Guild Wars 2

The proper way to play a mesmer (this is super general) is to assume that whoever you are fighting already knows which clone is the real mesmer. Clones are ultimately only a distraction for extremely new players, as it is really really easy to tell which mesmer is the real one.

Clones are a resource, just like anything else in the game. They are used offensively and defensively with shatters, offensively for bleed/condition/vulnerability stacking, or for passive offense and defense with the 3% per illusion traits. The clone on dodge roll trait is vital to clone production for a high volume shatter build, and giving that u kitten illy.

Fighting a thief is very easy and straightforward. All you need to do is dodge the stealth attack. This is easily done by using blurred frenzy and well timed dodge rolls. It is safe to burn both dodge rolls to avoid the stealth attack, because if no stealth attacks hit, you won’t need the dodge rolls for anything else. Blurred frenzy alone is enough to cover 50% or more of all stealth attacks due to the 4 second revealed buff.

When the thief can’t land the stealth attacks, the thief can’t do damage. Burst the thief down at your leisure as such.

Karmasutra.9351:

kylia.4813:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Karmasutra.9351:

Thank you for answering some of my questions. I’m hoping the condition damage versus condition duration question is being saved for another time (fingers crossed). I also really appreciated the little tidbit Kylia threw in there about not stacking toughness beyond 1500 and how it balances with vitality. That’s the kind of information that really helps in playing with different gear options.

I played WOW for almost 7 years so it’s been hard for me to wrap my brain around no difinitive diminishing returns (before 100%) on things like crit. I’m so used to having to factor in internal cooldowns that make it pointless to stack some stats beyond a certain point. I guess overall it doesn’t matter as this isn’t really a min/max kind of game but I sort of miss that.

P.S. Kylia are there any alternative gear options for your new build, named gear sets get a little expensive for us peons that just want to test before making a 10-20g commitment to a build.

Rabid gear can be obtained from orr karma vendors, twilight arbor, caudecus manor, honor of the waves, and arah.

Edit: Also from wvw badges, as per the most recent patch I believe.

New build doesn’t use Rabid

I have yet to find any items, if I do, I’ll make sure to let you know!

I think the closest I could find was Knight’s gear power, precision, toughness, which actually might not be too bad of a compromise since you loose so much toughness in the build and then just add the superior runes of rage.

My bad, it uses Rampagers: power minor, cd minor, precision major.

Rampagers is probably the easiest of any stat combos to find. It can, of course, be found at some orr karma vendors. It can also be crafted.
The dungeons that have it are the 2 easiest and fastest dungeons in the game: Ascalonian catacombs and citadel of flame. Also arah, but you’re not gonna run that for rampagers gear.

jportell.2197:

Pyro FYI the PvPers are griping about this build now… Nerf INCOMING. lol… :P seriously tho this build is amazing and right up there in the bunker builds.

Always fun to bask in the gripes.

Honestly though, I’ve taken to running my pvp phantasm build more often when I’m sorta bunkering down on a point, as it can demolish even the bunker engineers or guardians that will try to knock you off of the point, and there is absolutely nothing that can even come close to killing it solo if I don’t really screw up.

The best and most reliable way to kill my build is with a full damage phantasm mesmer build. That is the only build that can reliably dismantle mine.

That being said, in sPvP it is vulnerable to heavy condition stacking since I can’t use my staple -40% duration food. It does have significant condition removal between mender’s purity, runes of melandru, and the iWarden whirl finisher on the temporal curtain light field, a condition necro can still hurt, especially if I am caught off guard. Don’t even bother with a condition thief though, as that is either tons of hits (blossom) = instadead or tons of projectiles (p/d) = reflected.

Boon stripping isn’t an effective way to fight it, as the retaliation can be reapplied so often that even the heaviest boon stripping wont stick.

The most important thing to avoid is multiple hitting attacks. Whirling wrath and flamethrower are 2 attacks that will kill you within 2 seconds, and that is not an exaggeration. Grenades are almost as bad. Bouncing attacks (thief shortbow, ranger axe) are pretty dangerous too. Single target damage is preferred. Additionally, avoiding projectiles is very important, as this build has a near 100% uptime on projectile reflects if necessary to do.

Ultimately, the easiest way to kill this build is to take friends. However, unless the 2 people attacking are either extremely heavy condition damage necros or super spike thieves, I will survive long enough for my help to arrive as well.

LordByron.8369:

remove dodging use energy bar for walk

Done.

@eslafiel: I like it.

Your playstyle works against a mesmer of average to low skill, but there are some glaring weaknesses.

First, if you are fighting either a mesmer using my tank build, or any phantasm focused mesmer, every time you fire that shortbow, you’ll be taking between 3 and 5 hits of retaliation damage. That will hurt, and build up extremely rapidly. Therefor, you need to watch very carefully for the retaliation boon on the mesmer and the phantasms, and stop using shortbow altogether if that is the case.

Additionally, the mesmer you fought kept shattering at long range. This allowed you plenty of time to see the shattered illusions coming to you, and you could either dodge them, kill them, or get out of range. A good shatter mesmer will close the distance with the leap, then instantly shatter and burst you. The mesmer you fought spent a lot of time running away instead of pressing and closing distance for the repeated leap—>immobilize—>shatter combo. Against a mesmer who did that effectively, you would die fast.

In order to fight a good mesmer, you have to keep them on the defensive. This means daggers all the time. Additionally, you need to be stealthed as much as possible. Being visible is being vulnerable, and a good mesmer will exploit that. It only takes a couple seconds for a shatter mesmer to burst down 80% or more of your hp, along with loading up 12 stacks of confusion on you. Avoiding that alpha burst is your top priority.

You can get out of 1 burst like that with shadowstep, but the cooldown for that sort of burst is 6-10 seconds. The only reliable defense is simply stealth, and making sure the mesmer is more worried about staying alive than killing you.

Carighan.6758:

It’s no wonder people want a nerf to Dodge. Dodge complicates combat beyond choosing the highest burst (PvP) or DPS (PvE) ability and spamming it.

For someone who comes from say, WoW, this is needlessly complicated and probably annoying.

…and they keep biting. It’s sort of hilarious actually.

Carighan.6758:

Akio.3849:

I have to disagree with torch being fixed if confusion in PvE is fixed. The mage is so under powered compared to the other phantasms, even if they did fix PvE confusion mage still would be under powered as it is now.

Well he applies 3 stacks of Confusion (we’re assuming it’s fixed to be fully viable) and also grants a nearby friendly player Retaliation.

How would that be a weak Phantasm? It is weak because Confusion is so weak.

Just for you, I’ve dug out the massively long explanation that I wrote up a while ago with regards to the iMage. Note that this analysis is dealing with pvp, where confusion is significantly more viable, and in a good place, compared to pve.

For those who don’t want to read this explanation, I’ll put the tl;dr at the top.

TL;DR: The iMage is objectively the worst skill for any weapon for any class in the entire game.

The iMage does 2 things, apply 3 seconds of 3 stacks of confusion and possibly 3 seconds of retaliation. As per my testing, its projectile will hit a maximum of 2 targets, not affected by illusionary elasticity. Additionally, the boons/conditions are not affected by condition/boon duration, and so are locked at those numbers. The base cooldown is 30 seconds, but effectively 24 seconds due to illusions 5.

I will assume the iMage is being used in a condition damage build, because it has 0 utility in any build outside of this type of build. I will assume condition damage of around 1500, producing a total of 355 damage per skill use per stack of confusion, 3 stacks doing slightly over 1k damage per skill use. In 3 seconds, with very rare exceptions (hasted skill-spamming thieves) a target will use a maximum of 2 skills that will produce confusion hits, and very often 1 or 0, if they use or are using a longer channeling skill. Based on this, I will give a maximum damage value of 2000 to the iMage per skill use.

In a condition damage build with negligible power, the possible retaliation it can apply will do negligible, if any, damage, and I will ignore that in this analysis.

Being a phantasm, the damage is subject to normal problems such as obstruction/blind/invulnerability. The projectile is slow and can be LoS blocked or dodged. The phantasm also has low hp, and is unlikely to survive to cast a second attack. However given the possibility that it will do so combined with the additional chances of the attack not working, I will put the total damage per phantasm cast at 3000.

The phantasm has a cooldown of 24 seconds. The cd trait for torch is in a very strange place in the mesmer trait trees, making it difficult to take for any condition damage focused build. Additionally, without that trait, the phantasm has absolutely 0 utility, purely damage. With that trait, it now picks up a bit of utility, but not tied to the phantasm itself, just to the skill use. Due to these, I will assume the phantasm has 0 utility, and 3000 damage per summon is the sum total of its use.

Additionally, the 3000 damage is subject to normal issues that conditions face, including removal, being immune to conditions, or -condition duration (on my tank build, the 3s of confusion would only last 1.05 seconds).
Added all together, the phantasm is a 24 second cooldown skill with 0 utility and 3000 damage in the best of cases, with most situations producing significantly less than that damage, if any damage at all.

All the long cooldown skills in the game either have large amounts of utility (iWarden/static field/etc) or large amounts of damage (meteor shower/whirling axes/churning earth). The iMage has neither high potent damage or utility. Now, I don’t know every single skill in the game, but I do know most of them, and none of them have the massive cooldown that the iMage does with mediocre and fragile damage combined with 0 utility. Based on all of this, I say that the iMage is the worst weapon skill in for any class on any weapon in this game.

Your playstyle isn’t bad, from what I can see. Unfortunately, I can’t see very much. Whatever you did with the colors and contrast makes your video almost unwatchable, for me at least. I would highly recommend NOT doing that in future videos.

Karmasutra.9351:

Thank you for answering some of my questions. I’m hoping the condition damage versus condition duration question is being saved for another time (fingers crossed). I also really appreciated the little tidbit Kylia threw in there about not stacking toughness beyond 1500 and how it balances with vitality. That’s the kind of information that really helps in playing with different gear options.

I played WOW for almost 7 years so it’s been hard for me to wrap my brain around no difinitive diminishing returns (before 100%) on things like crit. I’m so used to having to factor in internal cooldowns that make it pointless to stack some stats beyond a certain point. I guess overall it doesn’t matter as this isn’t really a min/max kind of game but I sort of miss that.

P.S. Kylia are there any alternative gear options for your new build, named gear sets get a little expensive for us peons that just want to test before making a 10-20g commitment to a build.

Rabid gear can be obtained from orr karma vendors, twilight arbor, caudecus manor, honor of the waves, and arah.

Edit: Also from wvw badges, as per the most recent patch I believe.

karamelker.9836:

Thx for a great podcast!
How about an episode when you talk about supportbuilds (and maybe mesmer healing)?

We’re getting there, give us some time =P

Hexxen.7216:

That being that conversation.

There was someone complaining that this build was OP because of our Runes of Melandru and our Soup. I would like to remind them that because these are runes and food and have no way any connection to the Mesmer profession any class can benefit from this combo.

While that’s technically correct, in this particular situation the runes and soup happen to nicely remove the only possible vulnerability that this build had, being damaging and disabling conditions. I can definitely say that the difference between using that combo and before I switched to it is night and day in terms of the survivability of the build. This build definitely has overpowered defensive capabilities with respect to how potent the retaliation mechanic is.

Beachead.4127:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Beachead.4127:

The devs have said multiple times that they want players to have the ability to react to powers. iberserker has a .25 second delay for this exact reason. Dodge is not getting nerfed.

This thread: —-——————-

Your head:—————————-

Sound effects: WHOOSH!!!

No No No… trolling is the act of putting bait out for a bite. The better sound would be that of a fishing reel doing that zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz sound.

And bite they did.

Beachead.4127:

The devs have said multiple times that they want players to have the ability to react to powers. iberserker has a .25 second delay for this exact reason. Dodge is not getting nerfed.

This thread: —-——————-

Your head:—————————-

Sound effects: WHOOSH!!!

Well, it’s an interesting idea, but like all confusion bomb builds, is ultimately defeated by the most simple of playstyle choices: Not attacking.

This is most obvious when watching the fight with the guardian. You are unable to kill him, because after the first few seconds of the fight, he just stops attacking. He lets the confusion wear off, or cleanses it, and so you are generally unable to hurt him.

This build, unfortunately, will always be a noob-stomping build, and not much else. Some people will gladly suicide on confusion, but any competent player will counter it with ease.

@Hexxen: My numbers regarding 83% uptime are purely with respects to SoInsp usage. Keeping retaliation up 100% of the time on yourself is very very easy, as the cooldowns on the leap combo and cry of frustration are low enough that you can simply refresh the retaliation with no problem. Additionally, you won’t hit the 30 second cap unless you do 3 leap combos and the 3 clone cry immediately following each other. Since I almost never use phase retreat for retal, saving it for chaos armor, that isn’t a problem.

The only time the 30s cap comes into play is when you try to keep retal up on a group through the use of SoInsp. Since the signet is on a 36 second traited cooldown, you need to be able to distribute 36 seconds of retaliation in 1 shot, and that isn’t, and never has been possible.

Hexxen.7216:

Your build has effectively saved me from quiting GWs as it was getting boring but I must refute your statement. I was able to keep it up 100% of the time easily before the update. I know you will once again refute this but I did what I did and you do what you do. We will never see eye to eye on this and there is no way to test this anymore since I can no longer do it. But another Mesmer friend that I got to switch to my tweeked version of your build could also do 100% up time.

As it turns out, I just went and tested some retaliation stacking with full boon duration. The maximum stackable time is 30 seconds, it won’t go above that.

That being said, I would have to see some very specific proof that you could stack higher than 30 seconds prior to the patch, which specifically said it didn’t change duration stacking, for me to believe that this 30 second cap was imposed with the patch. Additionally, the traited SoInsp is on a 36 second cooldown, which results in an effective 83% uptime on retaliation for anyone you can hit with SoInsp, and easily 100% if anyone happens to use a leap or blast finisher on curtain.

FLIMP.8172:

I disagree completely if anything dodge is UNDERPOWERED. Why can we only dodge 2 times??? If I can spam 1 1 1 1 1 1, I should be able to spam dodge dodge dodge. Nerf dodge and I quit the game.

TL:DR – remove vigor and remove the endurance bar. L2P and predict dodges like a man

How about we compromise. I’ll sacrifice my 1 attack if you give up dodge rolling.

Hexxen.7216:

However, the nerf to the max amount of time that we can stack retalition to was a HUGE hit on our group dynamics. Not being able to keep up 100% retal on people because we can’t reach a high enough stack to last the entire cool down of SoInsp. was a major hit.

Glad to see you’re having fun with my build, but the quoted portion of your post is, thankfully, completely untrue. There has never been a nerf to the maximum amount of time retaliation can be stacked. The garbled patch notes for retaliation that came out at one point seemed to refer to the maximum amount of retaliation hits that 1 attack could return, although I’m not sure that has ever been verified.

Without a doubt though, there is no limit on retaliation stacking time…or at least it isn’t possible to hit it as a mesmer. Even if you do a 3 clone cry and the double leap combo at the exact same time, you’ll only get about 29 seconds of retaliation…significantly lower than the cooldown of SoI. Keeping retaliation up 100% of the time on a group of people purely by using SoI has never been a possible strategy.

sdsakuragi.8170:

I could have sworn last night 20 Mag players were holed up in EK in the DB BL fighting off a zerg of at least 50-60. If I recall correctly, the zerg punched a hole through the outter wall, and then another throught the inner wall, at which point they were stopped dead in their tracks. A counter push by a dozen Might stacked Mags broke up the attack and scattered the rest.

Not quite accurate. There were about 15-20 pugs, and 10-15 BP there, but by the time we had broken inner, we were flush out of supply for a few reasons. BP went to resupply, the pugs sat and milled around and eventually the mag push decimated them.

Agreed, people being able to dodge things is simply unbalanced. The dodge is the counter to effectively every attack in the game…simply dodge and the attack misses. Nothing should be impossible to counter like that. Dodge needs to be nerfed.

Zoom in all the way on your minimap. The range is approximately the distance from the top to the bottom.

This is amusing. Rangers and eles can be strong, but no class and no build is difficult to defeat as a mesmer, no matter what build you run (within reason). Mesmers have a higher skill cap and a higher skill floor, and if you aren’t good with them, you will die, a lot. It seems that the OP is unfortunately still at that stage, but once you really learn how to play, a mesmer should be unbeatable.

With regards to conditions…null field, arcane thievery, and mender’s purity are all great ways to remove conditions. You can also take runes of melandru for some innate condition defense. Cleansing conflagration is useless, as is cleansing inscriptions. Shattered conditions is great if you can work it into the build, but being a grandmaster trait it is inherently less useful than mender’s purity.

athuria.2751:

I have auto-targeting off for the sake of my Engineer and don’t care for toggling it on/off between characters

It really is beyond me how people can be so lazy as to noticeably impact the performance of one character because they refuse to take an action that will literally take 3 seconds to do.

Sebrent.3625:

Thanks for the feedback guys.

@Pyroatheist: I had read somewhere that both power and toughness scale linearly in GW2. However, that could be old news or bad info from arenanet (anyone seen our tooltips, lol!). If what you’re saying is the case, it just means that you get even less from those points in beastmastery :-/

They scale linearly insofar as there is no innate diminishing returns. However, as a product of the damage calculation, they naturally give less and less the more you have if them.

Damage = power * stuff/armor

It scales linear relative to your current amount. Increase it by 5% and you get 5% more damage. However, with more power or armor, that 5% gets larger, and so you need a larger flat increase to achieve the same effect.

Just stopping by to say that your calculations look pretty good with the exception of damage mitigation.

The % decrease in damage taken caused by x number of points of armor/toughness gets lower as your total armor increases.

With 100 armor, adding 100 armor will cause you to take 50% the original damage.
With 200 armor, adding 100 armor will cause you to take 66% the original damage.

As you can see, each additional point of armor adds less than the one before. Because of this effect, your 2.35% damage mitigation value for each 50 points of toughness is not going to be accurate. That will (I assume) be accurate for the first 50 points of toughness, but the next 50 points will add less.

Additionally, as I understand it, different pets have different base stat values. This means that 50 points of toughness will produce a higher % damage reduction value for a more fragile pet than for a pet that already has high base armor.

Edit: Power actually suffers the same diminishing returns effect as well, so you may want to take a second look at both your power calculations as well as your armor calculations.

BillyGoatsGruff.4695:

The point of this thread was to say that the mesmers can apply to many stacks of confusion to fast.

We understand the point of the thread, you’ve said it enough times by now.

The fact of the matter is, you’re wrong, and need to learn how to play. If you don’t have condition removal, then stop autoattacking, it’s that simple.

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

Puddin Cheeks.8539:

Pinko.2076:

Puddin Cheeks.8539:

Loki.4139:

Puddin Cheeks.8539:

Evalana.5480:

::puts on my Maguuma cheerleader outfit:: Gooooo MAGGIES!

I’m confused by this post and am not sure what to think about it eva.

That’s cute,

DB is having such a great time.

Yeah, Me thinks those who bailed to early are missing out on what we have had a blast with the last 4 weeks. Not sayin’ but just ;P

What do you mean?

Eva used to be in our guild and a commander on DB. She left to FA and was about a week too early before the fun we have had lately. So now I’m guessing she is a jealous cheerleader for MAG for some odd reason.

No offense. But once you are in BT, there’s little to nothing to be jealous of any server/guild.

Pretty sure when FA finishes last, BT still rolls in more badges than anyone in T3. That’s basically because T3 servers are less populated and can’t roll 80 man zergs out their wazoos that get wiped because they don’t know what’s going on.

BP, NNK, and TFV are the only guilds on DB that regularly field close to 80 person zergs, and of those 3 only BP usually encounters stiff resistance. That sort of fighting does happen….just very rarely.

That build actually doesn’t look too bad. A very common problem that happens with builds is that they are unfocused, but yours seems pretty well optimized for a semi-defensive long range greatsword build for doing damage in a group in wvw. The only thing I would change is dropping deceptive evasion for sword cooldowns, but that really depends on your playstyle.

If you want to go for a confusion build, a shatter build, or a glamour (type of confusion build) in wvw, then go for it. There are a lot of variations of those builds and you can find most of them in Fay’s build list that is stickied at the top of the forum. If you do want to go for a conditoin damage focused build, you will have to completely change your armor/weapons/runes etc. If you want to go for a shatter build, you should be pretty good, just a change of traits and weapons will do you pretty well.

Ultimately it really just depends on how you want to play.

Entropy.4732:

Sebrent.3625:

It’s been this way since beta. ArenaNet is aware of it but hasn’t gotten around to fixing it. It’s sort of like how in beta they promised to allow us to put 2 sigils on 2hand weapons so they are equal to wielding two 1hand weapons (which allows you 2 take 2 sigils for that set) … but haven’t done that either.

Gahh… that’s annoying. I really hoped this would be a quick fix in the next update kinda thing. Hopefully they’ll fix our checkerboard shatters AND this in the next patch.

Checkerboard shatters might be fixed in the next patch….this issue won’t. It’s been around for a very long time, and I don’t recall anet even saying that they would ever fix it.

Crossplay.2067:

I prefer it to be light because we already have so many ethereal fields. Gaining a light field would open up more combos.

We already have a semi-spammable light field in temporal curtain. Veil is a ethereal field and should remain an ethereal field just like every other glamour skill we have. It doesn’t really matter either way, as it is on a massive cooldown, but for consistency it needs to remain an ethereal field.

BillyGoatsGruff.4695:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Do you guys remember what class this bozo was?

Bozo???? Have some respect. I never offended you and if I did I’m sorry. I was running a ranger btw.

I knew it, my theory was correct. That makes this a 100% learn to play issue. If you run around spamming your shortbow autoattack with quickness, and you don’t pay attention to the simplest things….like your health dropping rapidly…you will get killed by confusion every single time. Also, as it turns out, the ranger shortbow is the most susceptible weapon in the game to confusion damage.

One way or another, you played badly, and you’re blaming a mechanic instead of owning up to the fact that you’re just bad.

Edit: Wow, that came out harsh. Oh well.

Do you guys remember what class this bozo was?

Crossplay.2067:

I’m fairly certain main hand pistol is a given now because so many people have requested it.

Ahhhh, to be young and naive…

Subtle.4596:

LOL might be easier if ur PRO group BP was not trying to KARMA train on Mag BL during Prime time. Poor Mag.

You forget, reset night is when BP does drunken raids. It’s not a karma train…its more of a stagger train.

Warcry.1596:

Dastion.3106:

Just loaded up my Glamour build, it’s fairly typical. CoF deals 250 – 2kittenage per Illusion on a medium target (WoC deals less per hit than CoF). Even assuming no IP in their Build (which would be stupid if they are intending to focus Confusion burst on an area) that would be 9×250=2,250, which is more than enough to appear in the damage logs assuming no IP.

Is it possible? Sure, maybe an Aegis ate some of it. But one of two situations occured.

1) You had only a moderate amount of Confusion from shattering, but not enough for CoF/Confusing Images to appear and repeatedly attacked, killing yourself. This is fine, it’s how Confusion works.

2) You received a HUGE stack of Confusion which killed you in a minimum of 5 hits. This would have necessitated enough CoF Shatters to appear on your log though.

Instead you claim you recieved a huge stack from CoF without enough damage to appear on the log, which just isn’t likely.

So, to translate your post, you’re saying the Confusion came from nothing then?

My money is on glamours, combined with some sort of fast hitting attack.

grimmson.9154:

would it not be possible to be hit by shatters from a condition shatter build? I mean the direct damage would be nothing but 25 stacks of confusion would be easy with 3 mesmers coordinatiing their shatters.
dunno, but imo op got hit by condition shatter set up and was quite confused.

No. Cry of frustration still deals damage. As you can see in his damage recap, he got hit by absolutely 0 shatters.

BillyGoatsGruff.4695:

I dont understand why people are making assumptions where the confusion came from. I have already stated it didnt come from chaos amor nor winds of chaos. It came from the shatter…

You’re cute, you know that?

You keep telling us it came from the shatter, and you obligingly posted a picture of the damage recap, to prove your point. Unfortunately for your point, the damage recap has no shatters in it.

Sorta leaves us in an awkward place doesn’t it…

I’d love to know what class the op is. This looks like it could have been far less than 25 stacks, but with a quickness ranger shortbow spam that was too stupid to use a condition removal.

Confusion being bad in pve is only half the problem. The Mage is completely worthless, in pve, pvp, wvw, and anything else that didn’t cover. It’s the worst skill on the entire game, and until it is fixed, the torch will simply be half a weapon.

Zachaos.2651:

Opinions viability?…happy to listen to any ideas

For a glamour focused build, the 40% duration increase food is extremely important, because having longer confusions is vital to your damage.

If you just want to play with the staff, then it’s not as much as an issue, since you can’t actually increase the damage from burning at all.

Veldan.4637:

We could also do with some kind of reward for downing a wall. Example:

yesterday in the EB I spent 5-10-15 minutes (whatever, felt like forever), solo catapulting down a wall from an enemy keep. My side’s zergs were in Stonemist at the time, fighting big battles. Eventually they won, and when I had the wall to 2% HP or something, part of the zerg came and finished the keep. Now I gained exactly the same reward as they did, while they got 100000 WXP from fighting in Stonemist as well. So basically I was wasting my time, even though I greatly contributed to the WvW since solo downing a wall is a very efficient way of playing.

2 large problems with that.

First, it would be highly abusable. You’d find people wasting supply and whatnot in all sorts of horrible places to break down the walls of things that are completely unnecessary.

Secondly, breaking down a wall really hasn’t done anything. If you break down the wall and then someone takes the keep for your team, THEN you should get points. But just breaking down the wall isn’t actually indicative of any progress if your server doesn’t have the manpower to go take the keep, which is the actual objective in this situation.

It is funny. When my mesmer is at full health, even without protection or my other passive defenses, I think heartseeker usually does like 400 damage per hit…almost as much as my retaliation returns. It usually makes me pause for a moment and chuckle at them…before letting them happily kill themselves, as they usually don’t stop spamming just because they have 12 stacks of confusion.

Iove.3902:

I quite like the trait. I don’t see a problem with it, and have not experienced a problem with it. If anyone wants to enlighten me, please do so. Though, the reason I might not have problems is because I’m not a stealth spamming Thief — I use Evades.

Regardless, what are the problems you are having with it?

The problem is that thief stealth is the primary defensive mechanic for the class. Even if you’re a p/p unload spamming build (which, by the way, can be countered in 12 different ways by 12 different things that people hardly even have to try to do) you still use stealth as a panic button. When your health drops below 25%, you’ll probably be in a fight, or on top of people, and pressing buttons to get out. If something spikes you below 25%, it is highly likely you’ll be pressing buttons already for whatever you were doing. In either of these situations, last refuge will simply cause you to lose your ability to stealth, as the button pressing that happened before last refuge triggered will have instantly revealed you.

shunobee.6907:

I think Anet has pretty much given up on T8. Or maybe the attitude is that they hope it will fix itself.

It won’t. As this week is making abundantly clear, it is absolutely impossible for SF to get enough points to actually leave the tier. If they get high enough, they just start losing points again. It will require one of the servers in t7 to get absolutely stomped and fall below SF for any change to occur.

knight.8926:

Sebrent.3625:

knight.8926:

I’m guessing they kill you at the same rate you kill them? I think what the people want is an anti-thief build that demolishes all kinds of thief builds…especially the burst spec

Those people should take a look at Pyroatheist’s Immortal Mesmer build then. Burst thieves can unload on you and you’ll simply be standing there saying “ok, that was maybe 1/3 of my health, now what are you going to do”. You may even have to “help them” as they lay on the ground from your retaliation.

I don’t know man those burst thieves hurt like hell even with 3k armor and all the protection I can get. Their burst isn’t just a one time deal, it’s pretty constant.

If you read my thief fighting guide, it’ll explain it a bit better, but being able to absorb the burst is a stop-gap measure. It prevents you from being killed. To actually duel and fight the thief, you need to use your active defense to prevent them from continually backstabbing you.

Scepter applied confusion back in the first beta weekend iirc, and it has not done so since then. The tooltip has never changed.

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

Xavi.6591:

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

I disagree with removing the AOE cap unless there is a very large reduction in damage or serious modification in how those abilities work. If you remove the cap, a team of elementalists would be able to wipe a zerg, or any other class with strong AOE would be able to wipe a zerg and it would just make them way too powerful.

I understand and agree with the arguments that AOE should hit more people but I disagree that this would be a good idea to implement without serious modification of AOE abilities and I like how they work now.

Learn to move out of AoE. It’s that simple. Right now with the current 5-man AoE limitation, you are safer running ikittenerg.

No, it puts way too much power in a few small classes.

Remove AOE and why bring any class at all other than a class that has ranged AOE?

You cannot give a class this kind of power. You’d be able to take 2 elementalist teams and descimate both zergs. No other class needed. That is a problem with removing the cap. You cannot invalidate other classes just to force other players to split up.

Stupid idea is stupid.

2 ele teams wouldn’t kill a zerg, because they’d kill themselves. Eles have the lowest base health of any class. Just a single lava font dropped in the middle of a large zerg could kill them from retaliation.

When I drop feedback ikittenerg, I will often lose upwards of 14k damage during its duration, and that’s purely from people attacking into it and gettin retal from the reflects. With no cap, any aoe into a zerg with retaliation would be instant suicide.

There’s an aspect of removing the cap that no one seems to have noticed: retaliation. That ranger barrage? Hitting 30 people once a second? That’s 30 hits of retal per second, or ~9000 damage to yourself per second. The biggest change that removing the aoe cap would force is just more light fields and more blast finishers. Right now, only engies really feel the pain from retal because of 3x grenade tossing, but without the aoe cap, everyone would kill themselves absurdly quickly.

Goloith.6349:

Thedenofsin.7340:

Goloith.6349:

As the title says I think its only a matter of time before confusion is nerfed in WvW. Personally I think it’s fine and actually forces people to run condition removal, but as I’ve seen with the Engineer forums, there’s a high likelihood it will get nerfed. I would really like to see a statement regarding this from ANET to see if this will happen or not.

If a glass cannon thief unstealths and I do nothing for 3 seconds, I die.
If I get 20 stacks of confusion on me and do nothing for 3 seconds, I take 0 damage.

…and you want to nerf confusion?

Absolutely not! I want to see it alive and well. I love my Engineers prybar and my Mesmer’s glamour build, but I’ve been seeing so many people whine about it that I have a feeling it’s coming. If I knew they’d never touch confusion I would make my Mesmer my main instead of my Engineer.

I don’t foresee a nerf on confusion. I foresee a nerf on the glamour mechanics.