Guild Wars 2

Sifu.6527:

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?

If I get 20 stacks of confusion on me and I dodge on my guardian, I get hit by 7k damage.

and you don’t want to nerf confusion?

Look, I’m fine with confusion. Just tweak it so it doesn’t hit on things like guardian’s dodge heal etc.

Or how about you notice those 20 stacks of confusion and not dodge? That’s the point of confusion, it’s supposed to lock you down. 20 stacks wont be there for very long, so wait a few seconds for it to go down before cleansing the rest. The only situation where you would have 20 seconds for an extended time would be if you ran afoul of like 6 glamour mesmers at the same time, so you’d be dead anyway.

Kontrolle.3514:

I whine about it because 80% and im not exeggerating are playing mesmer in wvw and this isnt fun at all.

Where to hell does all you biased non ebjective people come from? God its like no real men are left in the internet.

Emphasis mine, just for hilarity. You really think that 80% of people in wvw are mesmers? That is so wrong it hurts.

Nretep.2564:

- The long range often let’s it life for a quite long time, providing Phantasmal Healing for your party.

It usually tends to spawn very close to the target. If you’re planning on getting regen from this phantasm, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Well, you’re using a scepter in an offensive shatter build, which is a no-no. Mainhand sword allows you to actually avoid thief burst with blurred frenzy. Also, you only have 1 stunbreaker, decoy. It is pretty easy to burn 1 stunbreaker, you need to have at least 2, especially against a thief.

Thief attacks are really obvious, especially burst thieves. They all start in the same way, they all continue in the same way, and they can all be countered in the same way. Dodge the opening with blurred frenzy, pop out a few clones for a mind wrack to hit him, maybe drop a chaos storm for additional aegis. Once the thief comes back out of stealth, burst again.

If you actually let the thief land their opening combo, you’re probably going to die. You have to avoid that. Blurred frenzy is a great way to dodge it. You can also drop a temporal curtain, and then yank them out of their combo even if you are stunned.

Once you have dodged the opening combo, you simply have to know the rhythm of a thief fight. Stealth, pause, stealth attack. Break the rhythm of the stealth attack with a dodge or a blurred frenzy, and you can force the thief to waste their time and become vulnerable.

Yeah, if they really have enough people to strongly siege all 3 exits from your spawn, you won’t be able to do anything on that map anyway, and your time would be better spent going somewhere else.

It is still exceedingly difficult to actually get grenades on top of a wall due to the limitations of where you can actually see to stick your targeting reticule.

The greatsword beam attack is super duper bugged though. Autoattacking a gate will hit pretty much any siege within around 1200 range of the mesmer, and you can move around to get siege on both sides.

LordByron.8369:

You can t compare a minigame boss with 4 Attacks with ANY gw2 boss balanced around professions and stuff even with some sort of AI etc.

4 unique attacks is more than most bosses have. Count them up, you’ll see.

Take soulbound rune, place it into white or blue armor. It is now account bound. Salvage on the target character. Problem solved (if only until they really fix it).

kazi.6438:

Confusion/feedback/wall of reflection/trebuchet cows/massed ballistas are currently the only hard counters to zergs. Lets be honest here- this is a good thing. Less zergs = better game.

also, LordByron- Learn to play. The amount of aoe condition cleanse available to a zerg is insane. Null field and “Save Yourselves!”/contemplation of purity are just a couple examples.

I wouldn’t exactly call it a hard counter to zergs, but it is true that stacking glamour mesmers is by far the most efficient way to zergbust.

@ExZee:

Heheh

/15characters

ExZee.8109:

selan.8354:

lol are u trying to sell this build as your own?because it is kylias build that came out months ago with it.but yes it is a fun wvw build ikittennow how to utilize it correctly.

lol so whoever posts it on the forums first gets to keep it huh? You think nobody was using what was arguably the first most prominent and most popular Mesmer build (the shatter “cat” build) in pre-release stages by private testers before Osicat even had access to GW2? Or do you honestly think nobody out there without a youtube channel could possibly be better than the build thread posters that want attention and publicity?

If you’re better at it with the build, I say you have every right to call it your own. Only skill-less players speak under blind fandom worship, just like only mindless people speak under blind religious worship.

Well, I’m going to ignore the blatant disrespect for the general intelligence of a lot of people that is implied in this post because I know you have a tendency to do that, and I’ll focus on what you actually said.

Firstly, being “better” at playing a build or another is an awefully subjective thing. It’s very difficult to quantify that. What does better mean? Dying less? More kills? Having a greater impact on the enemy or your allies? There’s a lot of different ways to be better or worse at a build. Since this sort of thing is so difficult to actually define, you can’t use it as a basis for ownership of the build.

So where does that leave us with regards to ownership? Or in another view, does ownership even matter? A lot of ownership is very simply the tagline for the build. It ultimately doesn’t matter, and most builds can reasonably claim several creators. My immortal build was primarily created by myself. However, a suggestion for change from EasymodeX completely revolutionized the build and absolutely changed it from a good build into an amazing build. Does that mean we share co-ownership of the build? Maybe, maybe not. Again, ownership is a very tough concept to define.

It was unreasonable of selan to try and claim that the OP was attempting to make us think this build was his own. You are allowed to post videos of you playing any build you want, whether it be a build you made, a build that someone else made, or any variation between the two.
On the other hand, trying to put him down and flatly state that ownership simply goes to whoever plays the build best is also a confrontational and unhelpful sentiment.

TL;DR:

I’m right, you’re both wrong.

No. They are still ethereal combo fields. This does not change.

Archer.1658:

The Goat.1940:

Archer.1658:

I hope DB realizes if YB had any sort of nightcrew, they would be on top in this tier. This is from an outsiders view btw.

I hope you are aware that if DB had a slightly stronger NA yaks bend would not even be able to compete.

Hardly lol. As it stands its DBs NA + Oceanic vs just YBs NA. If YB had any night crew they would be winning. Simple as that. I’m not even on Yaks Bend and I can see this btw.

There’s quite a bit of difference between having, and I quote “any sort of nightcrew” and having a night crew that can actually put up any measurable resistance to NNK and TFV. If you look back a month or so, you will remember that even fighting TC and FA, the DB night crew was consistently putting up between +400 and +500 for 4-6 hours. Having a token night crew would change absolutely nothing. YB would need to acquire astonishingly massive numbers of people for it to make any difference at all.

Edit: Also, if you look at the ppt evolution for DB, you’ll notice that it rarely drops below 200, even during the strongest times for YB. DB day crew has gotten significantly stronger over the past several months. It would take far more than a bit of a night crew for YB to actually beat DB in this matchup.

Dahkeus.8243:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Those dps values aren’t quite right. The numbers in the wiki are the values for the skill recharge. Recharge is calculated from the end of 1 skill to the beginning of the next. For something like the swordsman, this isn’t a huge difference. For the warden and duelist which have significant casting/channeling times, this does make a difference. The duelist dps will be significantly lower than what you have there.

That makes my decision to go with sword offhand (for most situations at least) much easier!

I gotta admit, I’m glad the numbers work out this way since dual swords look so good, particularly with something like the Super Sword Skins.

Well, not to rain on your parade, but you have to consider a few more things too =P.

If you are taking at least 15 into dueling, duelists now can proc a bunch of bleeding stacks. This will add significantly to your overall dps even without any considerable condition damage, and so the bleeding from sharper images is where the duelist starts to pick up against the swordsman.

Those dps values aren’t quite right. The numbers in the wiki are the values for the skill recharge. Recharge is calculated from the end of 1 skill to the beginning of the next. For something like the swordsman, this isn’t a huge difference. For the warden and duelist which have significant casting/channeling times, this does make a difference. The duelist dps will be significantly lower than what you have there.

% reduction will vary based on your current armor.

With 20 total armor, adding 20 more will result in a fifty percent reduction in damage taken.
With 100 total armor, adding 20 more will result in a 17% reduction in damage taken.

kittening moronic piece of kitten over zealous idiotic filter.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Ah, my mistake. I knew that they inherited stats, and I knew protection is a flat 33% damage reduction yet for whatever reason as I was theorycrafting, I saw Protection as a toughness increase.
I really want to explore Phantasms next, will probably be shooting you some more questions in the future. Is there a formula for exactly how much toughness reduced damage?

Damage = (weapon damage)(power)(skill coefficient)/(armor)

Benjamin.8237:

Isnt this just a power vs condition damage build. Because warlocks don’t without conditions.

No, it isn’t. Warlocks scale with number of unique conditions on the target. That has absolutely nothing to do with condition damage.

It’s also still a needlessly imprecise metric.

Instead of doing something silly like timing ttk on an object, which inherently gives bad data, simply time the autoattacks of the phantasm itself.

Time between start of one attack to start of next divided by damage per attack = dps.

Once you have dps, you get to factor in crit chance and crit damage, bleeds from sharper images, damage scaling with the warlock, etc.

Fun fact: with that sort of test, you can also determine scaling with power and scaling with weapon attack damage for the skill.

Dahkeus.8243:

A hammer thief sounds pretty awesome actually. I just picture some theif leaping out of the shadows and thwacking an enemy square on the head with a sledge hammer, lol!

Stealth attack: thief stealthily breaks bones in your legs to provide a on immobilize…stealthily breaking bones, that’s a thing, right?

The patch changed pretty much nothing with regards to the viability of any mesmer builds.

@Archangel: I’ll get to the build in a moment. First about somehing you mentioned.

Illusions inherit our stats. The key word here is stats, and nothing more. Whenever we get might, our stats change, same situation with fury. Protection does not alter our stats. It simply reduces incoming damage. If having protection made clones take less damage, it would be as if having regen made our clones regen hp.

As far as the overall build, I feel it would be overkill. If you’re in a situation with too much aoe, the phantasms will still die instantly, and if you aren’t, they really don’t need that much protection since you can resummon them so quickly.

@Thedenofsin: I use pistol and sword as two offhands because those are by far the 2 strongest phantasms we have, no contest. At any rate, you’ll never see me running a damage mantra build like that because you have no defense, and it is really flashy and obvious. When I see someone with a bunch of mantras I think “I know their build, it’s squishy and has no defensive options, they die first”. And they do. Running a bunch mantras outside of a zerg situation is just painting a target on yourself against any competent opponent.

Also, note that my build is vastly different in pve and pvp. Your build is very similar to my pvp build, but you reference somewhat of a pve situation. Losing the points in inspiration and illusions makes the build vastly less flexible in terms of weapon usage and adaptability. My pve build is not optimized for damage, it’s optimized to be able to optimize itself for each encounter, if that made any sense.

@kazhiel: Survivability in group situations is one thing that my build doesn’t really do well. 1v1 it has more survivability than even remotely necessary, but as you toss more people into the equation, better passive defense becomes very important. I would experiment with moving 10 points from chaos into Dom for the 15% damage, as mirror of anguish really has limited viability in a group setting.

Interesting as this may be, no one uses any of the utilities mentioned because of their illusions/minute rate of generation. This is obvious for the phantasms, but less so for the clone ones.

MI and decoy are used as stunbreakers and stealth, etc. However, they are also used because they provide instantaneous clone generation, the precursor to instantaneous shatter burst. Clones on dodge roll provide far higher clones per minute, but don’t have the ability to burst generate clones. That reason over every other is why MI and decoy are so invaluable to shatter builds.

If you’re running a condition build as you say, you basically just pop out a few clones and autoattack them to death. If they try to get away, you anchor them. That’s it.

With a power build, you have to do a bit more manouvering. Try using the vortex and then summoning the phantasm to ensure that it gets all the hits.

Warden, for me in all cases, is utility first, and damage second. As it turns out, in the cases where its utility is valuable, it also provides extremely high damage due to reflecting the projectiles. However, if I’m in a situation where there really are no projectiles, I’ll replace the focus with something else. It’s not worth using without the need for that utility.

Edit: Another reason for this is the warden tends to die very quickly in most situations. The situations that it won’t die are the ones where it’s providing defense for itself by reflecting the attacks.

Sebrent.3625:

I’ve been curious about this … I see you, Osicat, SevenMirror, etc. take the shatter cooldown reset at 50% hp in several of your builds. However, when I’m watching the videos, I’m not really seeing this be leveraged, particularly by you and SevenMirror since both of you aren’t as prone to shattering as Osicat.

Could you please elaborate on why you take this trait, particularly in a build with such low illusion generation due to a lack of 20 in Dueling?

Thanks.

It’s primarily defensive for my build. First though, there’s not really anything better to take there.

In the more offensive shatter builds, this provides the potential for another strong full shatter burst if the enemy has brought you below 50%, which can be surprising, and just a strong overall boost to your potential dps in general. For my build, if I ever drop below 50% and I already used distortion, chances are I’m going to be needing it again pretty quickly. The reset on the other 3 are nice as well, but it is primarily for the defense of distortion.

LordByron.8369:

because i need mesmer for DPS >.> its the only full DPS class i have for PvE….but i can t www with that :|

Also due to long queues i cannot change build at will. (while i can take with me weapons and armor to switch).

Now the chance are 2

1) The build is bad at www
2) I am bad at mesmer (can be)

So i’m trying if possible to work on 1

There is a retraiter in every zone, you don’t need to queue up or leave wvw to retrait.

kylia.4813:

Bas.7406:

kylia.4813:

Mesmerize update – Rumour has it that there will be another podcast this weekend, Stay tuned!

Whoa!!! Excitement! Hopefully we can get your podcasts on youtube soon!!! haha

Youtube is up (finally!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UCmD3tZtn8

;)

Dat resolution. From now on, I do the uploading.

@Cygnus: The listed times on phantasmal haste are the recharge times of the phantasm abilities. I got those specific times by counting the frames from the end of one attack to the beginning of the next.

I’m also fairly certain the reflection duration is slightly longer than 5 seconds, as the reflection lasts a bit after the animation dies down, which you’ll sorta learn as you use the wardens more.

Basically, you need the other warden’s reflection bubble duration to fit into the recharge of the first warden’s skill, so that the coverage is continuous.

Also, another key of this build is versatility. I don’t always use staff, by any stretch of the imagination. I often ditch staff for greatsword/sword+pistol or sword+focus. For example, in the jade maw fractal, I want no projectiles, so no staff there. In other situations where I would rather have the boon stripping of the greatsword with decent ranged dd I’ll use the sword and pistol instead of staff. By taking 20 points in chaos, you lose some of that versatility in exchange for lowering cooldowns on one of your weapons.

As far as my pvp phantasm build, yes I have one, yes its grossly overpowered, and I might make a build guide for it. The traits are 10/30/0/25/5 with blade training, phantasmal fury, dodge on clone/duelists discipline. Mender’s purity and increased phantasm hp. In spvp, I use the zerker jewel. In wvw, I use the same setup as here with zerker armor and accessories but pvt weapons. The weapons are scepter/sword and sword/pistol. Utilities are blink+decoy and signet of illusions or null field for more team situations.

The playstyle is very very simple. Spawn phantasms, and let them kill your target. If you’re feeling perky, use blurred frenzy as an attack. I normally just run around them in circles cycling blurred frenzy and the 2 blocks to avoid getting hit at all, and maybe I’ll dodge once or twice. I have yet to find a counter to this build. It will eat through the bunkerest bunkers, it will rip apart glass cannons, thieves can’t hide from phantasms and can’t stealth attack through blocks and blurred frenzy, the phantasms are pretty beefy and tough to kill…

The downside is that it is very weak in anything larger than a 2v2ish situation. The phantasms will get killed by stray aoes when you get into group fights. The reason I have hesitated making a build guide for it is that it is almost 100% useless in any wvw situation other than scraping people on the floor in duels, and I really don’t do very much s/tPvP.

insanemaniac.2456:

otherwise you introduce inflation into a practically zero sum system.

Hm, I didn’t actually think of that. A solution to that without resetting all of the tiers would be to simply subtract a flat score from every single rating not in t8 to balance out the points added by the t8 reset.

The t8 reset probably wouldn’t fix the problem permanently, over time it would become unbalanced again, so monthly or bi-monthly resets would be necessary. However, putting a system like this into place avoids the need to completely retool the current rating system.

Edit: It’s not exactly a 0 sum system. It is, however, pretty close, so some sort of overall reduction in the scores would be necessary to avoid inflating it over time.

The thing about pve is that you can really set up wardens as just projectile shields for your party when you place them properly. In most cases, without 100% uptime, both wardens will end up getting killed very quickly, and with 100% uptime they will chain the reflects until the target is dead. That small gap makes a big difference.

Ryn.6459:

Cygnus, i was considering 10/10/20/25/5 as well, but I think the domination minor trait dazzling is too good (more if you change Dom X for IV).

Pyro, mmmh, I don’t know. How many places are projecticle heavy Vs being useful in all places (taking in acount that you still can do the combos, althought without achiving the 100% proj reflects (would be at 75%?).

Off the top of my head, some mobs in ac, the big spider in ta, some archers in ta, the entire CM dungeon, the entire SE dungeon, some spots in CoF, some spots in CoE, the entire arah dungeon, some spots in hotw. Harpies in harpy fractal, old tom in harpy fractal, final boss in harpy fractal, dredge fractal, a lot of mobs in ascalon fractal. There’s probably more that I’m not remembering.

Edit: Ghost eater in ac too, that’s a big one.

LordByron.8369:

but i want to change weapon/armor/traits from shatter i use for Pve to condition like hybrid for when i go to www ._.

I don t want to pve with cond mesmer….

is this not possible without respeccing?

Mesmer doesn’t exactly do condition/power hybrid builds very well. The vast majority of your condition damage comes form staff + staff clones autoattacking. However, to do power damage, you either have to shatter those clones or put up phantasms that don’t stack conditions very well. Additionally, if you are already changing weapons/armor/traits, why don’t you not do a hybrid build and just actually go for shatter or condition?

Cygnus.6903:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Phantasmal haste is key to being able to quickly stack 100% reflects by using wardens. It does increase dps from duelists and warlocks, but but the utility of wardens is severely diminished without it.

Can you explain this a bit more? I’ve been looking at this build as well, and thought of a similar variant (10/10/20/25/5), to drop haste but keep fury (you’ll be switching out GS for SW/FC often anyway).

But I don’t know if I fully understand what you’re saying here. Do you mean that with the reduction you get the attack to be once every 6.77 seconds, and with the 5 seconds of reflection almost 100% uptime?

The iWardens have the longest recharge attack time of any phantasms, and thus are affected the most by phantasmal haste. With phantasmal haste, you will have 100% uptime on projectile reflects with just 2 wardens. Additionally, with warden’s feedback traited, you can do the following 2 rotations:

Warden —> temporal curtain --> warden spins again —> 2nd warden = 100% proj reflects
Warden --> feedback —> warden spins again —> 2nd warden = 100% proj reflects

Without phantasmal haste, 100% reflects are not possible with just 2 wardens, and this hurts severely in places that are projectile heavy. In addition to allowing that, phantasmal haste also increases the dps on all land-based phantasms with the exception of the swordsman, and that ends up being a pretty decent dps increase, especially considering the more attacks it can fit in before dying, the more efficient the skill is.

Shirou.4862:

dooger.2640:

It will take Arena net atleast another year to figure out how easy this is, so we should be able to mop up the battle field no prob.

And another year to fix it.
Resulting probably with only pistol’s condition damage being nerfed.

In order to tone down the thief burst that has been causing problems, we’ve now decided to lower the damage of pistol whip by an additional 15%. This should fix any balance issues remaining with thief burst.

/s

insanemaniac.2456:

Pyroatheist.9031:

azizul.8469:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Having the winner of t8 move up and the lower of t7 would fix it, but it would be a really clumsy fix. Resetting the points of t8 once a month or something would let the glicko system work the way it is designed to without the disruption that continual downwards and upwards swapping would be.

Edit: @azizul: That would be unnecessary and extremely disruptive for every single tier except t8. That is probably why they deleted your thread.

a fresh restart without disrupting the balance in strength would be nice…. remember, they planned to reset the points for every server to the default 1500 but later cancelled it because they realized that it would disrupt the balance , i guess a reset would still be good but let the tiers separated by some points (servers in each tier will get same starting points)

again, we haven’t had a point reset after the free transfer ended. it’s now or never….

The thing is, it isn’t necessary. The reason for a point rebalancing is to break out of stale matchups that have stagnated due to point disparities. All of the matchups in the NA tiers are dynamic and changing, with the exception of t8. There is no stagnation that such a reset would fix. The only tier that desperately needs that sort of reset is t8.

i dont think you understand what a soft reset is…

it would get rid of the stagnation in t8 without disrupting any other matches

@aziz: really sad to hear that thread is deleted. maybe theyre trying to get rid of any kind of trail in prep for yoinking the idea? personally i wouldnt care. just use the kitten idea already. its kitten good.

My original post has the solution being resetting just t8, if you had actually read it. The idea that aziz was proposing was doing the reset to all of the tiers, and that would be unnecessary.

For the glamour build, I’d recommend scepter over sword. Confusing images is a fantastic way to stack up lots of confusion in a group, and the line aoe blind from activating the block will add an additional stack of confusion. Also remember to toss out that last nightmare rune and put in an undead rune. 5% chance to fear when you’re hit does you no good.

Other than that, it looks good. Keep in mind you can pick up exotic rabid accessories from the temple of dwayna, and you can slot them with crests of the rabid if you so choose, though the orbs work fine. Consider that you can also choose to trait the focus. This won’t always be optimal, but it will allow you to reflect projectiles with the curtain, which can be super useful in a lot of situations.

There are effective gs/staff builds, they just utilize straight power/crit damage with greatsword as primary weapon, and staff as defense + the warlock that hits like a mac truck.

I don’t understand why people try to make these severely hybrid builds that are meh at everything and good at nothing. It really isn’t that hard to swap gear and traits when you leave pve and go to wvw, or vice versa. It takes me a maximum of 30 seconds to swap all my gear and reset my traits, and for that 30s of cost, I can have a build 100% optimized for condition damage with glamours, and then swap to my tank build 100% optimized for damage reduction/return/etc, and then swap to my phantasm support build for 100% pve damage and team utility.

thetarot.8246:

I disagree, While confusion isn’t optimal in MOST fights, There are some select boss fights in which confusion completely destroys certain bosses. Risen Priest of Grenth for example. Each icicle he drops ticks confusion, With proper timing, it’s fairly easy to dish out 60k+ damage with proper confusion stacking. The same thing occurs with the boss in the Ice Fractal. Each icicle = Confusion. – Direct damage in PvE is generally the safer option, but there ARE fights in which confusion is the single best condition to use.

A couple select fights don’t really make the condition much less useless in pve. Subject alpha will also proc massive amounts of confusion damage. The thing is, by focusing on confusion, you make yourself useless for killing anything else. At grenth, you’re useless for shades (though dealing 60k damage is pretty sexy), in the fractals, there’s no guarantee you’ll even get that fractal, and in CoE you’re useless for anything but subject alpha. It’s just not worth it.

Using 6 nightmare runes is a bad choice, put in an undead for the 6th slot.

The problem is you have really low power, at 1385. This will mean your greatsword will do very low damage.

Additionally, your condition damage (with the food buffs I added for you) is 1360. Your confusion wont really hit all that hard either.

The problem with this build is precisely what I had identified earlier. As a glamour build, it is weak. Compared to a fully focused condition glamour, you’ll do far less damage. The glamour build that I run with has slightly less than 2000 condition damage with a fully stacked sigil, and its not quite done being geared up yet. Additionally, a condition damage mesmer is pretty horrific in pve, not just confusion, due to a variety of reasons that I’ve been over many times.

On the other hand, you have really low power. Your crit chance isn’t horrible actually, because of the rabid gear, but it’s also not very good. However, because of your extremely low damage, your greatsword will hit very very softly. In pve, you will do horrible damage with the greatsword, especially considering the phantasm is horrifically unreliable due to the bugs.

This build is sorta decent at doing damage with a greatsword, and sorta decent at doing damage with conditions. Adding them together gets you a build that’s sorta halfway decent at being a glamour build, but since mesmer condition damage is really bad in pve, you end up at a build that’s just sorta meh in pve.

azizul.8469:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Having the winner of t8 move up and the lower of t7 would fix it, but it would be a really clumsy fix. Resetting the points of t8 once a month or something would let the glicko system work the way it is designed to without the disruption that continual downwards and upwards swapping would be.

Edit: @azizul: That would be unnecessary and extremely disruptive for every single tier except t8. That is probably why they deleted your thread.

a fresh restart without disrupting the balance in strength would be nice…. remember, they planned to reset the points for every server to the default 1500 but later cancelled it because they realized that it would disrupt the balance , i guess a reset would still be good but let the tiers separated by some points (servers in each tier will get same starting points)

again, we haven’t had a point reset after the free transfer ended. it’s now or never….

The thing is, it isn’t necessary. The reason for a point rebalancing is to break out of stale matchups that have stagnated due to point disparities. All of the matchups in the NA tiers are dynamic and changing, with the exception of t8. There is no stagnation that such a reset would fix. The only tier that desperately needs that sort of reset is t8.

Eucalyptus.9784:

Hey guys,

So I’m looking at trying to put together a GS main weapon Glamour build and am curious about itemization and stats. Now, obviously I want something with a ton of Condition damage since my main source of damage will be Glamour Confusion. I’m not going to have 20 points in Dueling, since I’m going 20/0/0/20/30, so Crit seems kind of worthless since I won’t be stacking bleeds….

So would I skip Precision then too, or does it have an other use, besides my own crits? I’d like to build myself to mostly WvW obviously, being a Glamour build and all, but I also want to be able to hopefully dungeon sometimes with this build. Which is where it gets tricky since I know Confusion ain’t great in PvE. Hence, wanting to have a bit of self burst still.

Should I focus Power/Condition Damage?

Separate your glamour builds and your pve builds. They don’t mix, not even slightly.

For a glamour build, you want a massive focus on condition damage. Greatsword is ok for this build, although not optimal as it doesn’t produce condition damage, because the vast majority of your firepower will come from glamours.

In pve, not only is confusion useless, but glamours are completely useless for applying confusion because of their long cooldowns. This is not a build that works in pve, not even a little bit. My advice is don’t try to make it work, you’ll just end up producing a build that isn’t really great at anything.

Forestnator.6298:

Grenades. Give a kitten on retaliation – use Protection, ask your necro friend to remove boons, stack health up to 25k+. Easy.

Protection will not affect retal damage. Stacking hp will work, as well as keeping a friendly guardian or ele nearby to stack some heals. With 25kish hp, you can do a lot of grenading before retaliation starts to hurt.

Both scorpion wire and spectral grasp are projectiles, and can be blocked/dodged as such. Spectral grasp also moved stupidly slow. Temporal curtain can pull at 1200 range, but it will only pull you about 400ish towards the curtain itself.

Magnet has a small animation, not a projectile, instant once the cast is finished, and will pull all the way to you. It’s already on the verge of op, and that cast time is the only balancing factor.

Yeah, hypothetically if the 20 asuras that just steamrolled me then formed a ring and line danced around my corpse, I’d have to give them props for that.

Having the winner of t8 move up and the lower of t7 would fix it, but it would be a really clumsy fix. Resetting the points of t8 once a month or something would let the glicko system work the way it is designed to without the disruption that continual downwards and upwards swapping would be.

Edit: @azizul: That would be unnecessary and extremely disruptive for every single tier except t8. That is probably why they deleted your thread.

The warden reflect bubble is absolutely massive. When it spawns, it will absolutely reflect anything the target does, as well as everything that passes within about 150 radius of the warden.

The wall is also great. If you are being attacked while on a wall, drop it on the edge, and it will reflect everything. If being attacked from a wall, drop it again on the edge, or just use it to yank them off. Standing on top of the curtain does allow you to bypass the low height most of the time. It seems that targeted attacks will hit you below where the wall is, and so it will reflect them.

Ryn.6459:

Errr, no, just 4 gold X-D

By the way, is phantasmal haste that good? I’ve been playing around… What do you think about 20(III-X)-0-20(IV-X)-25(V-X)-5. That would mantain your versatility, allow staff/GS abuse and increase overall survival by dropping phantasmal haste and fury.

Thanks a lot for you time

Phantasmal haste is key to being able to quickly stack 100% reflects by using wardens. It does increase dps from duelists and warlocks, but but the utility of wardens is severely diminished without it.

Exactly what survivability do you gain?

My phantasm builds always include 25 points in insp, so they get aoe regen. Illusionary membrane is useless because you can’t control when the protection procs, so it is a completely random defense. The only defense you actually gain is the 3% less damage per illusion. That’s decent, but is it really worth losing 30% of your damage? I think not.

My phantasm build is 10/30/0/25/5, with sword/pistol and scepter/sword. The 2 best phantasms we have are pistol and sword, hands down for pvp. Zerker is unreliable, and warlock has a tendency to miss as well, since its projectile does not track. That weapon combo also provides blurred frenzy on 8s cooldown, and 2 blocks, each on around an 11 second cd. I take blink and decoy for stunbreaking defense. If I’m doing a 1v1, signet of illusions makes my phantasms extremely tough to kill. If I’m in a team for tPvP, I’ll take null field or portal.

It is the most overpowered dueling build I have ever seen or used, and I have not lost a 1v1 with it ever, not a single time. To my knowledge, there is no counter. It will rip apart glass cannons, chew through bunkers, and disregard conditions.