Guild Wars 2

I’m not in tier 8, I’m on Dragonbrand, but I see a massive problem here, and a simple solution.

Problem: Servers ranked 23 and 24 have, over time, lost so much ranking so that their scores are far far below those of the lowest server in tier 7. The result of this is that in order to move from tier 8 to tier 7, rank 22 has to crush ranks 23 and 24 unbelievably hard. Not only is this difficult, it makes 23 and 24 drop even farther, making the problem worse.

Solution: Manually modify the glicko ratings of server ranks 22, 23, and 24 to all be the same, and set to 200 points below that of the lowest server in tier 7. 200 point differential between tiers is similar to most of the other tiers that don’t have the top server about to move into another tier. Setting the scores equal would allow the rank 22 server to gain an appreciable amount of points from a win, and prevent ranks 23 and 24 from being forced to absurdly low levels.

Probably the biggest problem with tornado is that you can tag them with confusion and the tornado will cause them to suicide absurdly quickly. Other than that, it’s a pretty decent utility for repeated knockbacks and area denial.

It removes, I believe, 1 condition and boon at a time. Like all phantasms, no interaction with illusionary elasticity. Its reliability greatly depends on the situation. If it will die from aoe before it attacks twice, you may want to consider arcane thievery.

It is also a bit more reliable as a boon remover, as condition removal is dependent on the bounce.

I’m fairly certain that might stacks and fury instantly affect phantasms/clones. For example, stealing 25 might from the jellyfish instantly makes all my bleeds do loads more damage, including those from the clones. Fury will also increase the crit chance of your phantasms, on top of the fury they already can have, so you can doubletap on that bonus.

It looks decent, but feels unfocused.

It is a phantasm build, but lacks both traits to add damage for them, meaning our phantasms will hit 30% less hard than other phantasm builds. You also don’t have the cooldown trait for one of your phantasms.

Signet of domination really makes no sense in a phantasm build. Signet of illusions would synergize far better.

Kelthien.8593:

Pyroatheist.9031:

For pve dps, especially dungeons, phantasms are generally better. They will do higher damage over time with smart placement, and you also don’t have to stick out your neck to do damage.

For anything that isn’t a 1v1 in pvp though, phantasms aren’t very good because they die too fast. Shatter builds are very strong in pvp. My immortal build does pretty much everything in wvw well. Glamour builds are optimized and extremely overpowered in zerg fights, but much weaker comparitively in small fights.

You can certainly run a build that works in pve and pvp, but it won’t be as good as a better build for pvp and a better build for pve. You generally won’t have to change much, if any, gear. The main change is just a quick retrait, and I certainly hope you aren’t quite that lazy to avoid retraiting.

I don’t mind swapping individual traits around. For example, the 20/20/0/0/30 build is pretty good at this as it opens up a shatter build AND a glamour build without a respec. I do mind re-speccing (visiting a class trainer, paying to wipe my traits, and redistributing).

Do you visit a class trainer each time you swap from WvW to PvE or do you have a version of the immortal build that swaps some of the WvW focus for PvE without a respec?

I go through lions arch and completely retrait when I change builds. I don’t run shatter builds anymore really. There are 3 builds that I run: tank, glamour, and pve phantasm. Each one has a drastically different trait setup and drastically different gear. I will carry 2 complete level 80 exotic/ascended sets with me at any given time, with some overlap on weapons.

I don’t use the immortal build in pve ever really. I used to, but it doesn’t bring as much damage and utility as my phantasm build does.

lujate.5432:

All skills were off CD at the beginning of each test and the golem died so quickly that neither phantasm could be summoned twice. The idea behind Chaos Storm was to give the target some conditions to benefit Warlock.

I understand why you did it. Unfortunately understanding why doesn’t make your test any more valid.

Chaos storm deals damage, meaning the warlock had less hp to get through. If you had summoned phantasms twice, it would have only made your test even less reliable. Also with chaos storm, the conditions wouldn’t have lasted through the entire test, meaning the damage from the warlock would have fluctuated over time.

If you want to factor in condition boosting damage, you figure out the dps of the warlock, and then you increase it by 10% at a time. The way you did it simply gives absolutely no useful data. Additionally, time to kill an object really isn’t a useful measure either. You want to find flat non-crit dps, then apply crit chance and damage.

For pve dps, especially dungeons, phantasms are generally better. They will do higher damage over time with smart placement, and you also don’t have to stick out your neck to do damage.

For anything that isn’t a 1v1 in pvp though, phantasms aren’t very good because they die too fast. Shatter builds are very strong in pvp. My immortal build does pretty much everything in wvw well. Glamour builds are optimized and extremely overpowered in zerg fights, but much weaker comparitively in small fights.

You can certainly run a build that works in pve and pvp, but it won’t be as good as a better build for pvp and a better build for pve. You generally won’t have to change much, if any, gear. The main change is just a quick retrait, and I certainly hope you aren’t quite that lazy to avoid retraiting.

Using chaos storm and then warlock is just silly. Chaos storm is on a 35 second cooldown, and if you actually want to compare dps, you can’t put in other things like that. This would be like saying you tested the swordsman damage, but you also blurred frenzied it.

Swordman has the best instant damage. It is extremely reliable in landing its hits, and it does hit hard. On the other hand, it does not change with phantasmal haste, and also won’t apply a lot of bleeding.

Warlocks are affected by phantasmal haste. They also attack slower, and hit weaker than swordsmen…with 0 conditions. Once you get even just 2 or 3 conditions, they will hit harder, and in a team with a necro, they will hit ridiculously hard.

Berserkers are really weird, and have the ability to hit for stupid things like 800, and I have also seen them hit for as high as 8k in a single spin. So kitten unreliable.

Crossplay.2067:

Kazhiel.8194:

I like feedback the way it is, I can put it all sorts of places as long as I can get a target

You don’t need a target for Feedback. Cast it without one and it will appear directly in front of you at full length. One thing I use to do was wait for the catapaults to dissuade attackers from being in melee range. Then I stand a bit behind the gate and cast Feedback to troll everyone using projectiles.

That’s true, but then it only goes onto the horizontal plane in front of you. If you can get a target behind a wall or something, you’ll be able to drop it anywhere within 1200 range.

As far as having the bubble follow the target, that would be ludicrous, and I’d have to befriend someone on yak’s bend and SoS so that I could use them as a grunt to run around in circles spreading mass confusion.

Ooooooookkk. Here’s how it works.

Dark path is a projectile. It is reflected by feedback.

The mechanic for normal dark path usage says when the projectile hits the target, you will teleport to the target.

When feedback reflects a projectile, it becomes YOUR attack. This is most easily noticed by the fact you will see damage numbers and take retaliation from dropping feedback into a zerg.

When feedback reflects dark path, it becomes YOUR dark path. When it hits the necro, that means your dark path connected, and so you will teleport to the target.

Ryn.6459:

Love this build, Pyro .-D

Quote: “The runes in my armor are centaur right now, but I feel like runes of air would be a better choice”
Time to get my runes, so, centaur or air?

Well, if you happen to have gobs of cash lying around, get a set of divinity. The choice between centaur and air is mainly a personal choice though. While the swiftness can be sorta nice, it really isn’t necessary outside of wvw, which is what I originally got this particular set of gear for. Air is better for the crit damage though, because your phantasms will be critting a lot.

The original phantasm was 10(9?) seconds of 1 stack of confusion, reapplied every 5 seconds or so. The general feeling was that this was far, FAR more useful than than the 3 stacks for 3 seconds, due to the fact that it would actually guarantee at least some damage…

This also wasn’t a beta change. This was changed in the first month or 2 of the game, iirc. The phantasm was still bad before the change, it just wasn’t THIS bad.

eldenbri.1059:

Thx – I had no idea there were things immune to crits. My build is pretty heavily focused on crits. Anything else have crit immunity?

You can’t crit any type of structure. You couldn’t crit graveling mounds in ac for example. The fire elemental, all the dragons, shadow behemoth, etc all have the hp bar that is in the style of a structure as opposed to a creature.

eldenbri.1059:

I sent Bas a few questions already, but I like more in-depth explorations of builds – how the weapons, traits and utilities work together in different scenarios.

Also, I like to understand the numbers better. There are lots of posts about a certain skill doing X damage, but it’s really hard to understand the context. Pyro did a nice job of quantifying the 14K hits from iWarlock in a big event where the boss had all the conditions. I had been using staff for this purpose, but it feels like phantasmal duelist is higher average damage output for me. It would be nice to get a feel for “expected” levels of damage under different conditions.

Note that orr temple bosses are pretty unique in that they are normal mobs, so you can crit on them. Without critting, your damage is far lower, since most dragons and such are technically structures.

Maybe conducting ourselves with dignity might be a tad much…but /laughing on people is really just the lowest of the low.

Silver.4798:

Hey now no hate for the wonky signet builds Haha, they are really fun in PvE! WvW is a whole different beast though.

But I think the point Taril is making that the 1 shot BS thief is a myth, not that he endorses this build or “thieves-are-now-broken-f-u-arena-net-rage quit” (and there were disturbing amounts of those posts on forums after the patch). I agree with this assessment.

What drives me personally bonkers is when I’m facing a thief, I land some pretty heavy hits on the guy and he used up his heal, I go in for the kill AND THE GUY STEALTHS… AND HE’S GONE!!! Wait no he’s back, why is his health back? Burst him down again and he pulls this again!!! AHHHHHH!!!

10 seconds later the jerk gets a hard backstab off and this time I make a mistake and I die. My fault entirely but infuriating!

The 1shot-bs build isn’t a myth. Just look at the damage numbers he was posting. The thing is, if he chose is targets carefully, which he obviously didn’t, he could easily instagib many many many builds in wvw. As it turns out, a lot of people and builds have some sort of active defense counter to that, of course, which is where his build immediately becomes horrible.

Actually, I’m pretty sure its a bug and not working as intended, due to the patch notes saying they made dark path unblockable. It obviously didn’t fix it, but it seems like Anet is trying to get it to stop doing that.

Yeah, I wouldn’t mind acquiring a 7 mesmer kill team myself…

For the dragons, iZerker is actually the best. Warlocks will do the highest damage in theory, but if you target the head and put iZerkers on it, they will sit in midair and never take damage, allowing you to never have to worry about recasting them or losing dps due to lag.

Part of the problem is that for some reason you decided a wonky 4 signet build was the right way to go, which results in you quite literally having 0 defensive options. 0 stunbreakers, 0 stealthing skills, 0 crowd control other than basilisk venom, 0 condition removals (SoA isn’t a condition removal because you burnt it at the start to stack might).

If you actually want to be effective, you need to ditch most of the signets and take utility and heal skills that actually complement and shore up weak parts of your build. The reason burst thieves are so strong is because they can temporarily reset a fight; disengage; and try again. With your build, if they don’t die in your first burst, you lose unless they’re asleep at the keyboard, and that’s a silly way to play.

@Knight: I’ll try to get some footage of a fight against a really bursty thief. What you have to consider, however, is this: take normal burst damage, then scale it down for 3k armor after that, scale it down another 9% for 3 illusions out. After that, scale it down by 50% for the defender. After that, maybe apply 30% reduction from protection. What used to be burst rapidly begins to hit like a wet noodle.

Additionally, thieves are extremely reliant on their stealth attack, and that attack is get easy to dodge. Blurred frenzy alone can easily dodge 1 out of every 2 stealth attacks, and a well times double dodge will take care of the rest. If a thief actually hits me with backstab, it never does more than 4k damage, as a maximum. However, with smart play, the vast majority of stealth attacks can be avoided.

Edit: As I typed this, I realized I have no idea of the priority of damage reduction modifiers, so I will test this out tonight.

@Turimbar

You’re really not going to like this answer, but here it is: The only class that has successfully beaten (note: not killed, killing happens, whether due to mistakes or lag or w/e) this build is another mesmer. There are a few reasons for this. Mesmers have by far the highest amount of boon removal in the game, and are the only class that can reliably remove retaliation from this build. Mesmers also have some of the highest burst, which is necessary to kill this build. Lastly, mesmers are really the most versatile with active defense, allowing them to dodge a lot of my confusion/other offense.

The closest any other build has gotten has been a sword/dagger + dagger/pistol thief. The thief had a mix of damage and sustain traits such as hp regen in stealth and condition removal in stealth while still doing decent damage. In order to kill this thief, I had to extend my neck a bit more than I was comfortable with, and got into a couple of hairy situations because of it. However, even that build was never able to successfully kill me, and eventually they would make 1 too many mistakes and die.

While this build lacks many things, such as upfront damage, pve group utility, and out of combat mobility, the difficulty with which it is killed and the amount of damage it can return while doing so is quite honestly unbalanced. The -condition duration combo that I now run, having been introduced to it a month or so into this thread is really, as you said, the icing on the cake turning this build from irritating into patently unstoppable. I’m really expecting some sort of nerf to the retaliation mechanic every time a new patch comes out, because the way this build works is rather untenable.

One note: In large scale zerg fights, this build is severely outclassed by the glamour build in terms of zergbusting overpowered mechanics, and I would honestly never run anything but a glamour build in large zerg fights. That being said, I would also never run anything but this build in any fight with less than 10 people per side.

ATourist.8359:

It would be nice to hear about the hosts too, a little introduction to give some character. Maybe why they were chosen to be hosts etc.

Well, we did do a brief introduction for both myself and Kylia in the podcast itself, though if you want something more in-depth, we can certainly work that into the next one.

Um. Yes. Maybe? Lets go with possibly good.

Edit: Relevant to this thread, I present Garble: http://tinyurl.com/7o4mx

Kabuki.9103:

Ok, a small group of enemies are taking a tower in WvW and you get there just in time to get the lord. As the small group streams through the gate you count X. How high does X have to be for you to run and how many can you hold against before help arrives?

The question could also be asked, how immortal is this mesmer and what are the keys factors in staying alive?

In a tower with the lord and associated npcs still alive? I could probably hold out for a minute or 2 against 5-10 people. The npcs help out massively, because when people are concentrating on me, the npcs are doing a lot of damage, the scouts and guardian npcs are doing a ton of aoe blinding, and then I can hide behind them to heal up.

On the other hand, if the npcs are already down and I’m doing a last stand charge into the circle, significantly less time. If I have to fight in a confined area like the circle, my survivability goes down really really fast.

In a camp, however, I have held out against 20+ people for about a minute, long enough for my own zerg to arrive and save the day. This is possible because some camps give a really large area to manouver in. The more kiting, dodging, and evasion that I can do, the better my survivability is.

Chewy.9263:

Yes please. Give us a medal for doing it often every day without much reaction from either server. Successively hiding in a tower, dodging enemy players, and retaking the tower for TC is also included in killing the NPCs. Look at the whole picture and not just us killing a bunch of NPCs.

That is significantly less of a reflection on your abilities than on the incompetence of the other server.

Congrats I guess? You can kill a couple of npcs in 30 seconds…do you want a medal?

This is so inaccurate its comical. Getting hit with a churning earth to the face would hurt I suppose, but it would be unlikely to down anyone unless multiple churning earths hit the same targets…meaning your maximum target number is dropping.

If you want to complain about zergbusting skills, complain about something that actually works: Lots of glamour mesmers.

Maverick Holix.1382:

This video pretty much sums up DBs feelings towards Tsym prime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX1YzS_CYIw

As much as that’s borderline offensive, I can’t actually feel bad after watching that video.

This actually only occurs with the necromancer skill dark path. Judging from the patch notes, they attempted to fix it by making it, and I quote “unblockable”. However, it obviously didn’t work.

@atheria: Should be fixed.

santi.7516:

Let’s remove your asians from the ecuation and DB is not even worthy of tier 4.

Which is obviously why we’ve managed to keep highest PPT for the majority of the past 24 hours.

This is not a performance problem. I’m having my normal 25ish fps when we enter the keeps. There is no congestion, no clashing, just us, and people start crashing.

Every time we enter bay, a good number of people just instantly crash. Has anyone else been experiencing this?

D W.5179:

Faux Sheaux.6179:

Centrix.4065:

But isn’t that what they wanted? Instead of having 3 full servers, they want to spread the population out more.

I don’t think they meant to trade one bottom of the bucket server for another. Now the ones that this was an issue with before will be alright but the problems will just be given to other servers instead. It’s like taking the “kick me” sticker off one person’s back and sticking it to another’s.

Well you don’t have to worry about NA tier 8 jumping up tiers any time soon, we will be tier locked for a while due to this action from ANet. Even if we are T7 or T6 level, there is no way for glicko to compare us to any servers outside of our tier, so we will be stuck here independent of server strength for quite some time.
Once one of the servers manages to either dominate enough to jump out, or if a T7 server does bad enough to bump down, then we will be able to finally see how T8 compares to T7 or above.
ANet, glicko doesn’t work well with tiers, sort your kitten out!

Actually, it works pretty great….with the one exception of the trainwreck t8 has become. There are a few reasons why it completely failed in t8, which I won’t go into right now. However, a rather simple fix would be to simply manually adjust the t8 scores to all even and all about 200 points below the lowest server in t7.

lani.7431:

Tsym wants to run large numbers they should leave. This is not the tier for them because for the most part our guilds run 20 – 30. I don’t know what BP is fielding but I know what EA does. Tsym may only be running 30+ (which I doubt I’d go with 40-50 adding in the pugs would be 60+) like they said but the amount of pugs following them probably doubles that. I understand why they are leaving they want massive zerg blob against the same. DB does not do that for the most part and this is why you aren’t meeting any challenge against us. If you split your zergs into two with the pugs following you. You might find more competition.

On higher nights, BP will have 60+ running.

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Indure.5410:

It would be a lot better if that person wasn’t an elementalists every time and no matter how many times they get downed they just spirit form back to their base.

Then use Ring of Warding and keep them out again.
They can’t cross a Ward even with the invulnerability.

That’s not true, hate to burst your bubble.

There was a bug thread made for this. There were a couple dev responses, and apparently they have found the issue and will be fixing it in an upcoming update.

Bug thread here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Mesmer-shatters-a-checkered-square/first#post1715335

Doesn’t seem intentional. Also wont get fixed, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

Dasorine.1964:

yeah, its just that overall even in that case devourer venom is for most purposes much superior, 2 second immobilize that stacks with at least 2 applications compared to the singular 1.5s stun.

As an elite for the majority of thieves its just not… “elite” specially when compared to other skills that do what BV does but generally better that other people get.

DV is objectively better than BV in every possible way, that I will concede, and it is something that should be looked into.

Bhawb.7408:

Mesmer retaliation builds are really funny to watch against AoE builds, when they stack illusions with retaliation. The guardian in heart of the mists will kill himself with a single whirl attack if you do it right.

Whirling wrath is actually a really unique attack that procs massive retaliation because the single use of that attack produces multiple separate attacks, each of which have a 5 target aoe limit. When myself and 3 phantasms all have retaliation, it ends up producing a return of a maximum of 7 hits of retaliation per single attack, and I often will take out a guardian instantly from 80% hp with a single whirling wrath.

@Dasorine: BV is weaker than a lot of other elites, but you seem to be completely forgetting that it also has a ridiculously low cooldown. 45 seconds is the cooldown of a utility skill, not an elite, so if you think of it as just running another venom utility in your elite slot (which, by the way, I would give an arm and a leg on my mesmer to do) then it looks a bit more normal. Being an elite, of course, you can do some interesting things with rune sets like lyssa.

Here’s why that guardian died so fast. On my mesmer tank build, I routinely take out greatsword guardians from a single whirling wrath doing over 80% of their hp in retaliation damage.

The cause of this is simple. Whirling wrath produces multiple separate attacks, each of which are able to hit 5 enemies. On my mesmer, each attack ends up proccing between 3 and 6 hits of retaliation because of how my build works. In a situation with a zerg, each attack would probably proc 5 hits flat. I don’t know exactly how many of these attacks whirling wrath produces, but I can tell you that it is far more than enough to almost instakill a guardian from full hp.

I would never use moa morph. It’s simply inferior to the other mesmer elites.

In a 1v1, they just use the 5 skill to run away, and keep running away until it is over. Useless.

In a team fight, it takes 1 person out of the fight. On the other hand, time warp allows your team to burn down multiple people, as well as multiple quickness stomps. It is better in pretty much all ways.

In a direct comparison to basilisk venom, one of the major differences is the cooldown. BV has a base cd of 45 seconds, and can even be traited to 36(?). Moa is stuck at 210 seconds. Additionally, the BV buff persists for 30(?) seconds before expiring, which means you can have it charged up for a long time before you actually need to expend it in some situations, making the cooldown situationally far lower, while you can’t do anything like that with Moa.

Also, there are no traits that interact with Moa. You can trait the cd of BV, you can trait for venomshare, you can trait for healing on venoms, you can trait for might on activation, and you can trait for increased applications of the venoms. This means you can really load up this simple elite with a ton of extra utility and uses.

Really the only downside of BV is the 1 second activation time compared to all the other venoms, which has definitely thrown me for a loop when I forget to wait that full second. Other than that, it is far better than Moa in so many different ways.

Intense skill lag exists in t3. It generally happens when 2 zergs collide suddenly. If you are staring at each other, not much lag, but when a portal bomb or waypoint bomb occurs, everyone in that entire map instantly obtains 5-10 seconds of skill lag.

It happens with 100 or less people for sure. Again, it triggers more often upon a sudden clash, as opposed to gradual escalation.

@BartBacardi: You do make some good points. My immortal build is definitely more user friendly than my phantasm build. I found that I wasn’t doing enough damage with my immortal build to suit higher level fractals where you often really need to pump out the damage in places, and it still retains enough durability and evasions that I almost never get killed.

That being said, the immortal build definitely works in pve, and will be far easier to play, as you really have almost no risk of dying.

Edit: On lup, use staff. Phase retreat near an edge of his bubble pops you out nice and quick, and can also get you out of his big jumpy aoe thing really easily, also with his frontal barrage thing. For phase 2, just stack on him and use feedback, and he instakills himself into phase 3.

Talentless.5708:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Dastion.3106:

Because every Mesmer suddenly doing what you described wouldn’t force them to recognize and hot fix it?

What’s the name of this thread again. scrolls up Oh, right.

Heheh, yep. Regardless though, there is no exploit, this guy is simply either trolling or seriously kitten about a mesmer killing him. We have all known what proximity anguish is for a long time, and there’s nothing exploity about it.

Nothing buggy about 15k damage instantly on someone with 1600+ toughness?

hmmmmnope?

Dastion.3106:

Because every Mesmer suddenly doing what you described wouldn’t force them to recognize and hot fix it?

What’s the name of this thread again. scrolls up Oh, right.

Heheh, yep. Regardless though, there is no exploit, this guy is simply either trolling or seriously kitten about a mesmer killing him. We have all known what proximity anguish is for a long time, and there’s nothing exploity about it.