Guild Wars 2

EasymodeX.4062:

Definitely. But you can’t really kill anyone that turns around and walks away, or who’s not attacking you (presumably in a group situation).

You’d probably have a hell of a time killing anyone with any measurable healing power / heals in their build and backed by any toughness. Well, as long as they don’t shoot a barrage of stuff into you + the iDefender, but I would consider that a major error.

Toughness really isn’t an issue. I do a bit of direct damage, but it really is tiny compared to confusion + retaliation. Strong heals are definitely tough, but the only class that seems to have strong enough heals to outlast me is a d/d ele for w/e reason.

In a group situation, people aren’t paying attention to damage they receive from retaliation and confusion, so its far easier to do large chunks to people, the same concept behind why the glamour build works in larger groups.

kittenos Vant.4182:

@EasymodeX:
“As a general observation, condition damage + v/t kittens all over PVT when the target has 100% Protection.”
Cond. Dmg + Retaliation – No opponent armor involved!
Thanks for giving me another set of equipment to go try out.
Any specific build you’re thinking of for Cond. Dmg/V/T equip? Aside from the obvious “Immortal” from this thread.

Well, this build doesn’t have very much CD. I think I have about 405 since I use a Vassar’s band. The thing is that because confusion stacks in intensity, and stacks really sharply unlike bleeds, you can pump out massive confusion damage with little to no CD.

wintermute.4096:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Also, you have the block. There are a lot of situations where this is awesome, stopping a bulls rush, kill shot, stuns, etc. Any sort of 1 hit nasty attack is neatly negated by the block, and this is most obvious when fighting a thief. Instead of taking backstab damage, you take nothing, create a clone, and return 3k-5k damage.

I could be wrong here, but I think against backstab thieves especially, you will not take the initial backstab and start the riposte animation, but the thief will not be decloaked either, so you’ll definitely eat another backstab regardless. At least that’s what happens when aegis, invul/distortion/blocks are used against backstabs.

They won’t be automatically uncloaked, but most thieves wait until the last second to try for a backstab, meaning they will uncloak as normal in the next second. Also, you will have a weird sort of movement as you spawn the clone from the block, and it’s very difficult for the thief to hit you during that.

No need to delete posts, my thread is as good as any for an interesting discussion on theorycrafting.

I will say this though, @EasymodeX.

One of the aspects of the retaliation tank that does catch people off guard on a regular basis is the fact that there is no counter to retaliation. You can’t mitigate the damage in any way, shape, or form, and that is why my build has the potential to melt builds like full tank guardians, because they can’t stop the damage (nor can they stop a confusion burst, which has a similar effect).

Looking for Leader/Officer of United Dragons [ShvA] on Dragonbrand.

If you are a leader or officer in that guild, please send me a pm.

Yeah, the main problem I see (and this problem is common to a ton of builds) is that your build is unfocused. You really want to decide to either go shatter or phantasm. Sitting in the middle really doesn’t work, because you will be lacking various traits from both that make the builds successfull.

If you want shatter, you’ll need to go 30 into illusions for illusionary persona, you’ll need to take deceptive evasion in dueling.

If you want phantasm, you’ll need to take the phantasm damage trait in domination, and you’ll probably want to drop at least 20 or 25 points into inspiration for the phantasm bonuses you find there.

There’s a few things that make offhand sword really nice.

First, it is our only dual-wieldable weapon. This means you can take 1 trait and improve 5 skills as if it were a 2hander. This is especially important because dueling has so many important traits that spending 2 on sword and pistol can be tough.

Next, the phantasm is amazing. Casting it is a leap combo finisher on both you and the phantasm, and every time it leaps, the phantasm gets another finisher. It does a lot of damage in one hit, allowing it to take minimal retaliation damage. The actual attack is an evade, so it is very rarely killed before it can attack. With the duelist, the attack is projectiles.

Also, you have the block. There are a lot of situations where this is awesome, stopping a bulls rush, kill shot, stuns, etc. Any sort of 1 hit nasty attack is neatly negated by the block, and this is most obvious when fighting a thief. Instead of taking backstab damage, you take nothing, create a clone, and return 3k-5k damage.

@Stats: A few things.

First, the active damage mitigation point isn’t flawed. Suppose that the glass cannon can survive as long as the tank in the same situation (this is particularly true in pve, or smaller skirmishes in pvp). In that situation, the glass cannon will, of course, do significantly more damage than the tank.

Secondly, with regards to just pure damage, this has a ton of variables too. If the opponent has a large amount of condition removal, then any damage from conditions can be neglected, making a mixed damage build inefficient. Conversely, against a target with high armor and/or high uptime on protection, direct damage can be inefficient.

Lastly, as Gaiawolf mentioned, in pvp, what can be equally as important as total damage output is damage spread. You won’t kill a thief with slow and steady damage, you have to spike at some point, and this interaction is very difficult to reflect in a calculation.

For a power build, you’re really choosing between centaur and air.

Both offer increased movement speed, with centaur stronger in that regard. However, air runes have far better actual stats than centaur runes. The lightning strike proc is awesome, and the crit damage is incredible.

Unfortunately, air runes also cost an arm and a leg, while centaur runes are very cheap. If cost is an issue for you, centaur runes is the only viable option.

There are a few points being made here, I’ll clarify them.

Firstly: when you want to take about stats, talk about stats. Noone knows the normal stats of level 80 exotics, because it doesn’t matter. You make your build based on stats, and then you get the anomaly because it looks twice as awesome as spirit links.

Second: The point is being made that sword/focus is not a strong condition damage weaponset. This is possibly true, but not always.

There are 2 things here: sword and focus. The only thing that the scepter brings over sword is increased clone generation and a horribly implemented confusion attack. This means that it brings absolutely nothing in pve, but does have differences from the sword in pvp.

The focus is not a condition damage weapon. If you aren’t going to trait it (we haven’t seen your build) then don’t take it. However, if you can trait it, then the utility it provides makes the fact that it does poor condition damage inconsequential.

@EasymodeX: I presume you are referring to my long, exacting; and quite honestly gorgeous post highlighting the multiple deficiencies of the op, that was removed presumably because of the tiny line of snark at the end that I have now removed in hopes it wil get past the microscopic meter that our esteemed forum gods feel the need to measure every post by…

Wow ok. Lets start from the top.
The basis of your argument is some sort of syntactical BS that is completely incorrect. You claim that the wording means that it doesn’t apply random boons to allies, but you’re completely wrong. In the English language, an adjective is allowed to describe 2 different things. The way they did it in the description is a bit clunky, but it is still perfectly clear, you are just choosing to ignore it.

With that said, the rest of your points are blatantly false as well. If you get 3 swiftness procs in a row, their time is added, not just refreshed like you claim.

Every single point you make in your post is complete bogus. Every single claim you make is flat out wrong. Chaos storm and armor are not broken, not even a little bit.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Which spots? And in which Dungeons?

Several places in Arah are like that. One of the paths of cm where you have to place bombs by a gate, it is infinitely easier if you can portal people right to the gate with 0 aggro.

Mainly I’ve used it to get my party through nasty places in dungeons that I can get through, but they can’t. Other than that though, I don’t use it a lot in pve.

@pvt stat distribution: I decides to split this into a separate post, because I felt a big explanation coming on.

As much as it’s lovely to get another commendation for my build, I feel compelled to weigh in my opinion on that analysis.

Firstly, you seem to have done an analysis based on just face tanking things, it seems. The problem is, that’s not how combat works in gw2, and even more so for mesmers. There’s a reason why pure glass cannon Mesmer is viable in ways that no other class is, and it’s because we have an absurd amount of active damage mitigation. Between permanent vigor, multiple sources of invulnerability, multiple spammable stunbreakers, forced movements, teleports, and dazes/cc, mesmers have the ability to avoid astonishing amounts of damage by simply not getting hit. This means that a glass cannon can potentially live as long as a tank, i.e. indefinitely.

Pvt is horrific for dealin straight damage. My build is more similar to a condition damage build than a power build. It works off of attrition from retaliation, with the potential for a confusion burst because Mesmer. The retaliation damage is not spike damage (excepting greatsword guardians and flamethrower engies, then it’s spike damage). In pve, it is even less potent, with the notable exception of flamethrower mobs in CoF. If you build pvt and expect to do a lot if straight damage, you will be disappointed.

Overall, in a game with combat dynamics as complex as in gw2, it is nearly impossible to effectively sum up the combat ability of a spec purely from numbers. There are just too many variables that can not be taken into account that way, and those ultimately flaw the analysis beyond repair.

Heh. Even though my clones don’t show it, I’ll still have the anomaly in a day or so. It’s just too awesome to pass up.

Yeah, there’s a few things. Limited bandwidth and whatnot is 1 problem. Another is that you don’t always have the ability to actually listen to the video, for one reason or another. Having it in video form is all well and good, but you need to include a normal build link. If someone wants to check up on your build real fast, they don’t want to slog through a video, they want to see a nice and simple build page. The build page has a far higher information density than your video can contain, you can think of it that way in terms of convenience.

And as you mentioned, my build (in the signature) is the only sort of “cookie cutter” Mesmer pvt tank build that exists right now.

@Mantra Healing: It is true, if you trait for the mantra heals and whatnot, you can get a significantly higher hps than my normal build can achieve. The problem with this is that you spend upwards of 30% of total fighting time channeling that mantra in order to achieve this. I tried it. It didn’t work. This build is highly active, and needs every chance to be pressuring or avoiding damage, and sitting and spamming that mantra just did not work out.

@DrixTrix: Site is up for me. I use that site because it is the only site to date that can handle normal armor and whatnot, as opposed to the junk you get in sPvP.

With sigil of leeching, you will gain a temporary boon that causes your next attack from any source to steal hp.

That being said, sigils will never ever interact with phantasms or clones, no matter what, to the point of if 100% of your damage on a target was from a phantasm, you wont even get a stack for a stacking sigil.

Sneaky Bear.3704:

Kazhiel.8194:

Uhm, nice vid for people who are clueless, but the rest of us who know how to play Mesmer would rather just see you list your traits. I skimmed around thru your 13 min long “intro and traits video” and still have no idea your traits and I’m sorry but I’m not going to sit around and listen to the whole 13 minutes of you talking to try and figure them out.

It’s 7:36 on the first video.

Not being funny, but it literally took about 10 seconds of skimming through the video to see them.

Doesn’t really matter. It’s bad form to not have a link to the build, and have it 100% in video format. It’s inconvenient at best, and extremely annoying at worst if you are trying to look at the build on a mobile device or something similar.

dreztina.4820:

Why should you only break even or make a small profit from wvw? Why shouldn’t you get the same 2g/hr+ that you get from pve?

And no, the mobs aren’t fun. It isn’t fun downing someone with a bit of health left just to have them finish off a mob that got caught in all the aoe and pop up with half health while you’re sitting on nothing. That’s just plain bad game design.

So you’re telling me you get 2 gold an hour from exploring and having fun in PvE?

NO. No you don’t. You get 2 gold an hour from no-life grinding CoF. That’s not fun. That’s not interesting. That’s not exciting. No one cares about comparisons of gold rates from no-life CoF farming to wvw. That makes no sense and is pointless to do.

A small kill team in wvw has different parts to it. There is damage, there is support, there is cc, there is disruption. As such, different mesmer builds will fulfill different roles in a kill team best.

Illusions don’t get offhand weapons.

bhagwad.4281:

Well, mantra of recovery was a flop. 3 seconds is too long to charge mid fight. Kept getting interrupted and lost to a warrior (gasp!).

Also traited for the condition removal on shatter and didn’t work out. Doesn’t help when you have 4 conditions on you suddenly.

So I guess it’s just null field/arcane thievery. The latter is dicey since it can be dodged, evaded, blocked, invulnerabled etc. Or just plain buggy. Null field is more reliable. Plus at I can combo off it. And I missed the 10 points in chaos with staff cooldowns, added toughness etc.

Any other suggestions for condition removal in sPvP?

Caltrops doesn’t cover a point completely. It almost does, but not completely. Find that little spot and stay there.

With both condition necros and bleed thieves, you need to remember the whirl finisher combo. Drop warden, and then put temporal curtain on top of it. That will give you 3+ removals if you stand near it.

Bleed thieves are way easier than necros though. Just make sure you have at least 2 phantasms with defender up always. The bleed thief will die really fast. Necros just take some time, so keep using that whirl finisher.

Embolism.8106:

What do you think of this variation?

http://tinyurl.com/b7e6nse

This is a modified version of a build I used to use in sPvP, back when iWarden whirled forever with Phantasmal Haste. It was very fun(ny) to use against any projectile based enemy: just stand in iWarden and watch them shoot themselves to death.

I later used a version that used Power-Toughness-Vitality instead as Healing Power didn’t seem that helpful (at the time Phantasmal Healing only really worked on iDuelist), but now seems a good time to go for it again.

Mantra of Pain is optional, I only took it because it seemed like a waste to take two Mantra traits for Mantra of Recovery only. Use it for some emergency healing if Recovery is not available/enough, I dunno. Could probably be better replaced with Decoy.

There aren’t any glaring problems with it I suppose. It just seems a little…confused.

You seem to have gone 30 into Dom purely for (let’s face it) one skill. You also have a lot of phantasm damage adds without either of the 3 optimal phantasms for general damage dealing (sword, pistol, gs). Also, you have these damage traits, but no crit chance or damage; which severely limits the amount of damage you can unload.

It just seems to be stuck between a phantasm damage build and a defensive healing bunker, but without the necessary weapons/stats to really do damage, and lacking some of the defensive capability from the other side.

I guess it’s just really unclear what you designed this build to do.

Pretty much what Gaiawolf said. Using lots and lots of things with spell effects and teleporting around makes it extremely difficult to find the real mesmer. Given 1-2 seconds, I will be able to pinpoint the mesmer, but the more you teleport, the longer it takes for you to be found.

Great spells for this include blink, illusionary leap/swap, and phase retreat as actions that have flashy effects and move you suddenly. Big spells like chaos storm make it difficult to follow you. If you combine decoy with a blink behind them, it almost guarantees you several seconds. When you shatter, even if you don’t have illusionary persona, run to them, look like a clone.

LibertyBeer.7418:

Thanks for posting, I had no idea that it didn’t scale in sPvP. Did you happen to do any testing in WvW?

WvW is the same as PvE in all cases.

At any rate, did you happen to see if the damage from the swordsman and warden was scaling up from a specific base value?

That interaction with the defender is well known, and a major part of the damage output of my tank build. That is nothing particularly new.

Stiv.1820:

Yea, it’s a bad counter to Killshot :P Maybe you guys know the answer to this since it’s sort of related. I mirrored a killshot the other day and it hit the War for 3800. Do you guys know if reflected abilities use our stats/traits/bonuses or theirs? I was hoping for a 13K instagib but was sad. I’m not sure if the war as just weak and didn’t crit or if it’s using my stats which probably would never hit that level of dmg without all the warrior mods.

I’m fairly certain it just takes the base damage of the attack and applies it to your stats and traits. So no bonus damage with adrenalin, no higher crit chance, etc.

What advent seems to have neglected to mention is the existence of builds that don’t rely on condition damage….

You have 3 main choices in terms of builds. Power damage, Condition damage, or tank.

Power builds can either be shatter, long range nuker with greatsword, or phantasm build.

Phantasms are great for just capturing camps or really small 1v1-2-3s, but blow chunks in any sort of larger fight because they die instantly.

Shatter builds are extremely effective for any sort of fighting activities except larger zerg fights, as clones start to suffer the same problems as phantasms at that point, along with the problem that most shatter builds are primarily close range fighters.

The long range greatsword pure glass cannon nuker using mantra damage amplification is good for absolutely nothing but melting people from 1200 range from the safety of a zerg or tower/keep defense where you don’t have to worry about getting hit. It is, however, extremely good for that purpose.

For condition damage, you also have a few options. You can go for a confusion bomb build, a glamour build, or a more general staff condition damage build.

The confusion bomb build (in my opinion) is ineffective against anyone that isn’t incompetent, due to the inherent mechanics of confusion itself. It is also horrific against the guards in a camp (not an opinion). Being a type of shatter build, it also suffers from the same drawbacks in larger fights.

The staff condition damage build is great for taking camps and smaller skirmishes, but loses power really fast in larger fights because it has absolutely no bursting potential, and staff projectiles are really iffy for anything over around 900 range.

The glamour build involves using traits that make glamours cause confusion in a few different ways. This build, unlike all the others, is really bad for taking camps and 1v1-2-3 fights. However, it gets massively more effective as fights get larger, and in zerg fights it is incredibly strong due to some of the key glamour traits allowing you to bypass the 5-target aoe limit and stack up massive amounts of confusion on huge numbers of people ikittenerg.

Lastly, you have tank builds. Like all the other classes, tank builds are capable of pretty much any sort of fight, and are not particularly more or less effective in any. Ikittenerg fight, the tank builds will be taking a front line attack position, absorbing and returning damage.

Xolo.3580:

I made a new build for my Mesmer including this “http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vengeful_Images” Minor trait and was testing gear setups in the Mists vs the sparring NPCs. Regardless of my Power my Phantasms would always retaliate for the exact same damage once hit, which is 331 (449 + 331 with 2 Phantasms, if one is the Phantasmal Defender).
It would be good to know if this is a bug or if it is intended that Phantasm retaliation damage does not scale (although their Power does scale with mine!), because I’m about to buy a new Ascended amulet and this will affect my stat choice.

Thanks for reading.

I’m really glad you noticed this, as I had never noticed it before.

In my testing, the retaliation damage from vengeful images is fixed. However, it is fixed at different value depending on the phantasm. For example, the iDefender and iWarlock both returned 322 damage, but the iWarden returned 441.

Edit: From watching my own pvp videos, I’m starting to think that this is only the case in sPvP, because the retaliation damage seems to be changing smoothly in my videos as I gain might. I’m going to have to do a bit more thorough testing on this later when I have a chance.

I’ve had a few ideas.

First change needs to be putting it onto a normal recharge, If it is on a massive recharge, it needs to massive utility to justify that.

Next, you can choose to keep it as a confusion phantasm, or change it to be a more general condition damage phant, or the last option (my favorite) a debuffing phant.

As a debuffer, it would stack chill/weakness/cripple on a target.

As a condition damager, it would apply something like 3 stacks of bleed for 5s, 5s burning, and 5s poison.

As a confusion phantasm, a few changes need to be made. First, take off the ridiculous bounce to allies for 3s of retal, no one cares about that. Make it so that that the confusion duration is 5s. Make it so that it bounces between enemies but if it does not complete the total possible number of bounces, the last hit it does will tack on all the unused potential confusion to that hit.

@Sarie: The problem with making master of misdirection 100% in pve is that WvW = PvE. There is no split between the two, and this would make the glamour mesmer build unbelievably powerful, dropping 14 second hits of confusion right and left, not to mention a normal confusion bomb build would be able to hit at least 10+ stacks for upwards of 12 seconds. That change would catapult confusion from a little underpowered to wayyy overpowered.

Honestly, I don’t really mind the current incarnation of confusion. I don’t see it usable as a primary damage source, but to be used as an auxiliary tool for adding pressure or punishment into other combos, and it works really really well for that, especially with 0 condition damage, because the base damage of confusion is extremely high considering the stacking in intensity.

Sometimes I troll with it in WvW when I’m going against a necro, but quite honestly I almost never use it, even though when I do use it, it almost always works fine.

Stiv.1820:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Distortion blocks all damage with the exception of previously applied status effects ( conditions) and the agony hits from jade maw, which I haven’t managed to block yet. If you ate the full channel of damage with distortion actually running, you encountered a very strange bug.

Ok cool thanks. More likely user error and it was down or something and I thought it was up.

What about necro wells? I know they can go through some other immunity effects like Ice Block. Maybe a ground based condition that’s already active when you hit it counts as a previously applied effect?

There are no known exceptions to the rule I stated. Not even things like retaliation can make it through blur/distortion.

Distortion blocks all damage with the exception of previously applied status effects ( conditions) and the agony hits from jade maw, which I haven’t managed to block yet. If you ate the full channel of damage with distortion actually running, you encountered a very strange bug.

Lets see….about 30% of that post was factually wrong. About 30% of that post was massively questionable opinions, and the remaining 50% was unintelligable garble.

Mesmers have a very low number of broken traits compared to a lot of other classes. We have 1 weapon that is pretty much completely lackluster, but this is made up for by our overpowered other weapons.

Mesmers are the most overpowered class in the game. We have an overpowered burst build capable of massive burst damage combined with extremely high survivability. We have an overpowered tank build capable of 100% uptime on several highly important boons that make it nearly impossible to kill, and impossible to attack without killing yourself. We have an overpowered zerg fighting build that bypasses the 5 target aoe limit and melts massive numbers of people with a few simple aoe drops. We have overpowered phantasm builds that don’t even have to attack, but can simply run around in circles while people try to decide whether to kill the phantasms, or try to chase you.

Nearly every single well made build a mesmer can make will do nearly everything better than nearly every other class. Mesmers are hilariously overpowered for anyone that knows how to use them, and that just makes whine threads like this that much funnier.

@Ross Biddle: Not sure if you just mistyped there, but you certainly can NOT use arcane thievery without a valid target. You can use it with a target out of range, which will result in just nothing happening. You can most definitely use it with no conditions on you, or no boons on the target. The 2 effects it has are independent, so you don’t need to have both of them applicable to be able to use the skill.

I guess the thing that really gets me is how some people are so content with the current state of the torch (broken blast finisher notwithstanding).

Yes, the torch works great in some builds. Yes, the prestige is an awesome skill, and is the reason the torch is so amazing. However, the iMage is just horrible.

Seriously, think of how much MORE amazing the torch would be if it actually had a phantasm that wasn’t COMPLETELY useless. The torch would be an awesome pick in a ton of builds instead of just a few really specific builds because it would have 2 great skill like every other offhand we have.

Yes, the torch works fine in some builds now, but that is absolutely no reason not be clamouring to give it 2 real skills.

Soyboy.3548:

Don’t expect everyone to read every one of your 1000000000 posts on this forum Pyro. Just because you post the most doesn’t mean that your opinion is more important.

Not everyone has to make a pro/con list to use a weapon. You black and white thinker you. Oh and while you were writing your paragraphs on this forum, I made $1000 today.

I simply ask people to read the posts in the thread they are discussing. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask. I want to avoid retyping lengthy conversations that have already been done in this thread.

My post detailing specifically what is wrong about the iMage was in response to someone who asked me to do exactly that. They challenged me to provide proof to my claims, and so I did.

Also, congratulations on your “1000 dollars”.

Just tested it. It has no effect with either clones or phantasms.

jportell.2197:

Srsly Pyro this is a great build and really good at dueling… I have people refuse to duel me because they say “I know your build… The more I hit you the more I die…. No thanks.” But I was dueling a thief yesterday that started to get wise to the iDefender and he would take it out as soon as I would pop it up.. Any suggestions on how to deal with people that forget about you and go right for your tank?

Honestly, that’s not a problem at all. Just make him waste his time. Before the defender dies, shatter it. The thief will have wasted precious time spent visible, precious initiative, and taken retaliation damage just to have his target shattered with no loss to you. If the thief is attacking the defender, he is doing no damage to you, and so you have plenty of time to heal up, or immobilize him for a confusion burst.

The most effective thiefs I have fought have ignored the phantasms and just tried to do single target damage to me in large chunks, i.e. backstab. This actually works pretty decently, but they just don’t end up having enough damage to take me out, especially if you are good with using dodges or blurred frenzy to make their backstabs miss.

@Osicat and Daverollen: Yeah, this build seems to inspire more hate than the usual shatter mesmer builds do for some reason, and it is always lots of fun. People just seem to not like having a mesmer that they can’t kill, and especially one that seems to hardly do any damage to them. Another thing I’ve gotten a lot is people moaning to me after they die and see 14k+ damage from retaliation in their damage logs. That’s always fun as well.

Easily done. Just equip a steady mainhand weapon in the mists. Get those runes, and take off all your traits. Hit the dummy. Summon a clone, hit it again. Done.

@Edenwolf: greatsword clones still use the greatsword autoattack, this means that for each attack they make, they actually hit 3 times, giving them a far higher hit rate than any other type of clone. Higher hit rate —> more chances to proc sharper images.

Wolfield.9812:

Elementalist has best down state. Can stop one stomp from multiple, retreat to party or friends, wvw go through a gate.

Thief has second best. Can stop 2 stomps from multiple people, and with shadow refuge can fully heal themselves in downstate. Retreat to friends/party.

Mesmer has third best. Can fully stop 1 stomp (from multiple people).

Guardian has forth best. Can fully stop 1 stomp from multiple people, but easy to blind.

Ranger/warrior/Necro/Engineer, to easy to blind, afford, predict, stun break, invul.

Thief can’t stop 2 stomps unless the people are really slow. Also, it is vulnerable to teleports such as blink, steal, shadowstep, lightning flash, or that one thief signet that will move you without interrupting a stomp.

Carighan.6758:

A good PvE use in PvE is stacking it on the shaman at the end of the sub-zero Fractal right before he ports away (he takes 2 ticks per wave of crystals hailing down, so he takes 10-16 ticks of damage in 3-4 seconds).

But yes, in general they need to work differently. My favourite implementation:

• Confusion becomes a duration-stacking / fixed-power-stack debuff. X damage per skill use, scaled with Condition Damage. But this does not increase per stack!
• Instead, it stacks “duration”. Sort of. Confusion gets a base duration of 4s, and every time the target uses a skill while under the duration, the counter resets to 4s. +Expertise ofc extends the duration as usual.
• Stacks are counted, and used up, one per ability the target uses.

In short, I give a PvE enemy a 6-stack of Confusion. As long as this enemy attacks at least once every 4s, the stack will stay on (due to the resetting duration), and deal it’s normal damage, until 6 attacks are gone – one stack is drained per attack.

That’d work much better IMO, because it is nearly self-balancing. It also gives a lot of knobs to turn, in sPvP you can either shorten it by 1s (making shedding easier) or reduce damage, in PvE you can extend it by 1s to accommodate slow attacks.

Did not know that about the shaman.

That is a really interesting idea about the confusion. You would have to do a ton of re-balancing of course. With the current incarnation of confusion application, it would be childs play to keep stacks on an enemy 100% of the time no matter how fast they attack, between 3 different shatters, confusing images, clone bursting, etc. Certainly a really intriguing idea though.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Ross Biddle.2367:

The thing is, you can’t then turn around and demand people justify the torches worth because you’ve claimed it’s trash. The burden of proof is on you to back up your claim.

You haven’t read my responses well enough then. I haven’t claimed the torch is trash. I have claimed the iMage is trash.

That was a mistake which I edited. Regardless, iMage is on the torch and the terms work interchangeably in your argument.

sigh I actually noticed that and then tried to edit my post with a large description of the proof, and then the forum hiccuped and it was all lost. I’ll now type it all in again >_<. For the record, the terms don’t work interchangeably at all, as I explained in that post. I do recommend you read through my post if you didn’t, as it contains really in-detail explanations of my views regarding the torch.

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.

Edit: Note that demonstrating success with the iMage does not make it any less of a horrific skill, it simply means that they have managed to do good things with the worst skill in the game, and kudos to them.

Edit 2: I just did a bit of additional testing. I am unable to make the iMage attack bounce to more than one hostile target, even if I have aggroed multiple enemies, and I am out of bounce range. The attack will simply hit the first target and stop there. Therefore, I can safely assume nothing more than those 3 stacks of confusion per attack, there will be absolutely no chance of more than that getting applied.

Ross Biddle.2367:

The thing is, you can’t then turn around and demand people justify the torches worth because you’ve claimed it’s trash. The burden of proof is on you to back up your claim.

You haven’t read my responses well enough then. I haven’t claimed the torch is trash. I have claimed the iMage is trash. My opinion on the torch is that The Prestige is not a good enough reason by itself to use the torch. However, that is my opinion, and as such it needs no burden of proof and carries no argumentative weight in any way whatsoever.

As far as your comparison with pain inverter goes, it is a very different skill from iMage, being a pbaoe attack, but it also functions with both condition duration and boon duration, which immediately puts it on a higher level than the iMage. Additionally, the base durations of both its effects are 5 seconds as opposed ot 3 seconds. Add to the fact that it is an aoe attack, not simply an unreliable bounce, and that adds a bit more. The iMage can renew its attack of course, but only if it hasn’t been shattered, and only if it hasn’t been killed. Pain inverter is significantly more reliable, and applies both confusion and retaliation for a much longer period of time than the iMage.

You mentioned a bunker build you created with the iMages. I would love to see a more thorough description of that build, along with some videos of it in action. The problem with any bunker build that relies on keeping phantasms up is that they are traditionally very difficult to keep alive in an active fight. My tank build relies in a large way on the iDefender, which has significantly more hp than any other phantasm. However, even that phantasm will die rather quickly in a fight, and more often than not I am forced to shatter it for one reason or another.

As far as what I’m trying to prove goes, I’m trying to point out that the iMage is an unbelievably bad skill, and needs to be either massively buffed or completely reworked to be viable. I have acknowledged multiple times in multiple posts in this very thread that the torch can be used quite effectively in different builds, when they rely on the massive utility of the prestige as opposed to relying on the phantasm. The problem is that no matter how many builds use the torch effectively, the fact remains that it is half a weapon, and this needs to be fixed. The fact that effective use of the torch has to almost completely ignore 50% of its skills is a problem.

As a matter of fact, every single build that uses the torch effectively should be all shouting louder than myself to get the iMage turned into a useful skill, because they would all benefit far more than myself from that change, since they use the torch and I don’t. All of my arguments are not trying to prove the torch is bad, or trying to say no one should use it. The only thing I’m trying to do is show how the torch is half of a weapon, and needs to be made whole.

PvE Confusion: Has a few very very specific uses that are only effective if applied with pinpoint accuracy (subject alpha in CoE being the only one I can think of off the top of my head. Each one of his circles is a separate attack, and can result in 8-10 hits of confusion instantly).

(note: PvP analysis is assuming skilled opponents)
PvP Confusion: Not viable to base a build around unless you are talking the zergbuster glamour type build. This is because confusion only work when your enemy is using skills, and smart enemies will simply not use skills until it wears off.

That being said, confusion is fantastic if you apply it as an additional amount of pressure. Simply putting confusion onto someone doesn’t force them to do anything except stare at you until it goes away. However, if you combine that confusion with potent burns/bleeds in a condition damage build, or with an incoming full mind wrack combo in a shatter build, then confusion really shines. In these situations, your target now has to make the choice between eating confusion damage or taking evasive actions. Additionally, if they don’t choose the proper evasive actions, they’ll eat BOTH.

The point of confusion is not to put pressure on a target. The point of it is to take a target that is already pressured, and force them to shut down or take massive damage. Using it in this way is exceptionally effective, and is (in my opinion) what the devs really designed confusion to be used as.

In the zergbuster glamour build, you are dealing with a zerg, which you assume to have below-average intelligence and situational awareness, and so applying large stacks of confusion works quite effectively as people will kill themselves with it before they even notice what is doing the damage.

Morfedel.4165:

Plus, while by itself its worthless, when stacking with all the rest of the confusion you cause, it’s another story entirely.

By itself, sure. But it’s part of an overall larger build. Stacking with the rest of the confusion and retaliation I already do with my confusion build, its a great add-on.

Again, I didn’t say its the best choice. I’m saying its not crappy.

Actually, your analysis is a bit flawed. No matter whether or not you are stacking the effect of the mage with the rest of your confusion, it still has the same individual effect. Whether or not you already have 15 stacks of confusion on the target, it still only adds 3 more for 3 seconds, and those 3 stacks objectively have the same amount of value as if they were the only 3 stacks on the target.

Compounding it in a build means that your build has other ways to apply confusion, and therefor your build doesn’t fail as it would if you relied purely on that phantasm, but it doesn’t make the phantasm itself any better.

@zastari: With the torch traited, just the summoning of the phantasm itself removes a condition. This means you aren’t actually relying on the phantasm to do anything. Now, the phantasm also removes a condition from you if its attack manages to bounce to you. However, relying on that aspect of the condition removal is foolish, as it requires the phantasm’s attack to hit, and for you to be in range for the bounce, and for it to bounce to you, which is many degrees removed from reliable.

I’d also like to make the distinction, for probably the 4th time in this thread alone, between what I am arguing, and “torch bashing”. I feel that the torch is not a strong enough weapon to use in my builds, and that is my personal opinion based on the worthlessness of the mage. However, several builds that utilize the utility of The Prestige, or the condition removal upon summoning the mage manage to sidestep the problem of how bad that skill actually is, and so the torch works fine in those builds.

However, the fact that the mage is one of the worst skill for any weapon on any class in the entire game is a fact, one that I have repeatedly and at length described and discussed earlier in this thread, and other threads. If you actually want to dispute that, by all means try to justify your position that the iMage isn’t that bad, but I guarantee that you will fail at it.

Soyboy.3548:

Embolism.8106:

Soyboy.3548:

Regarding the iMage, I haven’t ever traited this, but have yall ever used Illusionary Elasticity with the iMage? If so, wouldn’t that put 6 stacks of confusion on someone relatively often? More if you have 2 out of course and assuming the extra bounce goes to the same person.

This phantasm is like any other: summon it, let it attack once, then shatter it. For confusion builds, it ups the sources of confusion that you can rotate on a target to keep a constant stack on someone.

Illusionary Elasticity doesn’t work with iMage. Besides, I believe iMage has two bounces by default, but it does enemy-enemy-ally instead of enemy-ally-enemy.

Confusion builds never count on iMage as part of their Confusion repertoire. It is too slow, too short and too unreliable.

If +CondDuration works on Illusions the iMage may be viable. But it still needs a CD reduction.

Don’t tell me what my confusion build can rely on. Not everyone copypastas builds from the forums. My build uses the mage and it is nice for what it does. God. People are so controlling on this forum. Excuuuuse me! Other people who don’t post as much as you can have opinions too that are less vocal because we don’t sit around and read this forum all day.

Regardless of your opinion, the iMage is the least effective confusion applying skill that any class in the game has access to, and that is a fact. Not only does it suffer from the normal weaknesses of phantasms (obstructed/blinded/invulnerabilitied), the actual projectile is slow and can easily be obstructed by an unintended target. Additionally, it applies confusion for the lowest duration of any skill, unaffected by condition duration. On top of that, it has the largest recharge of any confusion application skill.

Objectively, a build that relies on the iMage for confusion application is a bad build, because it is not a skill that can be relied on. If you simply use it as an auxiliary confusion application for an extra 3 stacks that may or may not work, then sure, that’s how you use it. But you can’t rely on the skill for any use, full stop.

Our downed skill is actually objectively the second best in the game for its intended purpose: Stopping a stomp. The only one more effective is the ele mist form, but even the thief skill isn’t as effective as ours. As long as we have some target to select, whether it was our fighting target or just a critter, we can stop a stomp with 100% certainty, and you really can’t ask for more than that out of the downed skill number 2. Additionally, our skill number 3 is one of the stronger ones, summoning an extremely powerful phantasm that does serious damage.