This is a problem actually. Because mist form resets the damage window, it’s not possible to properly examine what actually killed you. This should be fixed immediately.
The only phantasm that needs a AI upgrade is the defender. (focus #5 skill) He goes to his summoned location and does his whirling dervish move. Then he follows the mob at max summoning range as does it again, hitting nothing. He will never close to melee range after he is summoned. The only way he can do any damage is if you kite a mob or person into him when he starts to use his deflect missile and aoe whirl. So his AI should either follow the mesmer around and deflect arrow, or go to melee range and use his aoe ability for damage. He does neither. He does close to melee range to shatter. The focus is generally used for PvP either SPvP or WvW because of the speed buff or maybe in a dungeon as finisher for shooting through speed buff line. Currently he has very little utility because of his AI issues. A lot of people use the duelist because it has good AI and since it is ranged does not get 1 shotted by AOE’s very often. I have started trying to use a Greatsword, focus/sword weapon combination. That seems to work well. The torch isn’t bad either offhand and the Pistol is FOTM.
On a side note I find it interesting that the warlock just had his time between attacks lengthened. It is pretty long as is.
As far as extra mobs go, the agro range of many mobs is pretty large, so if you kite, it is easy to accidentally pull in friends.
I’m torn between whether this is working as intended or not. Since the iWarden(not defender, that’s a different phantasm) is a projectile absorber/reflecter, it seems to me that it could be designed to be something of a stationary defense emplacement. You drop him, maybe he does some damage, and then you can run and hide behind him when attacks start coming.
The ai on clones and phantasms is fine. The ai is extremely simple. Whatever they were originally summoned on is the target they will shatter on, as well as the target they will continuously attack. This has always worked perfectly. If they are shattering/attacking other targets, it means you simply summoned them incorrectly.
@Kimbald: You just completely missed the point, reread the initial post.
As for the actual question, its becoming very evident to me, from things just like this, the lack of duration increasing items, that confusion is not meant to be built around. The extremely low duration, combined with the potential for high damage when stacked well points towards a general usage of forcing people to take damage while in confusion. For example, take the attack combo of leaping into a blurred frenzy while leading with a few shatters to stack confusion up to 12-16. The person now has to choose between taking a ton of damage from the blurred frenzy, or using skills to escape that attack, while getting smacked for big damage from the confusion stacks. This way, it provides a method of forcing people to take confusion damage or taking weaponskill damage, as opposed to something that is just stacked high and hard like bleeds.
The burst that thieves can do with the CnD + steal + backstab combo is definitely troubling. The change to the signet is also much smaller than one may think, and in some ways helpful. Now the signet can be activated before the initial attack, and get the 15% boost on CnD, steal, and backstab.
Some people seem to misunderstand what combo is being talked about here. The thief casts CnD at large range, hits steal DURING the cast time, shadow steps to target, does 5k damage instantly from steal, 5k damage instantly from CnD, instantly stealths from CnD, and a moment later, does 10k damage from backstab. The fact that you’re able to use steal during the CnD cast time for a massive gap close instant stealth 10k-20k combo is overpowered.
The second problem is stealth. The current stealth lockout when coming out of stealth is 3(4?) seconds. Because the client lags so absurdly bad displaying things unstealthing, the actual unstealthed time the thief has is closer to 1 second. This means that instead of the intended mechanic of the thief being vulnerable for 3-4 seconds, theyre only truely vulnerable for about 1 second, making popping in and out of stealth endlessly extremely easy. The stealth lockout needs to be massively increased, to a minimum of 7-8 seconds for this to be effective, since fixing the client lag-unstealth issue would be extremely difficult.
A lot of problems have been brought up with your playing in this video, which I agree with in all ways. For a shatter mesmer, you don’t really do a whole lot of shattering. I didn’t see you use mirror images a single time that entire match (maybe once or twice). The whole point of a shatter mesmer is to do a massive amount of fast burst damage while at the same time applying a ton of confusion. A great combo is getting 3 clones out in some way, use cry, optimally while close to get the 4th hit from yourself. Switch to sword+pistol use illusionary leap to get a clone and an immobilize. Immediately use mirror images + blurred frenzy + mind wrack to get an automatic 4 clone shatter + blurred frenzy damage.
Additionally, on the topic of utilities you never use, you never use 2 of your utilities. I know you took portal for specific mobility reasons. Unfortunately, the one time you used it was a total waste, and it became painfully clear by about 3 minutes into the match that the utility you were getting out of portal would be significantly outweighed by the utility of something like feedback, null zone, or decoy. Making changes to your utilities during a match is part of the hallmark of a good player, because you need to be able to understand situations and adapt to them quickly.
Aside from all of this, you displayed minimal ability to effectively 1v1, certainly against that one engineer, who destroyed you without help, even though help eventually arrived. On top of that, complaining that these 1v1s turned into 2v1s is useless. The whole point of setting up 1 person on a point alone is that they are able to hold the point until help arrives, against 2 people, against 3 people. A perfect example of this is the guardian that you and a teammate attempted to take the mine from. He held the point until help arrived, and then you 2 got decimated. Sitting someone on a point that is not able to successfully survive or win a 2v1 is a recipe for disaster.
Advanced mesmer techniques: Being a shatter mesmer, you should have 3 illusions out at all times, and preferably one being a phantasm simply for the damage potential. To maximize the ability to confuse your opponents, try not to run around aimlessly. Attempt to dodge behind objects, leaving a clone where you were before. Move around with blink, staff 2, and sword 3 whenever possible (these are also leap combos, and used properly give fantastic auras/buffs, with sword 3 actually being 2 leap combos packaged in 1 skill). You should be moving fast, continually destroying and creating clones, and causing maximal confusion in anyone who sees you fighting.
Edit: 1 more thing I forgot to mention. If you must insist upon taking portal into all your matches, do yourself a favor and drop one end of it wherever you are fighting. This provides a continual ethereal combo field to use leap combos, blast combos, etc through, with no detriment to your mobility, or the utility provided from it. If you are specced for confusion when entering ethereal fields, this also does a fantastic job of applying confusion stacks.
(edited by Pyroatheist.9031)
Multiple defenders will not change things I don’t believe. You could have multiple mesmers who chaincasted the defender to keep 100% uptime on the buff, however.
We have "Dodging" for evasion, can we add 'Tumbling' for recovery?
in Suggestions
Posted by: Pyroatheist.9031
What the op and many other people here seem not to understand is that all knockdown type abilities are classified as stuns, and therefor any skill with the note: ‘breaks stun’ will get you out of the knockdown.
While the technical fats of what Nretep said are correct, his conclusion is horrificly flawed. While you can’t run around with an army of clones, upon meeting people, each mesmer can easily kitten 1, 2, or even 3 clones immediately and triple the size of the force running at them. With no names in WvW, this would be an unbelievably hellish tactic, combined with the other fun mesmer tricks of mass invisibility and feedback.
The only thing I can think of is that the bozos attacking her didn’t realize that she was stacking things like iwarden, feedback, and temporal curtain to cause near permanent projectile reflects, and the numbers they saw were the reflected skills coming back at them.
No, this is a horrific idea. It completely destroys the basic purpose of a GROUND TARGETED aoe. The reason these aoes are ground targeted, and not auto-targeted is because they are designed in such a fashion that their effect should be aimed purposely by the player, either because it would be overpowered if auto-targeted, or completely ineffective auto-targeted. Even the existence of such an option would completely wreck pvp, and greatly lower the skill cap, as well as locking in specific skills that are simply way more powerful than anything else.
This should not happen, and this will never happen, since ArenaNet knows better than to listen to misguided whines like this one. The total design, basic idea, and implementation of ground targeted aoe spells is extremely purposeful, and will not be changed, I can guarantee it.
The main issue with stealth, for me, is that due to client/server lag, what is supposed to be a sequence of activate skill→unstealth→cast skill turns into activate skill → cast skill →activate skill 2→cast skill 2→activate skill 3→unstealth→cast skill 3. This is the major problem with stealth in every mmo in existence. Stealth is nearly impossible to balance aside from severely nerfing any attack coming out of stealth, simply because stealth fading can not be properly addressed due to inherent lag. With the initiative system of the thief where skills can be spammed extremely quickly, this stealth exit lag problem is exacerbated.
Same for me and my group two nights in a row now. Missing 120 tokens currently and enjoying the anticipation of not being compensated for the time and coin wasted on these runs.
First run 10/24/2012 – http://imgur.com/RILF2Attachment is from tonight.
You will not be compensated, with complete certainty. I spent a week and a half fighting with customer service to get a straight answer, and the straight answer that I eventually got was that there would absolutely not be any compensation for bugs causing a loss of tokens.
Same, it’s happening to me extremely frequently. The game is nearly unplayable because of this.
Scepter doe beat sword in one area though, and it matters, range.
In wvwvw, the range on the scepter lets you put out damage when you can’t switch back to GS yet, and 3 works, though the delay before it starts firing does stink
While that’s technically true, it doesn’t matter at all, especially not in WvW. If you are doing some sort of wall defense, then you shouldnt have switched to sword in the first place, unless you really needed your focus offhand for whatever reason. Additionally, the 3 seconds of no damage before you can switch back to the gs are FAR outweighed by the massive damage advantage of the sword, and the massive utility advantage of the sword. If you are doing a power/precision setup, there is absolutely no reason not to pick sword over scepter.
all most ppl care about (and should atm) is the end reward (60 tokens), the faster u get there, the better.
how to do this? skip burrow, skip queen, skip foes on traps, skip troll, skip kholer, do burrow event, etc. . . finish in 10minsits just a playstyle, tobad most ppl prefere to skip him (not rly)
but why care how other ppl want to play?they said they’ll fix drops in dungeons, so things might change
Is it really viable to skip the spider and the foes on the traps? I can see skipping the trap gravelings, but skipping the queen and those looks to be exceedingly difficult.
The path to the waypoint does not go underwater
It really depends on what you’re doing. In explorable mode dungeons, having a very good amount of survivability is highly recommended. In sPVP, youre going to want to go for extremes, either extreme burstiness, extreme condition build with a scepter (DON’T do this in sPVP, confusion is horrible there), or extreme bunker build (possibly my favorite) with staff/sword+focus and idefender, etc.
As far as WvW goes, it also depends on what you want to do. A confusion build is actually viable in wvw, due to the much higher scaling on confusion, you can do 3k damage a tick with 10 stacks in a condition gear setup. If you are doing a lot of running with a (big) pack, berserkers is most likely your best choice. If you want to do small skirmishes, with a 5 man kill team or something like that, its really up to you. Full tanky gear will let you take a ton of punishment, and the projectile reflects from focus traiting is invaluable when taking supply camps, as well as messing with people on walls. Full berserkers is better if youve already got a few big guardians to go in for you, and you can just stand back and nuke things down.
Take home message is: get multiple sets of gear. Expensive, but worth it. Depending on what you’re doing, and how you want to play, you’ll need/want different setups.
After a prolonged fight with customer support, I have finally gotten a straight answer from them, and it is quite disheartening.
Hello,
Thanks for contacting us. I apologize if our previous responses were unclear, that was not our intent. Unfortunately, the losses you reported will most likely not be reimbursed. In the event we are able to assist with this kind of issue in the future, it will only be from that point in time and beyond. We will not be able to go back and reimburse everyone who experienced these issues in the past. I apologize for the inconvenience and frustration this causes you. If you have any other questions or concerns about this or any other issues, please let us know.
Best Regards,
GM Mourdyth
As you can see from this response, the customer support obviously has no plans to reimburse people for lost dungeon tokens. Unfortunately, the small incentive to do dungeons has just decreased, since a significant number of bugs exist that result in loss of the reward.
And literally 20 seconds after I make this post, it’s back to normal. Still though, anyone know why this would occur?
I have been frequenting the Game Bugs area of the forum recently. About 2 minute ago, I tried to go there….and it’s in german. I haven’t the faintest idea how this occurred, or how to fix it, any help?
None of the other areas of the forum come up in german, it seems to be purely limited to the game bugs section.
Agreed, a cheating option needs to exist. Any sort of report feature has inherent risks for abuse, and not a single one is exempt from that consideration, but they exist because it is necessary for reports, true or false, to make it back to the dev team to be examined.
A second update on my customer service interaction. The reply I received:
Unfortunately as stated before at this time we do not have the tools to grant a request such as yours.
It seems obvious to me that they are simply trying to ignore my posts, and make this problem disappear, but they will be disappointed in that regard. However, giving them the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t read the wall of text I sent them, I responded with that wall paraphrased in simple, easy to read fragments.
If, in fact, your response saying, and I quote “we do not have the tools to grant a request such as yours” is a response to the reply I quoted above, I will direct you to another part of my previous reply here:
Someone, somewhere, needs to make an excel file titled ‘Missing items to be spawned for our valued customers.’ In such an excel file, the account name, number of items, and item names will be listed, and once the tool is added, someone runs down that list, and provides all the items. This is not a difficult task, nor a time consuming one.
As evidenced in that statement, the only ‘tools’ necessary to comply with that request are microsoft excel, and a small amount of time. One additional thing is necessary however, and that is the desire to correct problems within your game, and to compensate your paying customers with what they deserve.
After that, I may have produced another wall of text regarding how failures in customer service almost always lead to a failure of a game, most especially in a game with a payment model such as this, where new players is absolutely necessary for cash flow, and money from existing players is just as, if not more, important. How they respond to this, after making my point painstakingly clear will be quite interesting.
It’s pretty clear that AC is extremely bugged. I haven’t heard anything about other dungeons, so I highly recommend not running AC, and telling everyone you know not to run AC.
@mage.3570: Make sure you reported it as a bug ingame. Additionally, make sure you open a support ticket here:https://en.support.guildwars2.com/
Do not let them dismiss your claims without a fight. Communicate to them clearly and effectively that you will not let this disappear, that you will continue the complaints and tickets until they restore your items. If enough people ruffle enough feathers up at Anet headquarters, I guarantee you that we will see results. All it takes is time and effort.
A bit of an update on the customer service conversation. Here was the reply I received:
I understand this is frustrating, I am having the same problems with my dungeon runs too. We are working on a fix for numerous problems like this in game. I feel your pain, and I wish there was something I could do. As much as I would love to take care of this for you right away, I am afraid we don’t have tools that allow us to modify or restore items in game at this time. Our development team is working hard every day to add features that improve the game for our players, and the tools that allow our support staff to offer the best customer experience. While I don’t have an estimate for when such a tool will be available to us, I know it is a priority.
To that, I wrote a massive wall of text, from which I will paraphrase somewhat:
I’m sorry, but I simply find this exceedingly difficult to believe. How is it that guild wars 2 was created in such a basically different way than every other mmo ever created on this planet that the GMs and/or devs do not have the ability to spawn items? Don’t get me wrong, it’s obvious that this game is very different from every other mmo, but from a basic coding standpoint, I’m positive that’s not entirely true.
The problem is that not once, not on the forums, not in any private bug reports/conversations with the support team, has any ArenaNet employee ever given a guarantee that after the necessary tools have been added, that the missing items will be provided….The fact that no one has given this guarantee is extremely troubling, and is representative of a colossal fail in customer service and public relations.
At the very LEAST, a rock solid guarantee that once the tools are added, I will receive my un-awarded items is absolutely necessary, and I am quite willing to continue this conversation until such a guarantee has been made. Not making a guarantee is the equivalent of stating ‘we care nothing for your game experience, and value ignoring complaints and hoping they go away over taking care of our customers.’… Instead of every dungeon run having an undertone of, ‘well, lets hope it doesn’t bug, because if it does, ArenaNet doesn’t give a kitten about us and we will never get our tokens,’ the runs will continue with the knowledge that the company we are PAYING for this experience will eventually right the wrongs once they are able.
As indicated in my reply, I’m not willing to let this go away, and none of you should either.
Just don’t skip kholer. Do the dungeon as intended.sigh
That is not the solution. I killed kohler in all of my three runs, but that obviously didn’t help.
I also sent in a ticket to support. This was the response I received:
The Guild Wars 2 Support Team is unable to restore missing characters or items. I understand this may be frustrating, but we simply do not have the capabilities to do this.
In response to this, I replied:
Hello, I have been playing mmorpg games for upwards of 7 years. I have played many different games, many different styles, types, and owning companies. However, there have been some qualities that remain given among every last mmo, and guild wars 2 is no exception. The GM accounts and/or dev accounts have access and ability to use commands that will spawn items. Saying that this does not exist in guild wars 2 is simply a bold lie. Since the situation is such that you DO in fact have the ability to produce the missing ascalonian tears, but you simply do not WANT to, your response simply means that I have not asked enough times. Therefor, I request a second time, restore the missing 90 ascalonian tears to my account at your earliest convenience please.
As indicated by my response, I intend to continue replying, requesting and/or opening new tickets if the current one is closed until I am properly compensated for the runs I did. In my experience with MMO customer service, this is the proper response if you want them to actually respond and react in a productive manner. I highly encourage all of you to do the same, and possibly they will understand that the playerbase is not willing to take no for an answer.
Phantasmal duelist summon range has a base value of 1200, like all phantasms. This does not change, and has never changed. What I have not tested is whether it affects the range that the actual phantasms can fire at. You may want to look into that.
I just did all three paths. Path 1 bugged out, and we got nothing. Path 3 worked, but on path 2, I only got 30 tokens instead of 60. Customer service will be receiving endless angry emails from me until I am compensated properly, they can put money on that.
I started crafting at lvl 1, used boosters all way through. Did not go out to starting area until about level 48.
Boosters do not affect crafting exp at all. They affect the amount of exp you get per craft, but ultimately, this only changes how quickly you reach 400, not how much exp it took to get there.
When you have been doing the same thing for the past few weeks, and been getting steadily same results. You know when something is wrong. Hard to understand?
Apparently harder than to understand probability. You are not going to get the same results all the time – that is pretty much obvious. You have mentioned how today your drop rate appears to be differente, which is pretty much to be expected.
go flip a coin right now and see how many tails you get from 20 toss, i bet only 1 right?
The fact you appear to believe that could not occur is proof that you don’t understand probability…
I think that you may be the one slightly in the dark about probability. He was not stating that it’s impossible to get only 1 tail, but that it is simply extremely improbable. The probability of obtaining only 1 tail in 20 flips is as follows: n!/(2^(n)*x!(n-x)! where n is the number of flips, and x is the number of heads obtained, and this calculates out to .0019%. This is obviously absurdly small, and so proves his point.
ATTENTION: 36,000 Mithril Ore + 18,000 Elder Logs +22,500 Large Fang = 1,500 Level 80 RARE Greatswords........ + Mystic Forge = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING
in Crafting
Posted by: Pyroatheist.9031
The chance for a precursor drop is too small right now, and anet HAS acknowledged this, and has stated that something will be changed, not willing to find a source for that atm. Since that is the current state of things, anyone who willingly gambles 1500 level 80 rare greatswords, knowing that the droprate is too small as stated by Anet, is simply too stupid to deserve to keep those 1500 greatswords. In an unrelated note, thank you for financing this game for us.
Any official response i could find thats related to this issue is
“We have been watching the prices climbing on Legendary precursors and share your concerns about some of them becoming too expensive. We will continue to monitor the situation and will make any adjustments we feel are necessary.”
The part I isolated is the important part. “We share concerns about some of them becoming too expensive…make any adjustments we feel are necessary.”
Note that I never said, implied, or in any way, shape, or form stated that chances had changed. The only thing I said was that Anet recognizes that prices are climbing out of control for some of the precursors. A recognition of that sort implies an eventual change, and so anyone willing to toss in weapons before that eventual change is simply wasting cash, and obviously does not care about wasting it.
(edited by Pyroatheist.9031)
ATTENTION: 36,000 Mithril Ore + 18,000 Elder Logs +22,500 Large Fang = 1,500 Level 80 RARE Greatswords........ + Mystic Forge = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING
in Crafting
Posted by: Pyroatheist.9031
The chance for a precursor drop is too small right now, and anet HAS acknowledged this, and has stated that something will be changed, not willing to find a source for that atm. Since that is the current state of things, anyone who willingly gambles 1500 level 80 rare greatswords, knowing that the droprate is too small as stated by Anet, is simply too stupid to deserve to keep those 1500 greatswords. In an unrelated note, thank you for financing this game for us.
That system from gw1 isn’t in gw2 because they don’t want players to have to learn two different sets of “rules.” Yet.
Considering Confusion works differently in sPvP from WvW and PvE, I highly doubt your statement. :P
Confusion works exactly the same, the only difference is in damage scaling. There are no actual rules needed to be relearned, the concept is exactly the same: stack it high, and stack it fast.
lol you told him he sucked an roll another class. A guy that has a mesmer twice the level you have attained. You didnt give advice because you cannot give advice because quite frankly mesmers do not start to mature really until 40+ imo. Thats when you stop struggling and can play around with different things.
All the guy stated was that hes frustrated with what he saw as a nerf to likely the only playstyle he has used. My advice was to try different weapon combos an stop relying on worrying about getting 3 phantasms up, just throw up the one main phantasm an get some clones off while you using your high dps weapon styles. Thats far more efficient anyways.
Im sure as a total pro you probably have a different rotation you would follow to down, say a veteran mob. What weapon, rotation would you use MrM&C?
You seem to be somewhat misinformed. Most of mrmc’s statements were quite reasonable arguments. The first one dealt with the fact that a slight nerf to cooldowns will not make or break a build, especially one that is as strong as the phantasm build. Mesmers require a certain knack for rotating skills and phants in pve, and with that proper feeling, the nerf has no effect at all.
Other than that, mots of his statements were pointing out how the comparison between necro minions and phantasms is not viable at all, and this is completely accurate. Necro minions have cd counters that don’t start until they die (think ele summoned elementals), and the minions also do significantly less damage, and have generally less utility than the army of phantasms a mesmer can produce.
Never once did he attempt to give specific pvp or pve advice. As much as this makes his comments somewhat substanceless, it also means that your beef with his comments is completely without basis.
No you didn’t. Thats complete and total bullkitten. You did not take 15-20 seconds to kill a veteran giant in orr. That fight will last at least a minute or 2, those giants have a massive amount of hp, they spawn grubs all over the place, and are by far harder than some champions to solo because of the adds and hp. If you actually killed it in 15-20 seconds, I challenge you to post a video on youtube of you doing so.
This has happened twice quickitteno me. I will die in sPVP (first time in capricorn, second in foefire). I will choose to respawn, and then get stuck on the loading screen, and never respawn. The only way to get out is to restart the game. My internet is working fine, and this has never happened to me before the most recent patch. Anyone know whats going on?
Edit: The filter is catching q u i c kitten o m e . seriously?
Edit 2: Oh come on. l y t o. what is wrong with those 4 letters?
I like the scepter as is. People who don’t like the scepter don’t understand how to use one
Or they don’t like how our single ranged 1 hand weapon is only usable with one very ineffective condition based build.
Why do you think main hand pistol is such a popular request?
The actual reason that the confusion on the 1chain was removed, was because it was on the first attack, meaning mesmers could keep upwards of 18-20 stacks of confusion on a target at all times, since the clones would spam confusion as well. Therefor, the removal was perfectly justified.
I’m not buying that at all. Trident clones cause confusion and attack faster and they can only stack up to 10-12.
You forget that with the unmodified scepter, your own autoattacks were also applying confusion, and you additionally have confusing images to stack it up further, neither of which are available in the water.
However, in the 2nd(third?) BWE, the autoattack from the trident DID apply confusion, and that was removed, presumably for the same reason, except it bounced, so you’d get 18 stacks of confusion on everything in the area.
[Mesmer Bug] Ether Clone (Skill 1 for Scepter) overidding third Phantasmal Duelist
in Mesmer
Posted by: Pyroatheist.9031
The amount of incorrect assumptions in this thread as absolutely astounding. The situation described is EXACTLY working as intended, end of story.
1. Phantasms will attempt to overwrite a clone, and then overwrite the oldest phantasm
2. Clones will attempt to overwrite a clone, and then overwrite the oldest phantasm.
This has always been the case, and will always been the case. If you want to run a build with 3 phantasms out doing damage, I highly suggest not using mainhand scepter.
The actual problem here, is that mesmers have no viable ranged mainhand weapons that are not pidgeonholed into a clone factory build by virtue of the 1 attack. The scepter works fine for what it’s designed to do, but unfortunately, it’s only designed to do 1 specific thing: generate clones (making confusion is a useful side-effect). Mesmers really need a true midrange mainhand weapon that is not limited in functionality to a clone factory build (pistol anyone?).
Could you post a source for that info? It would be fantastic if that were the case, but I would also like to know more specifics.
The actual reason that the confusion on the 1chain was removed, was because it was on the first attack, meaning mesmers could keep upwards of 18-20 stacks of confusion on a target at all times, since the clones would spam confusion as well. Therefor, the removal was perfectly justified.
…unfortunately they kittened it up by removing it altogether, instead of just moving it to the second attack in the chain so that clones wouldn’t proc it.
Unfortunately, you’re completely wrong about the iMage doing significant damage. Even assuming the absolute best case scenario, where the mob is attacking 1 time per second, its horrible. First off, if the mob attacks fast, and hits those attacks, you will be dead, and fast. Second of all, assuming the mob attacks 10 times in the length of that confusion, thats only goign to add up to something like 1500-2500 damage, at the absolute most. Compare that to a few rounds of unloads from the duelist, or a couple hits from the swordsman (my swordsman hits for around 2500-3000 each time). Every single other phantasm blows it out of the water in terms of damage and utility.
Gsword clones are by far the best for applying bleeding stacks with time warp, as they have an extremely high rate of attack, since each attack is split up into the 3 separate bursts, each of which can apply bleeding. Additionally, being at range, they are less likely to get killed. That being said, mainhand sword clones also are fantastic time warp fodder, due to the vulnerability stacking.
iDefender puts up a continual damage passing buff, with no downtime. It does have an attack rate like the rest of the phantasms, but that attack rate does not affect its main funtionality. iDisenchanter is just the same as the rest, with a specific cooldown time on its actions.
Phantasmal healing I have not tested….but since the buff has a continual uptime, I can’t see how it would affect it at all.
Time warp increases action speed, but it doesn’t decrease skill cooldowns accordingly. When using iWardens, this is actually a really bad thing, as it decreases the amount of time their protective bubble is up. Phantasms will never get a damage boost from time warp, as the time period between their skill uses will remain essentially the same. The only thing that will change with phantasms is how fast they use each separate attack.
The 105% is from a full set of +3% magic find armor, +3% on 2 weapons, +6% on 5 pieces of jewelry, +50% from a set of runes, and +10% from a different rune. And now that I recount it, turns out that I have 115%, not 105%.
I’ve been running around orr, doing the exploring thing for the past several days. This involves a very large amount of loot necessarily, and I geared up for this orr run by getting up to about 105% magic find. However, in these few days, I’ve found a ton of grey items, a ton of blue, a good number of green, but only a single rare item the entire time. I get the feeling that magic find is broken, has anyone had a similar experience?
Phantasm damage is (sorta) described in tooltips, although I highly advise looking up the damage on the wiki, since some of the tooltips are horridly wrong. As far as crit rate goes, phantasms and clones all have the same crit rate as you, plus any modifiers you get from traits, such as the trait that gives all phantasms fury (+20% crit rate).
EDIT: Why did that guy randomly go nuclear on Roven for asking a question? Anyway…
You were doing great until you hit Confusion. It is very easy to get 20+ stacks on single targets and that’s absurdly strong in PvP. It’s not as dramatic in PvE but considering it takes very, very little investment it’s not a problem. “Confusion” builds are goofy and poor though. Confusion just comes from in most builds.
You hit the nail on the head with Confounding Suggestions. Dumbest trait available in my opinion. Atleast Descent into Madness has funny uses.
Unfortunately, your analysis of confusion is lacking as well. Yes, its possible (read:not easy) to get 20+ stacks of confusion on single targets, and is in fact the build that I ran in sPVP during BWE3. Unfortunately, the super high confusion stack will last a most of 2-3 seconds. This gives it absolutely massive destructive value in pvp when used properly, but unfortunately is nearly pointless in pve. You could get lucky and get 1 large hit from it, but even that will be far less than any other build utilizing pure damage (and bleeds, incidentally).
I'm seeing a lot of sadness about Scepters. Here's a 101 on them if it's a weapon you've never really used.
in Mesmer
Posted by: Pyroatheist.9031
@djones
While I agree that some of zexion’s analysis is flawed, and significant portions of his math is shaky, he does make some good points. Scepter could have reliable shatter damage if the clones spawned at you, instead of in melee range of the monster (they used to do this in the beta, idk why this was changed). Now, you could shatter that clone immediately of course, but because of the shatter mechanic, this greatly decreases potential shatter. On the other hand, not shattering the clone immediately generally means the monster turns and kills it in one hit. The scepter simply is not viable as a clone production mechanism for consistent shatters in pve.