Guild Wars 2

Hey messiah,

I tried them a bit in sPVP yesterday.. largely because most of the other options mentioned here (scavenger, traveler’s, perplexity etc) are not available. The jury’s still out for me at least.

Part of the difference between us is that our builds are both condition-based but are different. I’m running a defensive 0/0/30/20/20 build and I do most of my damage from a distance, avoiding melee most of the time. I use my initiative largely for PD #3, DB and HS.

I don’t CnD all that much because I’m not very good at landing it, and my BS damage isn’t all that hot regardless. I don’t think I have the experience/skill necessary to run your panicond build.

I use stealth-on-steal most of the time and combine that with utilities for stealthing.

messiah.1908:

i still dont understand why ppl use crit sigil when the crit chance is low

I think the theory is that in this build you are just spamming so many hits that it doesn’t matter. I’m not really sure how the math works out though.

I am actually finding the straight Blackwater pretty hard to play in duels of late. Skilled players know how to counter it.

But it might just be my own inexperience.

That was… mesmerizing. Pun intended.

And so far over my head I feel like I should delete my mesmer and roll a warrior or something, lol.

I can’t get shatter builds at all even after nearly two months playing a mes.

Gracious.4279:

Ive played 1000 tourny matches

.. and yet still can’t figure out not to gank and stomp people on a dueling server.

If you’re experiencing “unconditional hate”, that might be part of it. rolls eyes

I posted this in another thread, but it belongs here too.

—

My most recent match: 500 to 83. With a ragequitter to top it off.

It doesn’t matter what the rest of the plans are for PvP. Until they fix this, it will be avoided by 95% of the playerbase, and for good reason.

Even with good rewards I do not feel like participating when I get my butt handed to me on an ongoing basis, and have to deal with fair-weather teammates to boot.

My most recent match: 500 to 83. With a ragequitter to top it off.

It doesn’t matter what the rest of the plans are for PvP. Until they fix this, it will be avoided by 95% of the playerbase, and for good reason.

Well, a day later.. it’s a bit better. But only a bit. At least 3/4 of the matches are still blowouts.

Josh Davis.6015:

The projects listed in the blog are not exhaustive – we’re working on other things simultaneously. As John mentioned, we’re still working on game modes and new maps. As Justin has mentioned in another post, we’re also looking at ways to drastically improve the quality of matchmaking. This includes harsher penalties for afk players and leavers.

Very glad to hear it. And I really appreciate the fantastic responsiveness of the PvP team.

Interesting stuff.

How well will these new PvE mesmer metas translate to WvW? I think I’m settling mostly on using my thief in WvW but I’d like to be able to do some WvW on the mes as well.

Does everyone run zerker for dungeons?

Lighter.5631:

- – thief is rather easy as other classes

Compare to, say, a warrior? For a new player?

Please.

Only now after about a month do I finally feel like I’m getting comfortable with the class.

OP, give it time.. it does get better.

I played with Grenth briefly in PvP and found it always proced when I wasn’t near anyone. That might be me using them incorrectly, but to be frank, I have enough to coordinate without worrying about that.

Messiah, I looked at Balthazar, but they’re power runes and I’m not sure they really synergize that well with the build. Unless that burn is a lot better than it looks on paper. And again, I’m going to have the issue that I generally try to stay out of melee.

The thing I’m not sure about with the sigil of earth is that since I’m always applying bleed and my opponent presumably always clearing it, it seems that its extra bleed would get lost in the shuffle.

Bursting seems like a no-brainer but they’re quite expensive.

I’m talking about people leaving in the middle of matches. In many cases after having been active, meaning they left because they just didn’t want to continue, usually when losing.

Travlane.5948:

ask anyone. well most …. its a dumb build for brainless players. its strong and u cant die if u dont want to.

You know who else can’t die if they don’t want to?

Thieves.

Have you ever actually played a PU mesmer? Doesn’t seem like it. They’re very strong against some builds, and fairly useless against others IME.

I know you guys have a lot of plans, and I know they’ll take time. But if I may, as a relatively new PvPer, I’d really like to see a priority made of addressing the current tendency of players to selfishly leave matches when they see things aren’t going their way. It’s extremely unfair to the other players, and seems to happen at least half the time in the solo queue IME.

Everyone sometimes has to leave in the middle of something, but there should be very strong penalties for those who make a habit of it.

Hey thanks for the replies! I actually have some scavenger runes and I’ll give them a try. Wish there was a way to try perplexity runes without the high cost. Maybe someday.

This will mostly be for PvP/WvW and I doubt I’ll stay up long enough for corruption to be worthwhile. But I’ll look at battle sigils.

Question.. if I’m running PD+DD, can I equip a single dagger offhand, and have the sigil activate when I swap the mainhand weapon? That would save me an inventory slot.

Travlane.5948:

undeserving requests as i stated mesmers are the ones that can really abuse it.

That’s what people say about thieves and stealth too.

Travlane.5948:

if a thief goes in stealth and hides nobody is the worse for wear…..

LOL. That’s pretty funny.

Do mesmers have special, extra-strong attacks that become available every time they stealth? And can they use them a dozen times a minute or more?

Please.

Right now on my defensive build I can stealth over and over, using CnD, steal, powder, shadow refuge, etc. etc. Every time I do I get tons of health regen, I remove conditions every 3 seconds, and I get to restart the fight with a nasty attack with the timing I choose, not the enemy.

It’s pretty funny seeing people who play thieves complaining about stealth.

Oh, and PU mesmer is not IMO a “no-brainer” character at all. If you’re good, it’s powerful, but I’ve been playing it off and on for a while and it is far from being simple.

Travlane.5948:

mmmhmmmm….but i dont believe somebody should be able to do nothing yet do alot you know what i mean? all while stealthed and pretty safe.

Congratulations — you just summarized every post asking for thieves to be nerfed that has ever been made.

Whatever this new system has, it should include HEAVY penalties for people who ragequit in the middle of a match. Really unimpressed with how often that happens right now.

Is it “legal” to give characters names designed to make it easier to confuse them with summons? In particular I’ve seen quite a few folks with names designed to sound similar to mesmer phantasms and it kinda rubs me the wrong way, but I’m not sure if it’s considered being clever or being deceptive.

Someone just said this to me in a solo queue match. He’s not wrong to have told his team that, from what I can tell given my limited experience, and it struck me as a somewhat funny indictment on the reward/incentive system in PvP right now.

I hope plans for new maps and map mechanics are in the works somewhere.

Hey all,

I’ve mostly settled on a highly defensive PD/DD condition build (0/0/30/20/20) that I plan to use for WvW, with some PvE and a variant for sPvP. I’ll be using either dire or carrion gear (actually have both right now as I try to figure out which I prefer). But I can’t seem to decide on runes and sigils.

I was using runes of the centaur to save a utility slot but frankly I find it a nuisance and the rune boosts aren’t that useful. I was looking at maybe scavenging or perplexity.. though the latter are pricey and I’m not sure how well they synergize with this build.

For sigils, this build has low crit so I’ve been looking at swap runes like doom, battle, energy, geomancy, etc. But it’s hard to tell how much impact each has, at least in the case of the ones that apply conditions. I also like the sigil of leeching in the limited PvP testing I’ve done so far, and it fits with my defensive/“tanky” theme.

Thanks for your thoughts!

ETA: Was also looking at runes of bursting, either superior ($$$) or major.

I see a lot of great plans here, thanks.

Re: The armor and weapons you carry into PvP will be, like they are now, just for looks."

I think this is a double-edged sword, and one of the impediments to getting people to come over to PvP from WvW and PvE. It does cause build-making to be simpler, but the inability to boost combat numbers to high enough levels makes some builds not translate well between PvP and the rest of the game. I think more people would participate if they didn’t have to figure out new builds, and I also think people would participate more if they could test out WvW builds in PvP.

Is it an inherently invalid strategy to play defensively rather than offensively?

I have a defensive thief. I don’t kill people too often, 1v1, but I can sure get a couple of enemy team members tying themselves in knots trying to kill me. If I keep that up throughout a match, it means a 4v3 for my team for the other parts of tha map. Seems pretty legit strategy to me.

Nretep.2564:

reducing it to a single heal with the double amount of healing wouldn’t make it so different.

It would for me. I like the multiple charges as I can space heals out more. And you may be forgetting about centaur runes.

I’d like to see more charges, and more traits to have things happen when mantras are charged or used. Reducing the number of charges just makes them like really slow regular skills.

Nretep.2564:

And putting traits into different lines means you should get them together.
I want to see you using two grandmaster traits of the same line together …
If you’d make all mantra related traits (5) into a single line you could only ever use 3 of them at once.

It may just be my lack of experience, but I ended up dropping mantras entirely because it wasn’t worth the sacrifices in the build to get what I needed for them to work.

Reducing them to 1 charge would greatly reduce their utility in builds that use them for healing.

One problem I see with them is that the trait that increases them to 3 per charge is very useful but in a completely different place than the one that lets them heal.

Welcome to the game. I’m new also, only just a tier “older” than you as I’ve been playing a few weeks. Ironically the two main characters I play are mesmer and thief. I started with mesmer because the idea of an illusionist in an online game struck me as unique, but I found it quite hard to play. I made a thief because I also like the playstyle and well, it’s been pretty hard to play also.

My main suggestion is to ask questions, lots of specific questions. Plenty of great, smart people on these forums who will be happy to advise you.

Use the wiki.. a lot. It has tons of info. You can even access it from within the game by typing /wiki <subject>.

Until you get used to the traits, use builds others have put together. Or start with them and tweak them, that’s a great way to get up to speed faster.

Most thief builds are “high-risk, high-reward”… you can kill the other guy quickly, and also get killed quickly. There are a couple that are more defensive. I’m currently running a very defensive build that is not like most thief characters in that it doesn’t kill quickly and sometimes not at all… but it’s super tough and gives me more opportunity to practice the ins and outs of combat while not getting killed myself very fast. I also personally find it fun to play “catch me if you can!” as usually they can’t.

Just keep playing and learning, figure out what areas of the game you like most, and it will start to come together. Happy to answer any questions I can.

mrmadhaze.8706:

it’s not envy, it’s about balance, design and nerfs patch after patch. Quite different from envy..

IMO this thread is actually just a lot of moaning and complaining by the OP, with plenty of factual inaccuracies sprinkled in.

As I said before, if thieves have balance issues they should be addressed, but on their own merits. What mesmers can and cannot do is not relevant because they are a completely different class and their stealth works in a different way. They cannot get stealth nearly as easily as thieves. They also have weaknesses that thieves do not.

NevirSayDie.6235:

Smart move. If you play to a competent solo queue level in PvP, you’ll absolutely demolish people in small engagements in WvW to where you almost start feeling bad…

Thanks. Well, in theory anyway… I’m really pretty awful at this. Maybe in a year, if I’m still playing…

I really like WvW but I did find that I couldn’t really enjoy it because I would constantly get demolished. I can’t afford to keep regearing myself with new builds so it seemed sPVP would be a better way to increase my skill level, and I think it already has. But it’s still a really long and slow climb.

And some of what I learn in sPVP may not translate into WvW anyway.

But I figure it’s still better than going into WvW and either dying the second I meet an enemy in the open or running with the ‘zerg’ which is incredibly dull and seems to be completely unimpacted by what I do personally.

NevirSayDie.6235:

Are you talking about solo queue or hotjoin/custom matches? Because hotjoin/custom actually doesn’t have “matchmaking,” just a quick attempt to get you in a room with some players around your rank. In solo queue, everyone’s rating was just reset, so it hasn’t had time to really “settle” yet. You could still be getting some really good players doing their “first” match, so they’re entering at the level of a newbie. Of course, they’ll only stay at that matchmaking level for one or two games.

Well, after that one close game, 4 or 5 more blowouts. That’s frankly a pretty terrible record, probably worse than they’d get with random matchups.

As for hotjoin, it seems to be even worse. Every time I try hotjoin I find myself in a blowout, usually on the losing team getting my head handed to me in seconds as soon as I leave the spawn room. It is completely unenjoyable and as a result I now avoid the entire mechanism.

If I want a quick PVP I join one of the dueling servers. They have a lot of problems but I’d rather lose in a duel than have 3 very experienced players destroy me in seconds.

sPVP right now is a feature that is mostly going to waste because it desperately needs adjustment, and that strikes me as a real shame. I understand they are announcing some changes soon, and I hope they’re good ones. This could be a lot of fun if .. it weren’t so much not fun.

So of course right after writing that I end up in a pretty close game. I think we won 501-378 or something.

I’ll be patient because I still like PvP, and I want to get a lot better at it before getting seriously into WvW. I really do wish they’d do something about the shortmanning and AFK issue, though.

The matchmaking in sPVP in this game could be the most dysfunctional thing I’ve ever encountered in PvP in any MMO.

I’m new, and I quite literally have never been in a competitive match. Ever. Every single match ends with the winning team up at least 150 points, and often 200, 300 or even more.

It’s a mess.

Travlane.5948:

they need to have the same risk as thieves do while invis.

No, they don’t. Period.

They are different classes with different mechanics. And you are not going to win anyone to your point of view by continually misstating and exaggerating how mesmers function.

The attitude expressed in this thread that most players are stupid and/or bad at the game is part of why sPVP is underpopulated.

Septave.8042:

(playing around costs money)

The way I deal with this is yellow armor, when possible. You can break it down and get globs of ectoplasm that sell for around the same cost as the armor went, assuming average luck with salvage kits. Unfortunately this only works with some types of armor but it’s a good way of testing some stuff out on the cheap.

messiah.1908:

mesmer can be in stealth for 30 seconds

Over what, a 90 second time frame? And that’s if they spec entirely for that, which means they aren’t going to do much of anything useful.

Thieves can be nearly constantly stealthed without crippling their build. The two are not comparable.

Anyway, not sure what the point of complaining about mesmers is. Not like it’s going to accomplish anything.

Thieves should be made flexible and functional irrespective of how much stealth other classes get.

Feel free to post a video of a duel with a mesmer invis “60% of the time”. That will be a neat trick, since it’s impossible.

Stealth is a secondary ability for mesmers, and only in certain builds. It’s a primary ability for thieves. And as others have said, if mesmer stealth reveals, they might as well just remove it as it would be useless. It’s not a problem for mesmers specifically because their stealth is of very short duration and with long cooldowns.

No, actually the facts are that they are not the same. Use, availability, duration — pretty much everything is different.

Mesmers have very slight stealth abilities and even that is if they build for them. Many mesmer builds use little or no stealth at all. In contrast, many if not most thief builds are designed around stealth and use it heavily.

It’s your word against mathematics.. I’m going with the math, sorry.

Comparing thief to mesmer stealth is pretty hilarious. Anyone who says that mesmers can be in stealth for 60% of a fight just reveals a total lack of understanding of the profession.

Agreed, it would just be a nuisance saver, not anything that really makes them more powerful. No different than your health regenerating between fights.

I play mesmer and thief and am mostly P/D right now. My guess is you just played a very skilled opponent. Thief seems to be a class where outcome depends a lot on player skill.. I’m sure I wouldn’t have beaten you on my P/D thief.

Not sure what your build is but maybe you just need some more condition removal.

It may have seemed like the mesmer was invis for 60% of the battle, but he/she wasn’t unless the battle was a super short one. They just don’t have that many ways to gain stealth.. certainly far fewer than thieves do.

Thief and mesmer is all I’ve played so far. And yes, mesmers are a pain in a lot of ways.

But I spar a lot with people who can absolutely tear me apart. It’s all gameplay experience. With mesmers success depends on learning to read the tells and pick the player out from among the distractions. Practice doing that by watching behavior and even spectating other fights.

No I agree it requires much less skill, and I have no problem admitting that right now that’s what I need.

I prefer the high-risk high-reward backstab playstyle too, but.. I can’t pull it off right now. And I want to also play more the sneaky thief in WvW where the goal is not to fight but to escape.. and high defense with conditions fits better there.

I’m a new player still struggling to get a handle on thief, so what’s “no skill” to you sounds pretty darned good to me.

I’m going to try the 10/0/30/0/30 build again. Right now I’m running an almost entirely defensive 0/0/30/20/20 build, and I’m getting quite accustomed to using PD and DD. When I duel (in sPvP) I rarely beat anyone, but I also rarely get beaten. Even when I do die, it’s because I chose to re-engage after stealthing, rather than running away.

I would like to edge a bit higher on the offense. But my goal with my thief is scouting and ranging in WvW so killing players is secondary.

I do see the value in enhancing steal with 10 in DA and 30 in the Trickery. But the extra health, dodging, initiative recovery and Descent of Shadows in the Acrobatics line, not sure I could give them up.

Maybe I could try 0/0/30/10/30.. the daze on steal and shortened steal recharge do seem really tempting. But man, giving up on 2 extra initiative every 10 seconds and also on more dodge rolls… tough call.

Would you use them over the scavenging runes in the (very nice) build you posted the other day? They’re certainly a lot more expensive.

I’m amazed that this WP issue is still not fixed. Usually the dev team is pretty quick with patches in my limited experience.

Just be prepared to die.. a lot.

Yeah I’d love to hear more about your build phaeris.

Thanks! Does look like a neat idea, though I’m not really looking at zerging all that much.

I could go with dire armor and a condition-based build. Though I was having fun with the mantra build and that’s much more power-based.

Would these runes be good in a PD/DD defensive condition build? Seems like it, and they are pricey but not too pricey.