Guild Wars 2

Kratos.6293:

I don’t see see how running around in circles while phantasms do all the work needs any skill ?

1. You have to figure out when to summon the phantasms.
2. You have to place them. They are susceptible to AoE and not very smart.
3. You have only a few and they have cooldowns.
4. Phantasms aren’t clones, they have unique identifiers so the mesmer is much more easily found than in a clone build.
5. The build is glassy and relies on active defenses. That means you have to use blocks and blurred frenzy, and again, know which to use, when and how.
6. The build is designed for dueling and isn’t great in 1vX, so you also have to know when and how to disengage.

Etc.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Qaelyn.7612:

I’d love to duel you with my bunker engi Pyro. Not because I’m making any claim about beating you, mind, just because I want to practice with it.

As always, just toss me a PM.

For those keeping score, he did beat my engi, though it took him a while. If I were better he might not have been able to (I only hit 80 last week) though it’s an annoying bunker type and I would never have been able to kill him regardless.

I then logged in with my mesmer and he destroyed that pretty easily. Afterwards I tried a different build and I don’t want to talk about that, lol.

I was actually fairly satisfied with the engi given what I made it for and my lack of experience compared to Pyro. I’d be curious to see how a good, more offensive engi would square up against his build.

Thedenofsin.7340:

meichor.7809:

Sensotix have some great new builds (10/30/20/10/0 on youtube), give those a shot, they don’t have weakness against anything and give you great confidence on taking portal while not losing in fight survivability.

I can vouch for this. 10/30/20/10 can out-bunker just about anything 1v1, but it has so little team support that Portal becomes marginally useful. Played right, it’s crazy. The other night I had a condi-mancer repeatedly come to try to drop me on a side-node and couldn’t do it (I had Disenchanter instead of Portal).

Interesting. Anyone have a build editor link for this? I can’t make heads or tails of builds in videos.

I’m also cautious about getting enamored of any condition-based build until we see what Anet does to DE in a few weeks…

Mesmers aren’t OP. Pyro is good.

And I only hit 80 on my engineer last week and even I know that turrets.. well… let’s just say they don’t have a good reputation.

And you challenged him, and said you could beat any mesmer, so why all the whining? Also, this isn’t a “fotm”, it’s from last April.

Next?

I’d love to duel you with my bunker engi Pyro. Not because I’m making any claim about beating you, mind, just because I want to practice with it.

Pyroatheist.9031:

This isn’t exactly true. If you look at the leaderboards for solo queue and team queue, you’ll see that there’s actually quite a lot of overlap in players. While this doesn’t mean there are no differences between the 2, because there are, it does mean that there’s not much of a difference in individual player skill.

Sure there’s some correlation, but there are also major, major differences. You seem to have a ranking in the top 200 on solo queue and yet a very low percentile on team queue. I think this may color your perceptions on their similarity. My leaderboard positions are similar on the two and while the players may be similar in certain respects, there are night-and-day differences in actual gameplay.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Again, maybe it’s because I learned how to fight warriors before they became commonly regarded as gods, but what I said there lines up quite nicely with reality, and all of the best mesmer players I know have similarly few troubles with warriors.

Well there seem to be some pretty good mesmer players here who do. shrug

Pyroatheist.9031:

On the other hand, this is definitely true. While I have no troubles with warriors in a 1 on 1 matchup, they definitely cause large problems in the meta with a wider look. I’m absolutely not disputing that fact. I simply have problems when people start complaining about individual classes and how they can’t fight them or can’t handle them. It’s one thing to say ‘mesmers have no real place in the competitive team PvP meta, and that’s a problem’. It’s an entirely different thing to say ‘I hate how I get destroyed by no-skill people playing classes x, y, and z’. One is a legitimate complaint, the other is not.

But the legitimate complaint is most of what this thread is about. There’s some frustration with respect to 1v1, but that’s because even there warriors are a lot harder to kill than most other classes, even by mesmers. The bad ones, sure, are relatively easy, but the players in this thread are mostly at higher levels and not facing bad ones.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Mesmer is a fun class to use, and can be a fun class to fight against stealth or not. Trickster or not. Quaelyn you and I have had some really fun duels, PU or not, but it wasn’t always that way. At first it was “Ugh this guy’s using PU, toughness gear AND Illusionary Defender in a duel. Win or lose this is gonna be such a drag.” because slowly tearing through defense after defense isn’t as rewarding/engaging as a higher paced more dangerous fight.

I began having fun when I changed my perspective. I told myself “PU is gonna be really prevalent and I needa learn how to counter it. Learn from each of my mistakes and and improve every duel.” and I did. And I began having fun seeing myself grow and get better fight after fight until after that day I never looked at PU Mesmers the same. They were demystified. I knew how to beat them because I had put myself through that exercise but even still… it’s just not nearly as fun as fighting any other build.

Well you have a very good attitude in that respect, which I’ve told you before. But I don’t really see what you’re saying as contradicting what I am, to be honest.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

All the OP was doing, I think, is giving props to the people that haven’t jumped on the PU Bandwagon simply because of how easy it is to use. Hes not saying PU Mesmers don’t deserve respect, but he applauds someone taking the bigger risk of a more engaging build (which is likely being used for a different purpose than the PU build)

Fine. I’ll admit to being a bit touchy about this after being disparaged over my build choice a zillion times. (Mostly not in this subforum, to be clear.)

But he did say he felt PU users were less worthy of respect. So this is not something I entirely imagined.

It doesn’t fail because it’s a PUG event. It fails because it’s a PUG event not balanced for PUGs.

They could have easily avoided this entire mess, and I hope they will next time they do something like this.

It’s the Internet. That above all else.

However, Arenanet deserves much of the criticism for this situation. They created a game that mostly appeals to average players, and then put into it events where average players will fail over 3/4 of the time. Not to mention the OF nonsense.

People get frustrated, and they lash out. They shouldn’t, but they do.

Kajin.5301:

At first when I saw the journals I thought “o my they made errors with the text capitalizing wrong letters”; nice to see it was intentional.

I thought it was some sort of indicator of her madness…

BTW you don’t have to beat the event to get lots of code fragments. Just go to the end of a lane, spam AoE, and you’ll get lots.

Vayne.8563:

So what’s the answer. You bring up a problem but I’m not sure I see a solution to it.

A big part of the solution is simply the developers avoiding the creation of content with flaws that are exacerbated by their own technology. They know how their overflow system works better than we do. So why create a LW event that interacts so incredibly badly with it?

If they can’t fix the overflow system, they should design around it rather than basically design while ignoring it and then force the players to work around it.

Tom Gore.4035:

In my experience the events fail because people have trouble 5-manning a champion.

And part of the failure falls to ANet for allowing lvl 35s in greens and blues to take part in the event.

It’s in a level 35 zone in open world. I think what you really mean is that the failure is creating an event in a place like that where level 35s in greens and blues are a liability.

You know it really depends. I was in an OF earlier where we failed and people were really nice about it.

Ironically, it only takes a couple of nasty people to ruin the atmosphere.. just as it only takes a couple of nasty people to fail the event.

That said.. I STILL think that Arenanet needs to err on the side of a bit too easy rather than a bit too hard, at least until they develop better ability to deal with issues such as OF.

Relshdan.6854:

okay….but there are enough good players to do the event right now….and also by now, many casuals are good enough to do it. unless you want a game that stays “catered to casuals only” i don’t see the problem here. casuals, by nature, will stop playing after too many fails. those that end up figuring it out join the ranks of “good players”. this kind of content actually makes the pool of decent players larger.

Good theory, but hasn’t matched the reality in the tries I’ve made this weekend. shrug

At this point I have stopped worrying too much about winning and just try to get drops. Because my win success rate is about 10%.

Relshdan.6854:

this can happen when you mix difficult content with open world. casuals vs. hardcore.

It’s what happens when a company makes a game that caters to average players, and then puts out a new release where average players fail the event 90% of the time.

Entioch.6594:

^ This is the biggest thing for me, win, lose, doesn’t matter, I haven’t actually enjoyed a fight against a mesmer in a long time.

You’re not supposed to enjoy it. This is the entire point of my personal objection to these sorts of threads.

The mesmer is meant to be an illusionist/mage-trickster class. The mesmer, as the wiki puts it, “confounds, controls, or evokes emotion”. Clones are part of that. Shatter mechanisms are part of that. And yes, stealth is a part of that, which is why we have a half dozen ways of obtaining stealth.

Entioch.6594:

Clearly your intent on making sure PU is well regarded in everyone elses eyes or you wouldnt be here defending it, my advice would be to play what makes you happy and forget everyone else, the odds are pretty good your not going to change anyone elses opinion, just like this certainly hasn’t changed yours.

I’m not going to lose any sleep over someone coming in here and complaining about PU for the 37,275th time. I’m simply calling it what it is, and that it is a complaint. He can couch that as saying he “respects” those who don’t use it, but it’s pretty transparent.

I’m also pushing back against the meme that there’s something wrong about using stealth as a mesmer, because there isn’t. IMO, a mesmer that uses stealth and tries to confuse people into attacking clones is being a lot truer to the idea behind the class than someone who just uses his clones as damage-delivery mechanisms. There’s nothing wrong with playing that way, mind you, but there’s also nothing more “respectable” about it either. And, again IMO, it just makes mesmer into yet another class that tosses damage at people.

And IME, “not fun” is code for “simpler”. Everyone has more fun when they are winning, and again, this is a class that is supposed to be designed to be annoying and tricky rather than direct and simple to deal with. People like the OP prefer mesmers who don’t use stealth because they’re simpler to deal with. (Which, before I get flamed, is not the same thing as “easier to beat”.)

hihey.1075:

Yep, they are less worthy of my respect. Which does not mean that they are not respectful.

It does mean that those objecting to the tone of the thread really were reading it pretty much spot on.

hihey.1075:

This is not a thread complaining about PU. If you see it that way that is only because of the actual state of the mesmer and of any PU build.

No, people are reading it pretty much as it is written. You are saying you respect people who do NOT run that build, which implies somehow that those who do run it are less worthy of respect.

If that’s not what you intended, you should withdraw that comment.

Edited OP to add: I’ve also been told that swapping weapons from the Hero panel works. Have not confirmed personally.

It’s the one with the floating bombs. Which BTW do not have red circles (despite all the mocking comments you get about “kitten , just avoid the red circles”) and the boss also has some sort of one-shot attack.

Boss #3 is too difficult, period. If it were reined in, the event would be a lot better.

As it is, this is an event that is a negative experience for the majority of GW2 players.

hihey.1075:

/respect.

Give me a break.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Well, that’s the thing though. Everyone will have a hard time if they give up mentally before even trying, and that’s what seems to happen.

It may “seem” that way to you, but that doesn’t mean that is what’s actually happening.

Also, you seem to play mostly solo queue. Most of the people in this thread play team queue. They are different worlds in terms of player ability and playstyle, and that also impacts your perceptions.

Pyroatheist.9031:

The mesmer toolset is almost unique designed to counter warriors. Warriors have loads of well telegraphed abilities, rely a lot of long cooldown applications of long duration boons, and don’t have the best in-combat mobility. Mesmer hard-counters each of those with great access to active defense, strong boon stripping, and incredibly good in-combat mobility.

This is another example of theory not meeting up with reality, in which case, I always go with reality. It’s like this marionette event, where people keep telling me “boss #3 is not that hard, just do _” yet 3/4 of the platform failures are on boss #3, sometimes 4 or 5 times in a row. That tells me that there’s a problem with the event, not the people.

And similarly here, there’s a problem with PvP game balance with respect to warriors, which pretty much everyone but Arenanet can glaringly see. That doesn’t mean people “give up mentally”. It means they get frustrated at having to work twice as hard to defeat people as they would on a warrior, and so they express that frustration.

Voodoo.8041:

I have also seen no further then round 3 and it’s very unforgiving. I finally load on platform, see red all over the floor, dodge, still hits me anyway, and I’m downed, there’s no time for anyone to rez, because the floors covered again and I’m dead.

Yes, and then to add insult to injury, you get to listen to idiots in mapchat complain that it’s “your fault” that the event didn’t succeed.

I don’t know if it’s a bug or whatnot but in that third fight I very often find myself downed with no advance warning, no circles, nothing. One time, I zoned in and before I could even hit a key I was downed.

Add to that people who think they’re heroes and are going to solo it without even ressing others, and you get what we have today — an event that could be a lot of fun but isn’t because it’s simply too difficult for average players.

In my last couple of runs I actually saw people avoiding lane 3. There’d be 20+ in lane 1 and 2 and maybe 10 or 15 in 3.

Pyroatheist.9031:

I feel like a lot of people see warriors and just completely give up mentally, don’t even attempt to think about how to counter them or otherwise, when they’re actually very easy to counter on mesmer.

Pyro, you tend to say that pretty much everything is “easy”, which it might be for you, but it obviously isn’t for most others.

I think it also depends on what sort of build you’re running, and at what level you’re playing PvP.

DaShi.1368:

The marionette event is not that difficult. I honestly can’t fathom how people are failing it so consistently.

They are failing due to taking a lot of damage and dying. I mean, really, is this hard to figure out?

The main culprit is boss #3. I routinely am on servers where the first two bosses are taken down in order, and then boss #3 is failed over and over until the event wipes.

That means there is a problem with this fight. Period. I don’t care how many snobs pontificate about how “it’s easy if you just do _” or “lol, just don’t do _”. People are failing it all the time except if they end up in an instance where there’s some very large organized guild or something. And that’s NOT what I thought this game was supposed to be about.

I’m not a moron and I routinely get downed in that fight. So do many other people. All you need is for one platform to get enough people downed that they can’t get back up, and the chain wipes.

And it happens over and over again. So I guess Arenanet wants people to be frustrated and kittened off most of the time, because 90+% of the people I know are stuck in failed instances over 3/4 of the time and it’s frustrating and kittening them off.

OP and Elestian are both right.

ghostwriter.5826:

I think one point some people may underestimate is the probability of failure to severe a chain in the Marionette event. In chat there are often people who just can’t fathom how a lane could have messed up but it’s usually only one or two platforms that lose. Assuming each platform has a 90% chance of beating their champ then the probability of all five platforms succeeding is only 59%. For a 80% base chance (which in itself still looks fairly easy) this would drop to about 32%. Of course, it’s not as simple as that and for the event as a whole the math gets more complex since you can repeat the chain events several times. But my point is that failure to severe a chain is not that unlikely even though the chances for an individual platform to succeed are fairly good.

This is a very good point.

I did a run today where our turn on the platform failed with 4 platforms done and the 5th one busily DPSing the final part down. It counted as a “failure” even though we were literally less than 5 seconds away from doing it successfully.

We failed, so I’m 0/5, but at least it was close and was pretty fun to do. I can deal with that, though I still think the difficulty should be pared down slightly.

Also not happy with how many people are on the map but not participating. If you’re reading this and are idling in LP and not participating in the event, please be considerate and go to a different map or overflow. Thanks.

jboegz.8371:

I think Scarlet’s chest might have the best loot because the cipher is made of less common fragments. I also found a recipe in it for the satchel of zealot exalted armor for tailors from it.

Yeah I wondered about that too, because it’s the only one you can’t get from the spare key pouches.

Well, I’m trying on TC main again. They won last time (while I was in an OF, not winning, lol). Either I’m a bad luck charm or someday I’ll get this.

Ohoni.6057:

A decent number of us love the challenge wurm gives us. We are watching other player’s videos. Talking to other guilds. Bringing in other worlds for help and advice. This is just one boss for us, the people who love the hard work. Seriously. You all have an entire game of content you can do on different skill levels. Let us have wurm.

Ok, fair enough, just remove the specific reward chests from the event, give it standard reward chests identical to the one you can get from the Caledon Wurm, and you can have your event. I’d just prefer in future that they spend their time creating content that is fun for everyone, rather than just the “hardcore.”

Actually here I do have to put in a good word for Arenanet. You do get lots of cypher pieces just from the lane defense portion, so you can still use the chests in the secret lair and have a chance at getting the rare drops even if you fail the event.

Gloomspanner.5920:

Morning is generally a tough time. In the evening is where we really hit our stride. Good luck!

And if I could get into main then, I’d love to. I’m sitting in LP right now on my engineer Qengi if anyone wants to send me an invite hehe…

I was fighting the marionette when suddenly I couldn’t use any skills. Press the button and it flashes but nothing happens. You can still move around, but that’s it.

Asked guildies and they said it’s a known problem. Tried a few things but the only one that worked was getting downed.. after I was rezzed up I was fine.

Thought folks might want to know in case it happens to them.

EDIT: I’ve also been told that swapping weapons from the Hero panel works. Have not confirmed personally.

Gloomspanner.5920:

When you get into the TC main, we generally will have at least 20, if not 25 in each lane. On the rare occasions we don’t, we’ll stack players in 1, 2, and 3 with 15 in 4 and 5. Then lane 1 goes to 4 and 2 goes to five after their portal events. We’ve had multiple occurrences of a “perfect” event (5 for 5 severing chains).

I was in TC main 3 times in a row this morning. The first time we had 20 or so people, fine, it was early. The other two, the map was full but there were people not participating in the event, and all 3 were miserable failures.

I’m trying again in an OF now.

Gloomspanner.5920:

I play on TC myself, and anytime I manage to NOT be in an overflow, we take it down. Perhaps you just had a bad run, but TC takes Mary down on a regular basis.

What are you trying these events?

Well I tried them this morning. I realize that that’s not prime time, but the map was full — couldn’t get party members to join — and I can’t get into main in the evening, so what does that leave?

Frustrating.

I’ve just had the joy of being part of the event and seeing it fail in part because the instance was capped but a big bunch of players in LP refused to help out.

Consider yourselves lucky all you get is a repair bill.

I’m on Tarnished Coast and I love our server.. I really do. But we cannot seem to get our act together for this event. I just did 3 tries over 5 hours spent camping in LP main on TC and all 3 were not just fails but horrible ones: 2/5, 1/5, 2/5.

Are there other servers who have figured this out better where I might guest and have better luck? Otherwise I guess it’s the overflow lottery or just giving up on this.

I’ve now tried it I think 16 times with 1 victory and I’m getting a bit fed up.

Thanks.

phys.7689:

explaining why is fine, but there is no way that all content will appeal to all people.

But people aren’t saying they don’t like the content. They’re saying they like the content but find it too difficult to enjoy. Those are different things.

I started a thread in the LW area complaining about what seemed to be random distribution of players to platforms as opposed to them being distributed evenly. A dev replied saying that players are supposed to be dealt out to each platform “poker dealer style” as I put it.

That is not happening. There are MANY reports of players ending up in boss fight instances with 1 or 2 players on one platform and 5 on another.

I’m posting this here to formally request that this be investigated. It is severely diminishing the enjoyability of the event.

Thanks.

phys.7689:

If you dont like doing this, then dont do it?

The purpose of these forums is to provide feedback to the developers. That’s what people are doing.. explaining WHY they aren’t enjoying the content that supposedly was created for them to enjoy.

phys.7689:

firstly, which event are you talking about here? worm, or marrionette.

Marionette. The wurm is so ridiculous and buggy I have no interest in even trying it until it is fixed and adjusted.

phys.7689:

secondly, what you want is to win. Making the content so that your going to win, essentially means making it easy.

That’s not what I want. I said that ideally it should be challenging but doable a decent percentage of the time.

I am currently at under 10%. Which means over 90% failure. Others have done a bit better but overall, it just sucks to fail all the time. It’s not what I play a game for.

phys.7689:

You think, all content should be made to be beaten by 90% of players, 70% of the time they attempt it even with little forknowledge coordination

Again, stop putting words in people’s mouths. It’s unconstructive and ticks them off.

Though I do think casual players paid the same money for the game that you do and should also be able to benefit from living world content. The wurm is supposed to be for the “hard core”, so why should this be a fail most of the time for everyone else?

I think a good goal to shoot for is 50%, and this event isn’t there.

And now that it’s the weekend, things are actually getting worse on my server, because people who only play weekends are on and so the whole learning curve has to be traversed again.

I was just in a hardcapped main event and we got 1/5 chains done.. so now I have to idle in LP for another 2 hours to have another chance. That’s bad design.

I’m at about 1 in 15 so far.

I think what some people forget is that this is a game. It’s supposed to be challenging, but really, many of us use it as escape from real life, and failing 75%+ of the time is not fun. If I want to fail to that degree, I’ll try to get my kids to clean their rooms.

Okay the Arenanet tag on this thread caused it to explode beyond my imagining and I can’t reply to it all. But I did want to respond to Josh.

Josh Foreman.8250:

In the never ending quest to improve our design and find ways to please as many people as possible we’re always digging into constructive criticism. We have not perfected the recipe for an open world boss event, probably because we’re pioneering new territory here.

And I think that’s great. Honestly. I really like the premise here, and the fight itself is cool.

Josh Foreman.8250:

As far as I can tell there are a couple challenges we are trying to overcome. First, we are trying to teach the community a new skill: self organization. And I’m happy to see that in the aggregate, they ARE learning. I’m sure as this process continues we will find better ways to accommodate the communication structures that will emerge.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Secondly, from both a technical and player-experience perspective, it’s best to break up zergs as much as possible. Thematically keeping everyone feeling like they are contributing to a common cause from multiple locations, and still feel heroic is an interesting challenge to balance. Always looking for new ideas on this issue!

I think you’re close, but this is still too difficult. I’ve now done it a total of 15 times or so, and succeeded once. That one time was because I played hookey from my work (I’m self-employed so no raspberries) and did it at 9 am on a weekday and was able to get into TC main. People with jobs and school can’t do that.

And even getting into main is now guarantee. Tried it again just now and we failed.. miserably.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Having 5 on one platform and 1 on another could only be a very edge case requiring several people to drop out at the right moment. Our script does exactly what you said, poker dealer style.

I’m glad to hear that, but with respect, I think you guys really need to get out on the servers and see what’s going on. Because at least 50% of the time I do this, I hear someone complain about mismatches in numbers on the platforms. I’m sure some of them are mistakes or exaggerations, but some are legitimate and I’ve seen it once or twice myself.

Josh Foreman.8250:

We tried really hard to get this in. Every solution we came up with had technical constraints.

Okay, I can understand that happening.

Josh Foreman.8250:

The timers and mob HP were balanced and rebalanced several times in an attempt to find a sweet spot that would ensure people couldn’t faceroll the event, but wasn’t so difficult that no one could do it. Everyone’s mileage will vary. And as with any group activity, virtual or real life, there is luck inherent in that. Some people hate that dynamic and some love it. If someone has an idea about how to ameliorate the inherent luck factor in group events, please speak up!

I still think the difficulty is too high, and that’s exacerbated by the OF problem. If I try to do this during prime time, I’m pretty much guaranteed a fail unless I can get a taxi to a full map. That’s really pretty awful.

Challenge is good, but it’s important to remember that this is a game. For most of us, real life is itself a challenge, and we play a game to have fun. Losing is not fun. Winning by a LOT is not fun either, but really, most people I have talked to have had experiences similar to mine: mostly fails. And it’s been the better part of a week on something that only lasts 2 weeks.

Josh Foreman.8250:

I know there are people working on various solutions to this problem.

Glad to hear it, but that sounds months off. You guys need to take into account the OF chaos when you design these events. This one is too dependent on having a full map for success in a system where the average player has limited control over that.

Josh Foreman.8250:

It scales quite a bit. The more people there are in a lane will change the number of vets and champs that spawn, and the platform boss’s HP scales based on how many end up on the platform.

It’s not scaling enough, IMO. Because there are still too many failures, especially in maps that aren’t cram-packed, and that’s the real test.

Again I appreciate you taking the time to reply to my concerns/complaints/suggestions.

In other words “the best defense is a good offense”, a famous line and often true. Here also, you’re right. I take that approach somewhat with my mesmer.

But this was actually more offensively oriented than I originally planned. I think the test I gave it was a poor one because:

1. It’s designed to work with a group of 5 to 10 and last night half my guild was elsewhere so it was more like 3 of us.
2. It was reset night, where the particular opponents we faced always come out gangbusters and we seemed to always be in mismatched fights.

But I still thought I was missing the backback regenerator and automated response in particular. So I made a PvP version of your Medic Engineer to test out.. 10/0/30/30/0, melandru runes, sigil of energy, cleric amulet. Even with not much experience, I found it took half the other team to bring me down… which is exactly what I’m looking for.

Of course WvW is different but I still think this will work well for me, so I’m going to basically steal your build and tweak it a bit. (Not sure I want to spend 25g on runes that may change in a few weeks, for one thing.)

Thanks for the reply, appreciate it.

This is a build intended for WvW roaming. Both WvW and PvP are player-player combat, and PvP is a great way to try out builds and get used to classes because you can swap gear for free, but there are important differences between them.

This is a much more offense-oriented build than Blackwater. You might be interested in my sPvP hybrid, which is sort of between this and Blackwater and I think decent for PvP. I’ll post it up tomorrow.

Thedenofsin.7340:

I’d qualify that. Shatter mesmers counter warriors. Phantasm mesmers don’t really do enough damage before they are killed to threaten warriors.

Well, depends on the level of play I suppose.. but in my middling position on the leaderboards I kill far more warriors in 1v1s on my phantasm/PU hybrid than the other way around.

Yeah before I read that I had already bought some stuff to try out. Went with apothecary armor, runes of altruism and cleric trinkets. Just yellow stuff since I’m tinkering.

Went into WvW with my 30/0/30/10/0 build and, well, it’s not working for me. At all. I rarely use the grenades anyway, since they have a ridiculously long lead time. And I’m dying much faster than I want when I’m outnumbered… I don’t expect to win a 1v3 but I’d like to at least have a chance to escape.

So back to the drawing board. :/ Going to return to 10/0/30/30/0, and go with a much of cleric and soldiers. With rifle. And maybe also use a slot for Elixir S or something as I really seem to have no way of escaping when I’m overwhelmed.

Or maybe just go condition like everyone keeps telling me with something like ellesee’s build: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/external?l=http%3A%2F%2Fgw2skills.net%2Feditor%2F%3FfcAQJAqelIq6ZX3SyF17IRoH2%2F%2BqV0D9bZH%2FpgcB-j0BB4gBkWAk%2BAI%2FsIaslRFRjVPjIqWfETKAmkGB-w

Meh, I spend too much time trying to figure out builds.

Yep, very valid point. And I do still plan to use those condition-dealers too.

I may just get a set of apothecary and a set of cleric, and try them both and see which I like better.. and also try a mix.

I forgot that celestial requires high-level crafting, which I don’t have (and don’t want to spend the $ on right now.)

Oops, Louk I’m sorry I didn’t mean to take over your thread. I’ll confine further replies to mine.

I’ve found so far that I enjoy being in dungeon-sized groups and also slightly larger ones. For example, I’ve been using my healing bombs to great effect in the “lane defense” portion of the marionette fight, and also on the platforms. I want my healing power high to keep that utility up.

I have little interest in 30v30 WvW zergs. Too much chaos and don’t feel like I make much of a difference.

The only real question is basically apothecary versus cleric. There are so many different factors to take into account, and engineers seem to do so well with both power and CD, that I’m almost thinking I’m better off going with both and just having a little of each, with a bit of vitality added somewhere (maybe a shaman or carrion weapon).

Weapon choice then becomes the big thing. I’d always used P/S but the rifle is growing on me especially for the nice immobilize on #2. If I go conditions though P/P seems the way to go.

I’m currently planning on not going full defense, rather 30/0/30/10/0.

Thanks!

Right, I understand the 1v3 damage equation. But in my theorycrafting it seems that power by itself does almost as much damage with bombs/grenades as condition damage.

It may be that I’m not working armor into that equation sufficiently, though.

I think there are also some diminishing returns to work into this though. I’m going to have like 1300 power to begin with, which means I need another 1300 to double that. But if my condition damage is near 0, I only need 850 to double that (except for burning).

But on the Nth hand.. I have to take into account the fact that I spam #1 bomb/grenade 10x as much as the ones that apply conditions. That’s the real trump card for going power on a bomb build I think.