All you need is to make Confounding Suggestions require an interrupt to proc the stun (otherwise, you just get the longer-duration daze).
When not stunned, mirror blade is super easy to dodge. Even if the mesmer stealth opens on you, you can usually dodge after the first bounce. The only exception is if the mesmer is literally inside your hitbox.
The reason burst on mes feels out of control is because the guaranteed instant-stun from CS+MOD makes it super easy for mesmers to land the burst. The best solution to this is to remove the guaranteed instant-stun, and to instead hook it onto something that requires skill and has counterplay. Simply increasing the ICD won’t change anything, because the mesmer only needs 1 stun burst to wreck you.
Once you take away the guaranteed instant-cast stun, mesmer goes back to being the class with the huge-but-predictable burst.
Also, I’m not sure mental anguish needs any nerfing. Power block already beats it out in PvP, and I don’t think mesmer damage is a problem in PvE.
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Mes vs Thief is pretty even now if the thief is any good, as long as the thief can LOS or stealth-disengage after baiting out the first distortion.
The risk/reward on the Overloads are way off.
For example: Channeling the Water Overload is a huge risk. You have to stay in water for a minimum of 10 seconds to go through the overload (5s to gain access to overload, another 5s channel). And during the second half of it, you’re stuck in a channeling animation (no dodging!). What do you get if you manage to pull it off? A tiny bit more healing than the healing ripple you get just from swapping into water.
You’re better off swapping out of water immediately, using all your other skills and dodging attacks etc., and then swapping back into water 10s later for soothing mist + healing ripple + water EA, which together heals for more than a Water Overload. Doing a Water Overload gives you less burst healing, less overall healing, less damage (b/c you’re channeling rather than attacking), and makes you more vulnerable to incoming damage (b/c you can’t dodge while channeling). There is no sane reason why you would ever want to overload water.
The fire and air overloads have similar problems, in that you’d do more damage and build up more might just cycling through your normal rotations.
I think they need to tweak the Overload numbers, reduce the channeling time by a second or two, and remove the requirement where you have to stay in an attunement for 5s before gaining access to the overload. Otherwise, I only see this being useful in PvE content or as a gimmicky WvW frontline blobbing build. Any skill above a 2-second cast time is already super easy to interrupt / escape from. A 5 second channel is just crazy.
I’m a little concerned that the fire and water overloads will actually be a net DPS/healing loss in PvP compared to what you’d achieve through the regular d/d or d/f rotations. Of course, this all depends on how the numbers come out in the final build. But currently, the numbers are pretty underwhelming.
For example, you have to be in fire for 5s to gain access to the fire overload, another 5s to channel it, and then after you overload you’re locked out of fire for 20s untraited. By channeling the overload, you take out about 1/2 of a heavy golem’s HP (using a cele amulet), and then the residual cyclone takes out the remainder of the golem’s HP (and a human player likely would not stand in the residual cyclone). You also gain ~11 stacks of might. Afterwards, you’re locked out of fire and are stuck w/ air autos for damage. So in 30s, you’ll get 1 burning speed, 1 drake’s breath, 1 fire grab, the Fire Overload, and then air autos to fill in most of the rest for damage.
In comparison, the current meta F/W/Arc build would have gone through ~3 burning speeds, 3 drake’s breaths, and 3 rings of fire in that amount of time, with air autos filling in most of the remaining damage. Going through this rotation also let’s you maintain ~15-20 stacks of might. So you have to weigh the value of the fire overload against getting an extra 2 burning speeds, 2 drake’s breaths, 2 rings of fire, plus some extra might. Using a celestial amulet, a burning speed + drake’s breath + ring of fire alone will kill a heavy golem once you’ve built up some might stacks. So by overloading fire, you do overall less than 1/2 the damage you’d have done just going through your regular rotation.
Also, overloading fire severely messes up the mightstacking rotation for two reasons. First, you can’t use the earth EA dodge, focus/dagger earth 4, dagger water3, etc. blast finishers, because you need to stay in fire if you want to channel the overload. Second, locking you out of fire takes away your fire fields for quite some time (as discussed above). You get ~11 might stacks just activating the fire overload, compared to the ~20 you can maintain going through the default d/d rotations.
So unless the overload fire does enough damage to severely cripple your opponent, you’re almost always better off going through your regular rotations. And right now, fire overload doesn’t appear to have the potential for that amount of damage. Based on the current numbers, it seems like the only time Fire Overload would do more damage than a baseline rotation is if you stood right on top of your opponent in a fire field while using the fire overload for the whirl finishers to stack up burning.
The Water Overload has a similar problem. Compare the huge healing you get from healing ripple, soothing mist, and EA water every 10 seconds vs. the healing you can get from water overload every 20s. The healing ripple + soothing mist + EA water is also uninterruptable and nearly instant, while the healing from water overload takes ~5 seconds and can be interrupted.
The earth overload, on the other hand, offers something truly unique in the form of a break bar, which I can see being really helpful for kiting.
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Just make it so CS only stuns on interrupt (otherwise, you get a longer-duration daze). That will get rid of the super-easy burst setups that mesmers have. Stealth openers still remain, but they’re on a much longer CD than MoD. And unless the mesmer is point blank, you can still see the mirror blade or ileap coming and dodge it.
I dislike this suggestion, mostly be because I don’t feel like every single lockdown-oriented trait shouldn’t simply be “on-interrupt.” I’d rather see CS moved up to compete with power block again.
And people are jumping to extremes left and right here. I think for most people this isn’t about good players vs bad players; this is about the average player. And this isn’t about being the underdog, though that WAS an allure, I highly doubt the majority of players picked Mesmer specifically because of that. (I personally don’t know of anyone who has)
Games in general are fun because they challenge you. Chess wouldn’t be interesting if one player had a queen that could move in figure 8s and wipe out anyone in her path. Gameshark is only cool for a little while before all your cheat codes start to get boring because the entire game is trivialized.
Shatter and lockdown feel like that right now. And no, it’s not because “of course if you’ve been playing mes so long you feel like a god” nor is it “Mesmer Stockholm syndrome” or whatever else you want to come up with to explaiin away the fact that a 1-week Mesmer can absolutely dominate most of their PvP games.
Helseth and the Abjured make money from this game, so yeah they play to win. The rest of us play because we enjoy the game and particularly enjoy the class/build we run. In truth we’re not playing to win, we’re playing for the thrill. And no, that doesn’t mean you have to jump to the entire opposite end of the spectrum with “is losing fun?”
The fact is there is a wide gray area between playing competitively and screwing around, and that’s where most of us stand. The majority of Mesmers are playing an overpowered build, and it’s really hard to justify playing anything else.
I’m in that wide gray area myself, and part of the fun for me is learning to adapt to new challenges, including facing the new hybrid lockdown/shatter builds.
Regarding your point about lockdown builds relying too much on “on interrupt traits,” keep in mind that CS also increases the duration of your dazes. So there’s value in the trait for a lockdown build even if you aren’t interrupting someone. If the value is too low, then you could consider increasing the daze duration increase at the cost of making the stun effect proc only on interrupts.
But as it stands, having an instant-cast 1.2k range AOE stuns is pretty crazy. Mesmer burst was always crazy, but it was balanced around the setup time. The guaranteed stun from CS nearly eliminates this setup requirement. My suggestion addresses your concerns about 1-week mesmers roflstomping everyone, because they won’t have the guaranteed stun anymore. But at higher levels of play, mesmers will still be able to use CS reactively to set up bursts.
Just make it so CS only stuns on interrupt (otherwise, you get a longer-duration daze). That will get rid of the super-easy burst setups that mesmers have. Stealth openers still remain, but they’re on a much longer CD than MoD. And unless the mesmer is point blank, you can still see the mirror blade or ileap coming and dodge it.
Just comparing thief stealth vs. mesmer stealth isn’t very informative, because thief doesn’t have to stealth to disengage. Thief can just SB5 away and re-engage before mesmer’s longer CDs have reset. Also, if you just want to compare stealth, keep in mind that a lot of the thief’s stealth is initiative-based, which means it’s on a lower cooldown in the long run. For example, BP+HS3x is effectively on a ~12s cooldown w/ shadow rejuv. Mesmer might be able to get longer stealth in the short term by popping decoy, torch4, and mass invis, but that leaves the mesmer w/o any stealth for the next ~40s.
Thieves plainly don’t hardcounter mesmers anymore. But I don’t see why that’s a problem, especially since thieves have superior mobility.
All in all, a good thief who knows how to bait out MoDs, or has the muscle memory to negate an MoD burst (such as by quickly mugging the mesmer to interrupt GS2 + apply weakness) still does really well against mesmers. I’d say it’s 50/50 w/o LOS.
And if there is a lot of room for LOSing / disengaging, then thief gets a slight advantage because the thief won’t even have to burn multiple stealths to counter PU torch4 — the thief can just port out of range of an effective burst, wait until torch4 timing has run a few seconds, and then go into counter-stealth.
To be sure, mesmer does completely wreck lower-level thieves who aren’t good at baiting MoD and don’t have the muscle memory to quickly negate an MoD burst. The problem is pretty much every mesmer, even newer players, can easily MoD + mirror blade + GS3 + mind wrack. So at lower levels between equally skilled players, it’ll look like the mesmer is just bullying the thief around. I definitely sympathize w/ the OP when I see these kinds of duels. The confounding suggestions trait is the main culprit here. But when I watch higher-level people fight, the fights are definitely way more even.
One example
I came across this vid on the warrior forum yesterday. Montage of duels this war has with the new build he’s adopted post patch. Final fights are vs a standard shatter mes setup run by a relatively average mes (link starts at mes fight). This war is running duel melee.
Not sure if that video provides much insight. The shatter mes in this video appeared to be burning almost every dodge off cooldown just to move faster. He’d backpedal away from the warrior, realize that backpedaling is too slow, and then just dodge backwards twice. Never used shatters to blind the warrior’s burst skills, shield bash, or rush. The warrior’s strategy of 24/7 offense worked well because this mesmer did not know how to kite or mitigate damage at all.
In my experience, the better “duel” strategy vs mesmers when you’re running a semi-survivable class is to play defensively and juke/kite with LOS until the mesmer is either down to 1 MoD or out of MoD charges. Then again, I’m just speaking anecdotally ankitten ot esports so others’ opinions may differ.
Back on the OP’s topic, I don’t find mesmer duels boiling down to luck. It’s more about who has better timing, CD management, and is better at baiting MoDs. I wouldn’t assume that someone who’s played mesmer half as long as you is necessarily worse. Especially if you’ve played a ton, because that means someone who’s played half as long as you might still have a lot of experience. I’ve also found that people who take the time to learn how to play all of the classes tend to perform better at duels than people who solely play just one class.
^^ hes right you know, Ele has everything, so there wasn’t really anything purely and totally new that an elite spec could offer, and its cool that its offering a way to be viable without being a skill rotation bot machine.
He’s not right. Ele lacks a strong burst build that isn’t completely outclassed by thief and mesmer. (I can count on one hand the number of times fresh air has been run in a tournament, and in every instance the fresh air ele was a complete liability to the team).
Then again, it’s too early to say whether tempest will be good or not. Maybe the tempest traits will allow for a new burst build. Too early to tell.
L2P meta. You can’t just rely on passive tankiness to survive anymore. You also have to manage your active defenses to stay alive. Fights are overall more exciting to play and to spectate than the previous iterations of Bunker Wars.
Yes, some specific aspects need to be adjusted, like Confounding Suggestions giving mesmers a guaranteed instant-cast stun, which makes the burst very difficult to dodge. Stealth openers also need to be looked at.
But overall, DPS being high has been a positive.
@ Sirbeaumerdier
A risk of the build you identified is lack of condi removal. Meaning that a burnguard / cele-ele will wreck the mes, and any class with reliable access to weakness would be able to mitigate a lot of the damage.
Going dom/duel/insp flips that around and gives mes great (aoe) condi removal, but then you lose out on the PU and CD reduction on blink, which makes the mes less slippery.
The only big issue w/ mes right now is that CS+MOD makes it too easy to land a big burst.
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You sure he wasn’t running elixir B?
The profession as is, has next to no risk at all since it can bail at any moment without the opponent being able to do much about it while maintaining huge burst every 15 secs and stuns nearly on demand. This is not my definition of “challenging”.
That’s three distinct builds you just described.
“Huge burst every 15s” = Power Shatter mesmer
“Bail at any moment without the opponent being able to do much about it” = PU Mesmer
“Stuns nearly on demand” = Lockdown mesmerSome people mix and match between those a bit, but you don’t get to have all three at once.
Dom/Duel/Chaos with PU + Confounding Suggestions.
“Big burst every 15s” = MOD + Mirrorblade + Mindwrack + Mindstab
PU = PU
“Stuns nearly on demand” = MOD + CS
What you should have pointed out is that this build lacks condi removal. Applying weakness will neuter both its burst and sustained damage, and applying a few stacks of burning = easy kill. So it boils down to how good the mesmer is at kiting / avoiding getting hit by condi attacks vs. how good the other player is at LOSing and baiting out CDs.
The main issue with CS is that it gives you a nearly guaranteed burst, because it is an instant-cast 1.2k range stun, and you can cast it while casting mirror blade. And given mesmer’s damage, you really only need to pull this combo off once in a fight to either win outright or at least force the guy to pop a cooldown and flee.
Upping the ICD to 10s isn’t going to change any of the above, except that really bad mesmers who spam MOD off CD will be punished a little bit more.
I think the better change is to make CS apply a stun only on interrupts. This would make it a weaker version of CI, which is fair considering CS is an adept trait and doesn’t require you speccing into a different trait line. If you go dom/duel/chaos for CI, then you’re going to have little-to-no condi cleanse and no PU — but you’ll be stronger at lockdown. If you go dom/duel/insp, then you get more survivability and can take CS for less lockdown potential.
Nah I just have a disease were when someone says PU and Lockdown in the same sentence I stop reading. Since you know the two can’t be taken at the same time.
That and whenever PU is taken in a PvP setting and people complain after the entire Mesmer community has pretty much reached a consensus something needs to be done about it is rather silly. If you’re fighting a PU Mesmer they gave up a lot of potential burst so it’s just a troll way to go in PvP. It’s nothing that’s necessarily OP.
You can run PU and lockdown now. Confounding Suggestions + PU.
Pre-patch, i.e. before buff to CS, you needed CI’s immobilize-on-interrupt to set up your bursts. Without CI, your opponent would only be dazed, and he’d still be able to dodge to avoid your follow-up burst. CI was one of the major traits that defined most lockdown builds.
But now that CS has been buffed to a 100% stun and moved to adept, you don’t really need CI. Dazing your opponent will stun him, which prevents him from dodging, which means you can usually land your burst.
Of course, CI still offers advantages, since you can’t stunbreak an immobilize, and the CI immobilize lasts longer. But you don’t really need it anymore to run a lockdown build. CS + Power Block is enough.
I think mes just needs some slight shaving in the following way:
(1) Confounding Suggestions: Daze converts to a stun only if you interrupt a skill.
Reasoning: Right now, CS synergizes with MoD too well. You can instant-cast MoD while bursting, and CS will convert the MoD into a stun which virtually guarantees that your burst will land. Since MoD is instantcast and will always proc the stun (aside from ICD), there’s little skill required from the mesmer, and little counterplay from the opponent. Tying it to stun-on-interrupt would increase the skill required from the mesmer. It would also give more value to the other portion of the trait, which is to increase daze duration.
(2) Fix Blinding Dissipation so it doesn’t go through evades. I think this is more of a bug fix — I doubt anyone would disagree here.
(3) Reduce PU uptime to 50% (you could increase boon gain to compensate if necessary). As a general rule, I don’t think traits that promote stealth-camping are good for the game. Small duration stealths allow interesting repositioning, and allow for more counterplay because you can predict what someone will do with his limited invisibility time. A lot of that goes out the window when you can stealth for 6+ seconds.
(4) Revert +15% phantasm damage being made baseline. You could increase the Dom adept phantasm damage trait to compensate for people who want to run phantasm builds.
All I see is how broken Confounding Suggestion is when you combine it with Chaos Storm and Mentra of disruption. It’s just infinite lockdown + guaranteed successful burst. It really need to have an ICD of 5 second.
Why can’t Anet understand, and keep on over-nerfing the wrong stuff when the real broken stuffs are so obvious? Why do Anet keep on favoring Mesmer and Ele no end?
So you think Confounding Suggestions would be balanced if it had an ICD of 5 seconds?
Hint, before you answer, do some basic research. This hint applies to most things in life.
Shoot for the sake of balance a zerker class should kill anyone after 2 mins of just auto attacks.
Try rolling a fresh air ele. Your autoattacks literally will not barely outdamage the healing signet on a soldier/valk/celestial warrior. If the warrior is using shoutheals, then even auto + lightning attune swapping will take forever.
But I do think the current bruiser ele just has a ton of passive defense, and I had made several posts predicting this before the spec changes hit. Zerker ele continues to fall behind, while bruiser/tank ele gets even tankier and easier to play.
P.S. I think the ranger in the video would have killed the ele if he coordinated his F2 beastly warden w/ rapid fire, rather than spamming each off cooldown.
Here is what I think needs to be done…
8-9 second CD on blinding ashes( Allow a per target cd on blinding ashes instead of an ICD)Ring of Earth no longer blocks projectiles if it does NOT land on a target
Regen duration slightly reduced (remove regen from soothing ice?)
Burning condition re-scaled across the board
Diamond skin reworked
Obsidian flesh CD slightly increased.
Drakes breath and Fire grab re-scaled so that drakes breath hits less hard and fire grab hits much harder. (its much harder to land a Fire Grab than drakes breath, and right now in some circumstances Drakes Breath hits just as hard as a fire grab if the full channel lands and burns are not cleansed, the CD on drakes breath is also very short while fire grab is a very long CD. It makes more sense to me for being heavily rewarded for landing a fire grab with a burn applied opposed to being heavily rewarded for spamming drakes breath)
…Would also be nice to get something a little more reliable than churning earth, that skill is almost a waste time now with how great the burning condition is. I have never been a fan of Churning Earth.
Ring of Earth: So you want a skill to block projectiles in melee range? Do you not understand how the logic fails in that completely? If I want to block projectiles, most likely my target won’t be standing at my feet.
Perhaps, I was also considering how mobile the Elementalist is though. I never said my ideas were perfect, that is why we are discussing them.
Again, Soothing ice gives you 800 heal from the regeneration in 20 seconds. Do you think that would actually do something?
One less condition removed + potential downtime for regen, consider boon removal
Obsidian Flesh cooldown is completely fine and should not be increased, there’s seriously no reason to do so. A horrible idea.
With Geomancer’s Training the CD on Obsidian Flesh is reduced to ~33 seconds, and magnetic wave reduced to 16 seconds. I think a cd this short for a skill so powerful is a little too strong, a 40 second cd with geomancer’s trait in mind seems reasonable to me. thats 10 more seconds added to the ability with no trait and ~7 more with trait.
If you take Geomancer’s training, that means you’re probably Earth/Water/Arcana, which means you’ll do negligible damage. It also means you’re running focus offhand, rather than OH dagger, so you lose updraft for throwing people off point. So basically you’ll be able to hold points already in your control, and will take forever decapping.
I’m curious how the test would turn out if the Ranger timed his rapid fire with Taunt, rather than spamming RF and F2 off cooldown. The ele just has armor of earth on a 60s CD to deal with the taunt. After that, you’d just get a full, guaranteed rapid fire off every ~16s (with owl).
Also, I’d be interested in hearing about ways to reduce survivability on bunker/celestial D/D or D/F without making Fresh Air builds even worse than they already are.
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You’re still wrong. MM requires that the player manage his minions and control his opponent’s movements so that the minions don’t spend the entire fight kitten ing around. The class also has terrible mobility, which means the player needs to have good map and rotational awareness to be at the right spot at the right time. You can easily spot the difference between good MM players and bad ones.
Despite your protestations to the contrary, it really is about what class you play (thief) and your inability to beat them. Otherwise, you’d realize that the class isn’t as braindead as you claim, and that it serves a specific role, which is to prevent you from solo decapping a point. It only seems “braindead” to you because the build counters yours, so you feel helpless.
The funny thing about the power of the interrupt mesmer is that it was powerful even before the patch, it’s just that no one wanted to play it because reasons. I’m sure when they fix confounding, it will go back to obscurity when really it’s one of THE most powerful builds of the Mesmer.
BAck then interrupt mesmers didn’t really have shatters to back them down. Now its shatter combination with interrupt, and daze mantra literally stops you from dodging. So basically with 3 skills, Gs2, daze, and mind wreck, you are already able to 1 shot other zerkers. Daze mantra can also be activated in stealth. You tell me How i can dodge that
You can’t. Confounding suggestions is definitely the culprit but I’ve seen some Eles, take them on and come out on top.
And that combo you just said, mesmers could totally do that before, it’s just squishies are squisher now and bunkers are bunkier now.
So basically you are saying that those combos have no counter yet they are fine? I don’t see how that is balanced and having a few people able to grasp a win or two doesn’t make it fine imo
I’m saying….. it’s funny how the community swings just because of an update.
To be fair, the update changed a lot for mes, the present combo wasn’t really possible before. Pre-patch, mesmers could not grab CS without giving up DE or IP, which no one would do. CS also wasn’t a guaranteed stun.
The only other way to get an instant “stun” out of MOD would be to grab CI from Chaos (so you get daze + immob), but that meant giving up IP and Illusionary Elasticity. Giving up both IP and Elasticity severely reduces the amount of damage you get from a point blank mirrorblade+mindwrack combo.
MoD is definitely really strong when combined with Confounding Suggestions. You can try to bait out the MoD by starting a long-channel skill and then immediately dodging.
Otherwise, I think it’s more productive to focus on timing the mind wracks (12s CD, plus you can see the setup) rather than the MoD. Even if MoD is on a lower, 5s CD, if the mesmer’s mind wrack isn’t up then he’s not going to be doing as much damage. The exception is if he MoDs right next to you for the mirrorblade, but you can see that coming (since he’ll be moving right next to you), so you can just pre-emptively blind/block/dodge/whatever.
If he does the blink/stealth opener to do a point-blank MoD + Mirror Blade, then he’s burned a long CD utility so you’re not at a loss by using one of your stunbreaks.
Once the mesmer has used both his MoD charges, you can pressure really hard and abuse the mesmer’s low sustain.
But it’s pretty hard to give specific advice without knowing what build you’re running. If you want a really easy fight, just run burnguard. One instantcast judge’s intervention and a ranged Purging Flames on the mesmer will put on enough burning to almost guarantee a down on a Dom/Duel/Chaos mesmer.
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The only fix they need is to make SE clear a condi on the first tick of stealth (as it did before), rather than after 3 seconds. Otherwise, making SE clear damaging conditions only (except fear) is fine.
The purpose of the SE change was to give more counterplay to stealth. Now as a thief you have to dodge attacks that apply weakness or immob before you stealth, otherwise it will mess up your burst. With the old SE, it didn’t really matter because stealth would clear those conditions for you.
Plus, you still have Withdraw to clear immob.
Too many thieves in this thread relied 100% on stealth, and complain now that it’s less effective. If you think stealth is the thief’s only defense, then you don’t know how to play thief. D/P thieves have excellent access to blinds (shadowshot), interrupts (headshot + sleight of hand), repositioning (sb5), and evades (bountiful theft + sb3 + withdraw). S/D has excellent mobility w/ Infiltrator’s Strike and evades w/ Flanking Strike. Learn to use those skills to avoid/mitigate your opponent’s main attacks. For example, blind the engy’s blowtorch, or the necro’s dagger3 immobilize, or quickly swap to SB5 to reposition yourself when you fail to dodge the immobilize. Stop instinctively dropping into stealth and trying to reset everytime you forget to use one of your ample damage-mitigating skills.
Stealth is not the thief’s only form of defense. If you think it is, then you’ve just grown to rely on it too much and neglected developing other aspects of your play.
OP, your zerker thief isn’t meant to be able to beat every single build 1v1.
MM necro is a solo-bunkerish build that is weak in teamfights. Its sole purpose is to contest a point in a 1v1 / 2v2 setting. The build has plenty of counters, such as kiting around the AI (you can just hop up a ledge, then hop back down, then hop back up, etc. and the minions will run around forever), or AOEing the minions. Or, if you already have the point, you can just run in a big circle and dodge the Dagger3 (immobilize) so you barely take any damage and continue to let the points tick in your favor.
How can you beat mesmers post patch?
You gotta hope that it is just one of those fotm rerollers that have no idea what they are doing
Or you just need a good thief…braindead ones spamming hs and shadow shot don’t work anymore
surprisingly, from a Mesmer PU discussion thread, someone mentioned thieves still own Mesmers hard in higher tier PvP tournaments:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Opinions-on-PU/page/2#post5240402
Any high ranking thief / Mesmer can confirm that’s true?
Think of it this way. Who gets the drop on who, putting who on the back foot first?
Also: Consume Plasma was never nerfed :p
In a straight up 1v1, I’ve found that chaos/dom/dueling mesmer has the upper hand over d/p thief by a pretty sizeable margin. The only time I end up losing to a thief in a 1v1 right now is if I whiff both my MODs and eat the initial steal, which is a pretty large margin of error. But you definitely notice skill differences in thieves a lot more now. The good ones that know when to dodge and shadowshot continue to be a pain in the butt. And all the bad thieves that just BP+HS+backstabbed continue to die like they did before the patch — nothing has really changed for them.
But in a teamfight scenario, the thief will generally be able to get the jump on the mesmer. Being able to open with steal to apply weakness really screws the mesmer over for the first few seconds, and if the thief crits with the backstab, that’s usually enough to trigger panic strike, which means the mes will need to burn distortion or a blink (or a blurred frenzy if the thief didn’t have venom active). Once the mesmer’s burned his cooldowns, he becomes a much easier target for the thief’s team (or from a follow-up attack from the thief).
Consume plasma also gives the thief immunity to interrupts from the mesmer, and can be applied twice per steal w/ improvisation.
I think one adjustment a lot of thieves will need to make is to not open with basivenom + mug + bp-hs / backstab. A lot of mesmers take mirror anguish in chaos now, which will cause the thief to also stun himself (thus interrupting his whole combo and wasting all those skills). It’s much better now to just open with mug (so you and the mesmer both get dazed), and then to apply venom on the next stealth attack.
I think all that needs to be done is that summoning a phantasm should count as a regular attack (i.e. break stealth + apply revealed).
And blocking/blinding/dodging an attack should also cause the attacker to drop out of stealth (but without the revealed debuff).
Fresh air S/F zerker is great for 1v1ing mediocre players. Better players know to dodge the lightning flash + phoenix combo and to kite when obsidian flesh is up.
Fresh air s/f has always had the same two issues holding it back from high-level play: all your defense is on fairly long cooldowns (obsidian flesh, arcane shield, lightning flash), and you rely on landing targeted bursts to do damage because your sustained damage is terrible. Zoose tried running fresh air in one of the World Series tourneys once and spent most of the game running away or eating dirt. I don’t think we’ve seen any other WTS teams run fresh air.
Scepter is definitely “viable,” but it’s far from optimal. The sustained damage is simply too low.
In Conquest, the main issue w/ PvP is it makes your stealth skills last long enough that you can stealth from outside the enemy’s LOS, and then walk up to him for a nearly-instant mirrorblade-mod-gs3-mind wrack burst, which is enough to instagib zerker builds and do heavy damage to other builds.
However, in higher ranked games, PU seems to be necessary for mesmer to survive. If you watch the latest ESL, the mesmers on both teams were still getting farmed by thieves even with PU. But against anything less than a coordinated team, PU gives mesmers a crazy amount of survivability.
When we’re talking about WvW, I don’t really mind PU, except for the mesmers who take Dom/Chaos/Illusion for permastealth (with PU + the torch trait). They’re not really a threat, and they don’t accomplish anything but summon phantasms and camp stealth. It’s just another ineffectual build that rewards sloppy play.
It really depends on your build. The general strategy is to play defensively to bait out the two mantra charges and then go heavy on pressure.
Bruiser-type classes like D/F ele have the upper hand against mesmer if you’re fighting over a point. You can bait out their initial stun-burst (either w/ an invuln, multi-block, or port) and then pressure really hard. The only way the mesmer has a chance of winning is to draw out the fight with a ton of kiting and stealthplay, which will almost certainly give you the point.
The Dom/Duel/Chaos build that most mesmers are running now also have 0 condi cleanse. So any condi cleanse really just has to survive the initial burst and then manage to land a few condis onto the mesmer. One good blowtorch and a poison nade, or a good burnstack from burnguard will result in a dead mesmer unless he can get his teammates to cleanse (but it sounds like you’re talking about 1v1s).
My Judges intervention works fine in pvp. the cooldown is properly reduced to 36 seconds. Maybe there are some other traits that are interacting with the skill here?
Yeah, apparently some people have the bug, others don’t. And once you have it, it doesn’t go away. I’m guessing it has something to do with the specialization patch splitting WvW/PvE/PvP and somehow there’s some combination of traits/skills that causes the wrong Judge Intervention (the kitten version) to get activated, rather than the 36s version (even though the tooltip shows a 36s cooldown).
Mesmer is finally able to compete for a spot on a team, everyone’s losing their minds. Most teams still run double ele, thief, warrior (zerker now), and engi…. nobody cares.
Mesmers are part of top teams since… 8 months minimum?
So I went back and looked for the teams that placed in the TOL world series.
Maybe I missed the memo, cause I didnt see mesmer in every team.
Isn’t TOL NA+EU…?
Mesmers weren’t played by NA teams at all in half year, thats because NA is so behind meta wise…I wonder when people will realize that Mesmer (supported by Thief) was the best answer to Celestial meta.
Didn’t NA, which ran no mesmers, beat EU in the WTS?
I’ve reported this several times in-game, and also created a thread on it in the Bug Reports forum (as well as the Guardian forum), but didn’t get many responses.
I tried re-validating my game files, unslotting/reslotting JI + Monk’s focus across all game-modes without any success. My other meditation skills don’t have this problem.
Guardian forum:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Is-your-Traited-Judge-s-Intervention-bugged/first#post5218305
Bugs Forum:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Traited-Judge-s-Intervention-Cooldown/first#post5213337
The patch made a tanky D/F celestial earth/water/arcana ele very strong, but I personally found the playstyle kind of boring to play.
The ele burst builds (which I personally find more fun to play) took a relative nerf compared to all the buffs that other burst builds received.
I think the real takeaway re: mesmer is that the 15% phantasm damage boost was totally unwarranted.
When Rytlock used mirrorblade + mindstab + mind wrack + power block, the damage wasn’t over the top for a burst class. It also requires as a practical matter that the mesmer burn blink to get the mindblade bounces and extra mind wrack damage from IP. (Note that Rytlock asks for 20s to reset whenever he messes up his burst during the tests). But the izerker alone often did more damage than the mindwrack.
Given that phantasms are pretty much fire and forget, I’d be more inclined to first revert the 15% baseline damage buff to phantasms before even thinking about further nerfs to mesmer.
Edit: Arken, why is your JI going on a kitten CD when you use it? Shouldn’t it be going on a lower CD due to Monk’s Focus?
Not sure what you mean?
Edit Jasher: Indeed, stated multiple times it was to test how much we could do.
Sorry, the language filter randomly picked up on my edit text.
I was asking at the end whether the cooldown on your JI was bugged. I notice it was going on a full untrainted cooldown of fourty-five seconds (using numbers activates the filter), rather than going on the reduced cooldown of 36 seconds (which I believe is what traited JI should have).
Regarding the damage, I understand that you guys were testing how much total damage you could do. But the purpose of the video was also to show whether something was OP or needed nerfing — both you and Rytlock constantly made comments in the video about certain skills being OP or too strong.
One item Rytlock picked up on was the iZerker damage and the 15% baseline phantasm dmg buff, which I completely agree with. If you rewatch the video and look at the damage logs, the iZerker was doing more damage than the mind wrack most of the time (and sometimes iZerker was doing significantly more damage). And I’ve seen similarly high numbers with iWarlock in my own play. I was just suggesting that, if people are going to talk about mesmer nerfs, we first think about phantasm damage (which requires no setup, doesn’t break stealth, and is fire-and-forget at 1.2k range) rather than nerfing the rest of mesmer’s damage. Because the “instant burst” combo from mirrorblade + blink + MOD + mind wrack + mind stab alone is comparable to the “instant burst” that other burst builds can do (lower than some, higher than others).
Wisdom
Agree with the above: meta as a broader concept relates to the understanding of the game. And developing a deeper understanding of the game allows you to develop an optimal strategy (or build), which is referred to in shorthand as the “meta” strategy (or “meta” build).
Thus, when people use the term “meta build” or “this build is meta” in this forum, they are almost always referring to a build that is currently in popular use (typically because it is considered to be optimal). And when they say that a trait or skill is “meta,” they mean that it is currently in common use in the meta builds.
It refers to Next it does not mean next
That doesn’t even make sense. “Meta” in the context of gaming refers to what most players tend to use in a given environment (usually because it’s viewed as “optimal”). By definition it refers to what is currently in play, and not what is “next.” For example, a “meta build” usually refers to a build that is currently being run by many players, and not what players will be turning to next.
If you want to refer to next, you would say the “next meta.”
I think the real takeaway re: mesmer is that the 15% phantasm damage boost was totally unwarranted.
When Rytlock used mirrorblade + mindstab + mind wrack + power block, the damage wasn’t over the top for a burst class. It also requires as a practical matter that the mesmer burn blink to get the mindblade bounces and extra mind wrack damage from IP. (Note that Rytlock asks for 20s to reset whenever he messes up his burst during the tests). But the izerker alone often did more damage than the mindwrack.
Given that phantasms are pretty much fire and forget, I’d be more inclined to first revert the 15% baseline damage buff to phantasms before even thinking about further nerfs to mesmer.
Edit: Arken, why is your JI going on a kitten CD when you use it? Shouldn’t it be going on a lower CD due to Monk’s Focus?
(edited by ResJudicator.7916)
None of the skills you asked to prematurely nerf turned out to be problematic…
Instead, the main burn stack offenders turned out to be things not in your list:
(1) Whirl finishers + fire fields = instamelt
(2) Engie incendiary ammo + kinetic battery
(3) Blowtorch
(4) Zealot’s flame + Radiant Fire
“Meta” doesn’t mean “next.”
This also isn’t a PSA
In all seriousness. Did you change the trait in your PVP setup, or your PVE?
I changed it in all three game modes. And unslotted/reslotted in all three game modes.
I understand that you have separate builds in PvP, PvE, and WvW — this is not an issue where I simply forgot to slot Monk’s Focus in whatever gamemode I’m in. The tooltip for JI will even show a 36-second CD (but it’ll go on a kitten recharge when used).
When I trait Judge’s Intervention with Monk’s Focus, the cooldown should drop from 45 to 36 seconds. However, when I use traited JI, I still get a 45-second cooldown. I spoke to some other guardians in-game, and some of them are having the same problem while others do not. I’m not sure what the cause is. I figured I’d post this thread to see if anyone else has the same problem (or knows of a solution), so that we can draw A.net’s attention to it.
I’ve quadruple-checked that I have monk’s focus traited. In fact, the tooltip for my JI says that the cooldown is 36 seconds, but when I use the skill it goes on the longer kitten cooldown.
I’ve tried unslotting/reslotting both the skill and the trait, I’ve tried restarting, and I’ve tried it in all game modes (PvE, PvP, and WvW). I’ve also used the “verify data integrity” function in case there was a problem with my game. None of these solutions have worked.
Is anyone else having the same issue with traited JI? Or with any other skills? Anyone have ideas about how to fix it on the player end?
Edit: Here’s video proof. Just skip to the duels starting at around 45 minutes. You can tell Arken is running Monk’s Focus, since he gains Fury + Health when he uses his Meditations, and his Renewed Focus is on a 72s CD. But his JI goes on a kitten CD when he uses it.
(edited by ResJudicator.7916)
Judge’s Intervention traited cooldown doesn’t seem to be working for me.
The base cooldown on JI should be kitten . When traited with Monk’s Focus, it should be 36 seconds (the tooltip even says so). However, when I actually use the skill, it goes on a full 45 second cooldown.
I’ve tried it in all 3 game modes (PvP, WvW, PvE) with the same result. And I’ve triple-checked to make sure I have Monk’s Focus. Again, the tooltip for JI says “36 seconds” cooldown.
Does anyone else have this problem? Or has anyone had it before?
At first I thought the bug was specific to me, so I tried restarting the game, unslotting and reslotting monk’s focus, unslotting and reslotting JI, etc. No dice.
I don’t think OP knows how CI works. OP says that MOD should only daze when the target is using a skill. The reason he gives is that MOD + CI is too strong. But CI only triggers if you land an interrupt, so OP’s point makes no sense.
MOD with CI is fine.
MOD with Confounding Suggestions, on the other hand, is a bit strong. As long as you aren’t spamming dazes off of cooldown, you basically have an instantcast, uninterruptable, ranged 1-second stun. If you learn to time and combo it well with mirror blade + mind wrack, it’s crazy strong — all on a fairly low CD (especially since you can usually reprep MOD immediately after you’ve used both charges now; just need to cover it with stealth).
Then again, almost all the other classes have crazy strong skills now, so I don’t know if this synergy is out of line.
Shadow’s embrace removing only damaging conditions is great. But I think they should revert the (unintended?) nerf where it no longer removes a condition as you enter stealth (and then 3s after). .
Chaotic dampening nerf was a little excessive IMO.
But mesmer damage feels very over the top right now. I can instagib (or close to it) anything short of a tank class with just mirror blade + shatter + power block. Even if I fail the interrupt, the MoD procs a stun which still helps secure the mirrorblade+shatter burst. Combined w/ low cooldown, phantasm baseline dmg buff, and nerf to vigor, there’s more damage than the other person can dodge.
Yesterday, backstab was bugged to reveal the thief if they used it. This was something that a lot of PvPers were hoping would happen. Few questions
- If you played a D/P thief during this time, did the reveal feel fair?
- If you played against a D/P, did the reveal make the build feel more fair?
- Would you want this applied to all stealth attacks (Backstab, Surprise Shot, etc) if they are used (aka, hitting air = reveal)?
- Would you want this applied to all stealth attacks if blocks, blinds, evades and invulns caused you to be revealed, but not hitting nothing?
- Would you want this applied to all attacks that miss in stealth?
1 – Yes*. I thought it was fine, and didn’t really notice it. One reason was that the reveal wouldn’t actually take you out of stealth, so it only mattered if I whiffed a backstab as stealth was ending. *However, being unstealthed + revealed when you miss a backstab would be unfair.
2 – I also played against D/P thieves, both as a D/P thief myself, and as an interrupt mesmer. I thought the debuff was fair, but not a huge game-changer because, again, the debuff doesn’t actually take you out of stealth. I had many instances where I’d evade/blind 1-2 backstab attempts and the thief would stay stealthed the whole time. But once the stealth wore off, there’d be a 1-2s window where he couldn’t restealth with blinding powder or refuge.
3 – No.
4 – No.
5 – Kind of, but only if the attack is dodged/blocked/blinded/invulned or otherwise negated by your opponent. I don’t think hitting air should cause any penalties. Thief should still be able to shortbow5 w/o breaking stealth, for example, or stack stealth w/ heartseeker & clusterbomb.
Also, there should not be a revealed debuff when you get destealthed due to a evade/blind/block/etc. Being taken out of stealth is enough of a penalty.
As a side note, mesmer phantasm summons should also count as an attack, given how much damage they can do now and how much stealth uptime mesmers can maintain. (A mesmer can currently camp stealth almost 100% and just summon phantasms for damage. Not at all effective against decent opponents, but still terrible gameplay.)
(edited by ResJudicator.7916)
Thanks for the bugpost Nutshel.
Messing around in HOTM post-patch, it seems like fresh air still has some ICD. I did the following, and had the same results each time:
1) Start in Air
2) Channel Air1
3) Swap to earth,
4) Fresh Air procs,
5) Swap back to Air
6) Swap to water while Air1 is still channeling
7) Immediately cast Arcane Blast (autocrit)
8) No fresh air proc
If the fresh air ICD was indeed removed, fresh air should have procced again on Step 8, right?
Is anyone else having similar results?