Guild Wars 2

Having recently levelled a guardian, solo’d most events I encountered along the way, (Including CHAMPION level bosses!) I can safely say the OP has an L2 kitten ue not the game.

I consider myself to be quite good at the game, and I’m not expecting him to go around soloing champions; but events scale to the number of participants and with the exception of events involving champions or large area defence a lone player can do it quite easily – especially on a guardian which is comparative easymode.

Maybe you guys need to start recording your dye results instead of throwing about claims of RNG nerfs; it’s the very nature of RNG to be… you know… random. People end up seeing patterns where there arn’t, as other people’ve said some have observed an opposite trend which suggests to me that more data is needed before you crack out the torches and pitchforks.

The human brain is mighty good at finding patterns and outside agency where there isn’t any.

I’ve always thought The Elder Scrolls is a great analogy – Mesmer is a perfect match with an illusionist/mystic under their character build scheme.

Mysticism in TES covered spells that manipulate and channel raw magic and bend space and time; turning the victims own energies against them, drawing, siphoning or trapping energies and even providing limited teleportation and precognition.

Couple that with Illusion (Which I shouldn’t need explain) and you have the mesmer’s concept laid out in it’s entirety

(If the school is unfamiliar to Skyrim fans it’s because they took a knife to mysticism and merged it with alteration in TES5: Skyrim, and removed the teleportation spells in TES4: Oblivion)

I’m just gonna leave this here…

@ Euin: Then just say that! – go to the suggestions forum and tell them you don’t like the design, instead of acting like some some law has been violated.

@Greyfur: And who created Rox again? – Arenanet, so it still stands, it’s their bloody design xD

You know the original charr had horns coming out their shoulders ; but modern charr no longer have those? – But they’re still charr right, or does their new sleeker, less spikey look betray the original concept?

At a cursory glance, the planet on meteorologicus does not appear to share any obvious geographical similarities with the known maps of tyria:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/1/1d/Meteorlogicus.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/N6xVe.jpg

I may be wrong though

Rednik.3809:

Retractable claws are incompatible with instrument-operating palm design, because retraction mechanism excludes last phalanx of each finger from active use. In addition, it makes it difficult to manipulate the open palm and fingertips.

Plenty of people do just fine without the tip of their finger due to amputation (Look at Sir Ranulph Fiennes), with proper evolution and development time I don’t see it’s be difficult to have both a solid grip, and a retraction mechanisms in the same hand design.

The problem is less to do with the mechanism and more to do with the sheer length of the charr “sabres”, the hand just isn’t big enough to retract the entire length of that blade

Euin.3578:

I’m too closed minded to want Anet to make their charr look like charr?

I’m sorry, and you are the leading authority on Charr designs since when exactly? – An elephant eared human would be stupid because you don’t get elephant eared humans, but Arenanet created the Charr. Where they take the charr design aesthetic is theirs to decide.

Personally I like Rox and hope we see the eye option extended to the makeover kit :p

I’m curious what people are using the dust on, I presume some new recipe was added in my absence that jacked up demand?

Namu.5712:

if that was the case then many many more people would be being hacked to the point where it would become public.

I know at least 4 people who’ve had their accounts compromised* in our guild alone – and they all got the same response I’m getting. “It’s obviously your fault, if this was really a problem surely more people’d be getting hacked”, just what percentage of players need to be hacked before it becomes public; it’s public right now and you’re dismissing it

*All of them had the same thing I have – their account was essentially untouched; but someone besides them had been added to their authentication list, usually with a foreign IP. In my case it was an IP originating in california; I live in Europe – it’s not impossible that there is an authentication issue and the system is erroneously authorising people to the wrong accounts, and no ACTUAL security issue exists, it would explain why nothing was taken.

Namu.5712:

Or your system is compromised…. didn’t think of that did you, much easier to blame the company rather than your own ignorance thats understandable.

I mean hello 2 times you have been hacked? its likely on your end…

Yes, because networking technicians don’t know about trojans, key loggers, script vulnerabilities and virus’ and wouldn’t think to check their own PC.

The problem with arenanet and it’s fanboys is they’re far too fast to blame the user and unwilling to stand back and evaluate the actual source of compromise.

Now, the only people who know the e-mail addy are me, gmail and anet. he only people who know the password are me and anet. Someone in America had authenticated themselves to access my account – which would require them having access to my e-mail, this means someone at g-mail or anet had dropped the ball, or I have some kind’ve keylogger or virus not known to Avast! or MS Windows defender and do not have a software profile likely to flag an alert on Windows 7 UAC.

The latter is not impossible, but highly improbable considering I have performed extensive scans and come up clean.

If gmail is compromised, it’s rather odd the intruder then bothered to match that up with GW2, recover the password, and then authenticate himself, and THEN clean up the evidence – instead of using that time to say, steal someone’s bank details.

The final possibility the problem is on Arenanet’s end – which is a cleaner answer than the problem being on gmails end, and I’m not in a position to examine more closely (Despite their assurances companies are not hack-proof)

Sorry to derail the derail and get on topic, but notice the text:

quote: During the chaos, Rox—a charr ranger lacking a warband—is sent on a desperate mercy mission by Rytlock Brimstone himself. Team up with this young charr gladium

Anyone suspect she may be little more than a cub? – The low angle camera hides her actual size, if she’s just a kid then the “giant cutesy kitty eyes” might not so be out of place…

Incidentlly, I want those eyes in the makeover pack

Blackwolfe.5649:

Ryuujin.8236:

I tried to use a password that I’ve never used before, not on GW2, not anywhere, it had 20 characters and my e-mail is used ONLY for GW2. (9 quadrillion years to crack!)

“This password has been logged or used before”

Whaaaaaaaaaat?

Its possible that someone else had used the password before on some forum somewhere that got hacked or whatever, and that password ended up on one of the password lists that the hackers spread, which ANET probably picked up on, and in order for account thieves to not simply go through the list (assuming they knew your email adress and wanted to steal your account)

Impossible since GW2 has it’s own entirely unique e-mail address I have used nowhere else online. One of my friends (Who I know and trust) had his account hacked early on in GW2 and he had very robust security precautions – obviously they blamed him for having weak security.

So I implemented extreme security measures (unique e-mail, unique password, extreme strength password); and twice now my account appears to have been compromised. So, either gmail is both compromised and has someone using that data to datamine for GW2, or arenanet’s security is compromised.

I tried to use a password that I’ve never used before, not on GW2, not anywhere, it had 20 characters and my e-mail is used ONLY for GW2. (9 quadrillion years to crack!)

“This password has been logged or used before”

Whaaaaaaaaaat?

If you’ve bought something for gems, the item is delivered to your mailbox. The mail box only has room for like 10 letters at a time, so you need make sure there is room in your inbox for new mail to arrive.

Don’t worry if it’s full, once you make room the purchase will arrive by itself shortly thereafter, the purchase hasn’t been lost. (If you watch closely you’ll see a little carrier pigeon fly in with a letter )

If you bought or sold stuff on the trading post for gold, then you need to visit a trading post representative, they can be found in every major city (and even some explorable zones) and are marked with a pair of scales on the map.

phandaria.4891:

However, I foresee in the end that the meta-game for PVE will be moving towards DPS/Berzerk with the dodge mechanic as the player become more skilled. .

Actually, amongst mesmers the meta’s gone the other direction – originally it was DPS-way or no-way. The vast majority running shatter/zerker builds; now people are branching out and you’re seeing more serious discussion and usage of support/tank builds in PvE

I reported this in Beta 3 -shrug-

I don’t have much hope it’ll be addressed any time soon, the FOV “beta test” has been a good TEMPORARY solution for me but, it’s been a TEMPORARY solution for like 6 months now with no sign of them addressing the ACTUAL issue at hand.

The only time standing on stairs should be a valid defensive strategy is when fighting off Daleks, otherwise, they need to address the potential exploit

Neb.4170:

All classes should definitely be brought to the ‘Ranger’ tier.

I’d love to see the forums. The tears would be amazing.

I can imagine it now…

Mesmer: “Why are my clones healing the ENEMY!”
Warrior: “I can’t just plant banners anymore?”
Thief: “Stealth only works now if I stand still?!”
Necro: “Whoa! – I got buffed!”

And yet the rangers would be quick to tell you that they feel extremely neglected as a class; and necros (undoubtedly the most neglected), are also the class two arenanet employees were recently screenshotted playing as in sPvP.

Whichever class is flavour of the month is the one people will accuse of being arenanet’s pet. You need take get rid of the tinfoil hat, the dev team is big enough that there is no “bias” towards a singular class

Mesmer’s and swords have always been associated with each other, even as far back as Guild Wars 1:
http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii109/ma4ever86/RPG%20Games/Mesmer.jpg

This whole “spellcasters can’t use melee weapons” is so Blizzard, even D&D had viable melee builds for Wizards

What you’re describing is connection latency, check if the rest of your WvW raid is having the same issues when you experience it. If the majority (There’ll always be a few playing on dial-up) are not suffering it then the issue is entirely on your end and is not something Arenanet can “address”

Performing a ping test and tracert with the arenanet servers will help verify whether latency is the issue. If the ping rate is more than 150-200ms or you are seeing “spikes” of high high values or lost packets, then latency is almost certainly the cause, in which case you’ll want to contact your service provider and report it.

As MMO’s go GW2 has extremely good latency handling – try playing Star Trek Online with a less than perfect connection and you’ll be spitting blood, spending minutes at a time rubber banding all over the place

I’m afraid I have to disagree strongly with the OP.

There are VERY few racial skills worth using, certainly not enough to justify skipping over a class/race combination. You are going to be staring at your character possibly HUNDREDS of hours, and picking out outfits for, pick something you enjoy aesthetically – if you’re big on lore/roleplay you’ll also want to make sure their setting is one you can immerse yourself in properly (Lot of folks can’t handle asura for example because they have too many preconceptions about fantasy worlds and asura’s high-tech level is disruptive to them).

Picking your class/race on the basis of racial traits is the least of your concerns.

jportell.2197:

They may shave a little bit off of shatters depending on how the beam change affects the “meta” lol.

Since when do they ever “shave” damage off anything; they treat nerfs like whack a mole – something pops up as being too strong, then hit is so hard it’s mother pops back out her hole BACKWARDS.

Behellagh.1468:

Someone told me that if I sell to a buyer, who was looking for 10@4s and I was selling him my 5 but at the time I click sell he was down to 3@4s, I would sell him 3 and the remaining 2 are now a sell order at 4s.

If you try to sell and there is no longer a buyer either you get a error message or it LISTS your items at the price you set. Can’t remember which but it’ll certainly not mark down your price, unless you have tabbed “sell to highest”

Melchior.2135:

Out of curiosity, where is Snaff’s class confirmed? I don’t recall it coming up in the novel.

It isn’t, but very few characters have their “class” formally confirmed in the books either. Snaff’s research was particularly focused on mind-golem interfacing, and their entire master plan with kralky involved him getting into the dragons head and dominating it.

Whenever Snaff is doing something with magic, it’s closely tied with the magic of the mind – mesmerism, that he appears to be practising, not to mention he wears traditional mesmer colours.

Your mileage may vary, but we know he’s a staff wielding, light-armoured caster (He actually wears Asura tier 3 light armour), he’s not a necro and he practises mind magic and golemancy

Besides, if a mesmer is traited for support they probably have signet of inspiration, in which case you’re going to share the love when or if you’d just get some boons back on yourself already.

Not to mention I’m pretty sure they bounce to your CLONES too, again pretty useless

You should forward this to the suggestions forum.

The answer is really rather simple.

It’s all about forces; provided a force acting upward exceeds that of gravity, even a bookah can fly “unassisted”

If then we consider “unassisted” to mean “not wearing or seated upon a device that produces lift”, then positioning an apprentice upon a modest pile fo explosives and lighting the fuse will provide a force in excess of gravity, and thus produce “unassisted” flight in the individual.

This proves once more that if explosives are not solving your problem, you just need more explosives.

Supply crate; the asura racial elites are pretty lacklustre. Offensive golem blows, golem armour is a joke. Defensive golem is pretty good but is second-tier elite so you can’t buy it right off the bat anyway.

Supply crate is the most versatile and effective engineer elite in 90% of situations.

Remember that you can trait bouncing projectiles to bounce an extra time; this means at close quarters a staff can be traited to strike twice per shot – it might attack slow, but each shot hits twice potentially.

Don’t kid yourself, this is an abuse of mechanics – certainly not how the skill was intended to be used.

It will get fixed if you start exploiting it. An exploit is an exploit no matter how you try dress it up.

It seems like a terribad idea; those people’d get spammed to death with everything from accusations of cheating to beggers asking for gold.

Remember – ALL Asura are implied to be magically and technically adept. Zojja is an elementalist, Snaff a mesmer and yet both were skilled golemancers. Since Asura tech runs on magic casters are asura’s technicians.

Asura engineers are actually the oddballs of Asura society; they shun magic in favour of chemical and mechanical solutions which makes them very very eccentric by comparrison.

InfamousBrad.5879:

out of character: For what it’s worth, all of the NPCs that have Golemancer in their names seem to be elementalists. No, I don’t understand why, either.

Yeah, odd that – but we do know Snaff was a golemancer too and he was a mesmer. Likewise Teyo appears to be an engineer and she built that huge cubist golem in the tutorial

Any true synergetic would recognise the synergy provided by all three colleges; only a dynamics or statics student would try claim their school is “more important” in the eternal alchemy than any other

Technically, no. It’s perfectly acceptable

HOWEVER, it’s not improbable that it’ll flag up as unusual behaviour and there is a very small chance you may accidentally get banned; but you’ll also almost certainly get unbanned if you appealed and explained what happened.

Experiments have demonstrated that “typical” plants release chemicals when damaged, and other plants are receptive to the chemicals and may actually avoid the origin; ie. it is normal that plants both respond to harmful stimuli and avoid receiving harm.

Should we stop harvesting and consuming plants due to this reflex action? – Of course not!.

In my experiments I have found that sylvari, likewise display reaction and aversion to harm. This is a normal reaction from all living things including the plants we rely on for food, that shouldn’t stop us from harvesting or experimenting on them otherwise we would all starve to death both intellectually and physically.

My sylvari test subjects have objected to this perspective, though the opinion of plants doesn’t amount to much, and I shall endevour to prove this is simply a reflex action as well.

I ran some maths and figured out a good system of crafting rares to try on the forge to get a precursor in a way that would in the long term ensure a huge ROI – it was mostly a matter of patience obtaining the items for the right price.

I plugged away at that for a couple of weeks; but no precursors, but had quite a bit of exotic weapons to show which if sold would ensure a break even…

…then the karka event hit and buried the precursor and exotic market ¬_¬ – had to suck up a pretty big loss on all those now worthless exotics.

NickChabby.8907:

In fact, it seems like to quick-fix the missing shoulders for the female Asura, they gave the MALE ARMOR version to them, helm included. So our poor felow female Asura ended with both the coat glitch and the big male helm.

Well spotted!

That’s got to be the answer right there – while usually the male and female asura share skins, I have noticed before the male T3 helmet has bigger ear flaps

Star Trek Online has had the same phenomena with Gorn going on for years… it’s a very pernicious meme; I wonder which MMO it began in

1.) Of course guilds and friends are valid reasons; most my friends are roleplayers and they wanted to play on the US RP server so I stuck with them.

2.) More interesting gameplay, I spent a week or two playing WvW hard but it ultimately comes down to Player Vs Door and crazy amounts of lag and culling; it wasn’t fun.

3.) I didn’t ask for the buffs, if you feel I’m freeloading on your effort take them back I won’t mind.

4.) Repair cost is trivial to me.

5.) I don’t use a legend; I sell the parts to make legends to the people who think the priestess will be impressed

Strangely enough, the only NPC I know of who uses mindstab, his mindstab actually causes blowout in it’s AoE

In fairness, there are some dungeon bosses who are nearly impossible to complete without dying at least once (I’m looking at you subject alpha!).

I’m usually happy if I can down subject alpha’s final form with “only 1 death”, and I’m usually the longest surviving member of the party by a long shot, I’ve known people rez 7 or 8 times in that fight – it’s not like you can just field-rez people in that fight because if you stand still you’ll end up on the floor with them and then everyone dies.

Rez-rushing is a HORRIBLE mechanic, and I’ll be happy to see it removed but they need to be VERY CAREFUL and make sure they rebalance the hell out the dungeons to match. Finding players for CoE is like pulling teeth because subject alpha is already a hair pullingly frustrating fight for most people and classes; making it so dead-is-dead will increase the difficulty factor 7 or 8 fold.

pmnt.4067:

You can’t kill someone just because they are part of the wrong krewe/worship the wrong spirit of nature.

Well, you can’t in Rata Sum – you can in real life if they declare your organisation to be an illegal cult or terrorist cell, then you’ll likely get assassinated by a predator drone regardless whether you have ever been involved in something.

Don’t you love how 1984 and flying doom-bots are here and we never noticed?

It’s a complex picture, there’s several aspects that need be considered:

Utility conditions
Cripples, blinds, weakness, to a lesser degree poison for example have no damage component only duration. If you’re packing a lot of these then duration maximsies their utility

Condition survival time
The longer a condition is present the more likely it is to get cured; so dealing the damage fast guarantees it’s success – so if you’re using conditions mostly for damage, condition damage is superior.

Conversely, confusion if it’s too short may end before the enemy even attacks rendering it useless.

Multiplier
If you increase damage AND duration then the net impact is greater than the sum of it’s parts as they are multiplicative, there may be a sweet spot to aim for.

Here’s a more extensive list to answer the OP’s question:

Illusory membrane
A mainstay of bunker mesmers, arenanet is trying discourage bunker gameplay in tournements so they slapped a HUGE recharge on it. Mesmers can’t maintain protection now in PvE.

Illusory Berserker
Mesmer’s only skill capable of hitting targets at high elevations, was rather buggy though. People were using it to attack from concealled positions in sPvP and WvW, so it got kicked in the head.

Portal
Used to have no limit and 60 second cooldown, now 90 second/5 person limit because of it’s usefulness in sPvP for area control and for moving zergs in WvW.

Shattered strength
For a while had 3 stacks per shatter not 1 stack. This resulted in very deadly shatter spikes if specced for pure DPS resulting in much QQ in PvP, subsequently they kicked it in the head in PvE so now mesmer must choose between support or DPS they can’t tread a middleground.

Moa
Never a very useful skill in PvE, but the moa form received a significant buff to appease PvP complainers. Now it’s arguable if moa form actually makes a typical mob any less dangerous than it was in the first place.

Chaos armour
Had it’s cooldown increased because it’s a fantastic bunker skill and again, anet hates bunkers in PvP. Which means defensive skills in PvE can go suck a karka.

Pretty sure there’s others I’ve missed

Angriff.1935:

One again, the solution is easy:
-Make Time Warp a channeled skill. You interrupt the mesmer, you stop Time Warp.
-Make it centered around the Mesmer. The mesmer must risk their own safety to grant a benefit to their team. In a good team, the mesmer will have support, and suffer little to no consequence.

And how exactly is this meant to be any use to a solo PvE mesmer, if he can have quickness just as long as he doesn’t actually cast anything? ¬_¬

Remember; for whatever reason anet has decided no PvE/PvP split for mezzie so whatever strategies emerge here have got to remain useful in story mode too (A part of the game where Mesmer is already one of the weakest classes)

Arise long dead thread, arise! – Applies thread necromancy

So folks… 4 months later what do you think? – My warning from the future still looking like a knee jerk reaction to the BWE nerfs, or well founded concerns that history is repeating itself.

Mesmer isn’t a unique class, several other MMO’s have nearly identical classes; and all of those MMO’s nerfed their mesmer equivalent into obsolescence because it was too much of a pain to balance and had all the other classes screaming incoherently

Thought it’d be interesting to get people’s reactions now the situation has changed

Could be a drop in demand, according to statistics I’ve bee reading there’s been a sharp drop in players recently – which I can attest to, I’ve given up and moved on (as have most my guild) I was just poking my head in to see whether they’re going to cut mesmer’s a break or keep on with the ole’ nerfbat.

tqhx.2190:

Have you guys ever heard of confusion?

beat me to it by minutes; I was about to say – not once in this thread has anyone brought up confusion; the natural counter to timewarp. If you throw confusion on a team under timewarp, they will annhilate themselves – nevermind that if you throw AoEs into the timewarp AoE, or send a warrior into the zone you can pretty easily flush them out after which they have a long cooldown.

And remember this IS a long cooldown – timewarp isn’t something you’ll see every time you fight a mesmer (Though it’s more likely since you all got moa nerfed, mesmers are running out of viable skills!)

This is mostly an L2P issue

nofo.8469:

Am i the only one that thinks they are just trolling us with a generic name when in reality they don’t have an economist on staff?

Poor John xD

He certainly seems like he knows what he’s talking about, he’s actually very active on the BLTC forum and regularly answers people’s questions and discusses the game’s economics. I’ve found it quite enlightening :p

I think the loot system may not be his work, but rather a case of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing.