Guild Wars 2

Breaking the PvDoor/Zerg Vs Zerg metagame.

I’ve spent my time in WvW, and after a while it came down to the same routine over and over; during prime time form a giant zerg, punch through the enemy with weight of numbers until they were demoralised.

During the downtime when the enemy had you outnumbered, fight a hopeless losing battle against their giant zerg hoping slow them enough that they don’t get too many points before prime time cycles back in.

Mostly, it wasn’t fun. And it only got less fun with every mesmer nerf (Longer cooldowns, no attacking people on walls, 2 second telegraph on pulls etc etc)

Farzo.8410:

If you aren’t willing to work for it, you are not worthy of the achievement.

“work for it”? – you’re kidding right. That achievement is 90% luck that there isn’t a guild of enemy players camping it when you step into the portal

It’s really quite simple.

Guild Wars 2 has a PvP/PvE split. You can play GW2 just fine without ever having to PvE or PvP if you don’t want. The vast majority of GW2’s player base does little to no PvP simply because they don’t like it.

By placing PvE achievements in PvP zones you’re forcing PvP upon those players, which seems like another big violation of the manifesto promise that forced PvP wouldn’t be a thing. (sPvP’rs pointing out the game has forced PvE; I’d like to point out PvE rewards are as much use in sPvP, as sPvP rewards are in PvE. As for WvW – I still stand by the statement that WvW should not be treated as an essential part of PvE)

Before you say “carebear”, I have my gifts of battle, and I personally kicked the kitten of 3 dragonbrand who tried stop me from getting the JP achievement last week. However, I also respect and sympathise with the players who do not enjoy or have experience in PVP

No you’re absolutely right and I tested this extensively with another player. We were both asura, similar scale – both mesmers.

The only difference between us is I experience relatively high latency, and playing from Europe on Tarnished Coast (NA), whereas this other player helping me test was playing from US and had relatively low latency.

Whenever he used lightning pull – targeted, or automated, he always landed on the platform. Under the exact same conditions, clicking in the exact same place I would always overshoot the platform by several metres. This is reproducable enough that some of the lightning pull JP’s are physically impossible for me since there is no way for me to click “in front” the platform to compensate for the overshoot and it overshoots too far for me to “pull back” after the jump and hit the platform in most cases.

I’m 99% sure this is due to client-side latency, and needs to be addressed urgently or the JP won’t be finishable for some of us

I can’t seem to get a good look together on my mez that suits it. However i absolutely love your medium armour get-up there OP

My money is on restorative mantras (2.5k+ party heal? – This is nice), deceptive evasion (they ruined our phantasm/clone cooldowns but forgot shatter mezzies can still spam them) or sharper images (Bleed stacking with no internal cooldown – thats unique amongst the classes) getting it the nerf bat next

If any of those 3 goes however, I’m gonna start maining my engineer full time.

shimmerless.4560:

i can’t see PU being changed again it’s a heavy trait investment and if you don’t have a friendly shadow refuge or shortbow it needs some utils to work as well. the trait’s in a really good place at the minute.

Shattered strength was too but they slashed that down from 3 stacks to 1 stack of might (They since moved shattered strength to a lower slot, but they could do that to PU, nerf it and make it major)

I’m in the same boat. i respect it’s AoE DPS capabilities, reliability and usefulness at range (Not to mention how awesome the skins look). But i hate how unimaginatively direct it is.

I tend to use it as my ranged swap when the party doesn’t need staff boons, for it’s additional AoE DPS, and to snipe bosses when melee isn’t an option; but i much prefer to be up close and personal with my sword/focus

Wethospu.6437:

LordByron.8369:

nerf to ele and buff to warrior rofl…..

Do you seriously think that change will somehow affect Warriors in PvE?

Beats me :p – I play mesmer and PvE almost exclusively. All i know is that Warrior is crazy OP in PvE, and yet every patch Mesmer get another nerf, and Warrior gets another buff; whether the buff is objectively useful to warrior is largely irrelevant given the only thing warriors need right now is a good solid nerfing to the DPS (Or every other class a significant buffing to their DPS)

phtotrope.3761:

This change doesn’t only affect staff users. I’m always applying Chaos Armor while in melee with the Sword. Now I’ve got nothing. I guess they don’t want us full zerker anymore.

Basic chaos armour doesn’t apply protection when activated. It’s referring to the fact staff 4 applies protection on activation.

However this does render staff #4 almost worthless as a skill, since we can proc chaos armour using virtually any of our weapons and comboing into an ethereal field. Staff 4 only belongs as a seperate ability because it gave on-demand protection.

It’s not a patch if they don’t buff warrior and nerf mesmer. /rolleyes

I guess you guys missed the memo. In PvE we’re only meant to play warriors now.

But seriously I’ve been a long time proponent of staves but this is just getting silly now. Since they fixed zerker I’m mostly running GS and changes like this don’t behoove me to <cough> diversify my builds

What’s the source on this?

The statement about “previously only found on ascended”, refers to the fact that up til now the vast majority of celestial gear was ascended only (Exception: Amulet)

We can now obtain full exotic celestial gear, so obviously it’s stats will be in line with normal exotics.

As I understand it, axe is the warriors “other hot PvE weapon” besides GS, mainhand sword is more PvP-ish for closing distance and snaring enemies.

I always view it’s better to sell precursors (I’ve had 4 now ) fairly quickly so that you can reinvest those funds, assuming you’re an active trakitten rofit is afterall a combination of both velocity and magnitude, and sitting on an investment for a very long time is only good if you’ve reached a ceiling in how much you can trade within a comfortable timeframe.

Finally, there’s always the danger that anet will implement their long toted “scavenger hunt” for precursors and face-stab the precursor market; so as a long term investment precursors are risky.

The entire premise of this thread is fallacious

While it’s true that knowing in advance means you can take advantage of the trading. You’re not looking at the scale of the trades. When i saw the patch notes go up on Dulfy, i could immediately predict the rise in silk/leather/candy etc. But I didn’t trade in it – do you know why?

I typically make around 30-50g in trading a day without putting too much effort into it. Say you have a product like silk that’s gonna jump from 8c to 16c reliably (double your money) – 100% ROi seems fantastic, til you consider the logistics. if I wanted to make a transaction that’d net me similar profits to my daily income I’d need to flip 250 stacks

That’s – where exactly am I going to store 250 stacks while I wait for the price to rise? – I could just immediately re-list it and hope the price rises that high but that’d be a big gamble, I might over-estimate how high the price will actually get. Not to mention actually listing 250 stacks given the TP’s slow response time and anti-spam code will take the best part of 20 or 30 minutes; and that’s just for 50g profit, if you really wanted to make bank you’d have to waste hours.

So, no.

This kind of small time trading does not benefit “the rich” as much as you think. As I said at the time, this benefits the small time traders the most which is why when i obtained this information, I immediatly told me poorer friends so they could cash in on it, where the handful of gold they could make would make a bigger difference to them, whereas I stuck to the big investments where I can capitalise on the power of scale

You can also get mystic coins from the recipe for mystic clovers.

(However, this would be a very poor strategy as statistically you’ll consume more coins than you receive unless you have crazy blind luck)

Shattering only occurs when…

• …a clone succesfully detonates a shatter effect
• …a player with Illusory persona activates a shatter.

Clone death triggers when an illusion is…

• …is killed by hostile action (Even if the clone is en route to a shatter)
• …is over-written by a new clone
• …despawns due to it’s target dying
• …despawns due to the player leaving the area or being transformed.

The two effects are mutually exclusive. There is no way for the same clone to both shatter, and trigger an on-death effect simultaneously.

Shatter builds are still great for DPS, but, that is pretty much all they do – and mesmer’s strength in dungeon is their ability to DPS while simultaneously supporting.

If you want to try something new in duneons, you could try running an inspiration support/DPS hybrid such as:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNAsdRl4zCoHRzqGaNJipC92pHQnztckKoalUgbXIA-jwxAYLioRKSEJLAJviox2GKiGruGT5SEVLEgo1A-e

The mantra heals provide unparalleled healing-over-time both for yourself when needed, and also heals your allies at the same time (~5-6k per rotation), traitted focus and feedback ensure you always have reflects on hand to cover your party and your phantasms apply regeneration to the front line.

Full zerker and high crit rate ensures you pump out solid AoE DPS and once you have your perception stacks up combined with perma-fury your phanties will crit virtually every hit.

If you need more defence you can switch out the GS for a staff to provide defensive boons to your party, while you can remove signet of inspiration for another support skill as the situation demands (I often switch it out for illusion of life, and swap the chaos trait to manipulation cooldown if I need get people up fast or if the party is a bit squishy), or switch out mantra of pain if your party doesn’t need the extra heals and replace it with arcane thievery to steal yet more boons to give to your allies

Some might call the build unorthodox but it’s by far the most effective support builds I’ve run to date, cutting a good line between support and robust DPS and keeps open a lot of options for fine tuning to suit specific situations.

The OP’s statement may’ve been way off the mark but fundamentally GW2 is not an RP’r friendly environment, and this is a bad thing for it’s long term.

The singular most important feature RP’rs need is private space to call their own, such as a guild hall. Star Trek Online achieved this fantastically, offering both a guild space in the form of a starbase (Guild hall equivalent), for guild-centric events. And the ability to walk around inside your own ship and bring allies aboard – for meeting up with people in private.

GW2 has almost no private spaces whatsoever besides an impersonal, non-customisable home instance usually far removed from any centre of activity that can only take 5 people anyway. While I applaud many RP’rs making use of public locations (Such as the Seraph Rp’rs in the seraph fort in queensdale) they do sometimes attract people who just want to kitten all over everything who’ll harrass and get in the way if they see people roleplaying publiclly.

They could also afford to extend the range of emotes, a proper range of actions such as the ability to sit in chairs in the environment go a long long way to making the the world seem more natural.

it’s not like either of these things are difficult to provide, yet their absence is sorely felt.

It’s not in game, but – spoilers follow
It's the original Arah explorable map from during development, where the corpse of zhaitan formed a part of the environment. Zhaitan later got a visual upgrade and now looks completely different and the Arah map substantially reworked.

Before you ask, one of the devs confirmed this – i think it was on reddit I saw it.

My only criticism of our elites is that all of them are designed for the benefit of your party rather than yourself.

That’s not to say other classes’ elite’s don’t benefit others too. But for mesmer it is disproportional.

Most classes have at least one elite that exclusively benefit them and them alone; for example Rampage as One, Dagger Storm, Lich Form. And even then the majority of elites that work both ways, can be used optimally in solo play and the party benefits are a side effect rather than it’s primary function, such as Supply Crate, Fiery Greatsword, Renewed Focus

Mesmer’s “Elites” are almost universally a more powerful, party-supporting version of other classes non-elite skills.

For example Time Warp provides a long duration, AoE haste – but has an insanely long cooldown. Mass invisibility provides a good, long duration invis – but it has a very long cast time and cooldown compared to other invis skills, because it is a HUGE AoE effect… and Moa… yeah we don’t talk about Moa.

The point is, mesmer’s elite skills are elite because they can provide that bonus to the entire party. But used in solo play, the massive cooldowns are difficult to justify – an engy can pop Elixir U every 50 seconds (reducible with traits) – basiclly every fight, AND he can throw elixir u to turn it into a projectile screen. Suddenly Timewarp with it’s 210 second cooldown and no sweet alternate fire mode just doesn’t really compare, sure it has a longer duration, but it’s a novelty reserved for tough fights, as opposed to elixir u which can be used every fight safe in the knowledge it’ll be off CD fairly soon.

I still wouldn’t want Time warp to become a caster-only ability; I’m just saying it’d be nice if we had 1 elite that was strictly for our own benefit, like ranger’s rampage as one.

AresFyra.3570:

I’m no kitten.. Ofc I’ve unlocked the skill.. ^^

The tooltip is showing correctly.
The “within range” is working correctly.

I just can’t activate it! Not through keyboard 5, or on my Razer Naga 5.
Not even by clicking on it! And it’s not a pathfinding issue.
It just isn’t responding..

I’m currently using “Berserker’s Pearl Sabre of Speed”.
Tried with “Berserker’s Pearl Sabre of Strength” also..

NOT working at all..

Just to annoy you with one more “obvious” question but, you do have a target selected right? <.< – because… y’know. Phantasms arn’t pets persay, they cannot exist without a victim.

Phantasmal swordsman works just fine, though like Illusory leap it can be extremely finicky about path-finding when cast on illusion unfriendly surfaces like stairs, bridges, low ground cover or if it’s Tuesday

It’s worth remembering spear 4 doesn’t just boost you, the same “field” that accelerates allies, also bumps back any enemies that try swim through it so anyone chasing you must swim at an angle (further decreasing approach velocity) to avoid it; or get knocked back and totally lose you.

More frequently the latter as the field is difficult to see and doesn’t produce a hazard marker if cast in open water

To clear up I’m mostly thinking PvE here. PvP isn’t something I tend to do much and WvW is a totally different kettle of fish (For starters full zerkers or full rampagers in a zerg is fast track to being dropped at the first mass arrow cart spam)

Anyway that is a very important point there Pyro; even if you do put out lots of conditions and maage to claim a decent portion of the stacks you’re denying damage to your allied condition specialised players, hence better to focus on power, makes sense.

Once again we see how utterly messed up the GW2 metagame is right now >.<

So, common wisdom is Zerkers or nothing when you want DPS. But I’ve been going over the numbers and I’m not entirely convinced wondered if anyone could prove me wrong.

The difference is coming in from incidental bleeds.

In a typical zerker phanty build, you’re probably looking at ~50% base crit chance, with another 10-15% from other sources like sigils. Add in Fury and that’s around 85% crit chance on your phantasms.

This means a typical warden will inflict ~10 bleeds per attack cycle. The same goes for your clones and what-not, they’re all generating trivial amounts of bleed damage from non-trivial bleed stacking (GS clones will generate on average 2 bleeds per channel).

In a zerker build you probably wont deal more than ~55 damage per bleed (~275 total), so your warden in addition to doing his ~9-10k direct damage, is also dealing ~2750 condition damage.

If we switch it up to full rampagers and throw on condition/bleed duration runes/food, then it’s not unreasonable to double both the damage and duration of the bleeds to around ~110 per tick/10 seconds each. (~1100 per bleed), furthermore rampagers has a higher crit chance, so you’re landing more like 11 bleeds, so your warden in addition to the power based DPS is inflicting a massive 12,100 condition damage alongside still pretty significant physical damage (~4-6k in testing).

Furthermore, your clones become a non-trivial source of damage. Greatsword clones alone are capable of maintaining ~12-15 stacks of bleeding; that’s ~1,500 damage per second; this is clones we’re talking about here, providing DPS on a par with spamming basic attack (They’d only do ~500 without).

This breaks down when you look at the player’s own attack, sigil of earth cannot stack bleeds as fast as a clone, so the player’s direct damage attacks deal less than a zerker counterpart would, however this is offset by the fact your clones are helping deal non-trivial DPS too, in essence shifting the damage burden away from the player and onto your pets.

Another aspect is that the on-death condition traits (notably Duelling 25, which many phanty mezzies take) start dealing more respectable damage and have a better duration, and debilitating dissipation becomes downright potent.

There is of course, also the “problem” of the bleed cap, but in most pugs I have tested the concept with, this has not been a significant problem, with only a couple capable of capping bleeds without me, and none of those sustaining the cap indefinitely.

I can’t be the only one to have pondered this, so why is it that the general concensus is zerker or bust for phanty builds?

Esplen.3940:

But with that in mind, then that makes Snaff a hacker, because his has armguards on both sides and he was… I don’t even know what he was.

He doesn’t just have armguards on both sides; his right armguard is blue, his left armguard is red. And I don’t think it’s any co-incidence in their design that his two former apprentices, zojja and kudu, have seemingly identical armguards between them.

Incidentally, Snaff was almost certainly a mesmer (Most of his research was into mind-technology interfacing, and their master plan for kralkatorrik basiclly involved dominating his mind), not to mention the abundance of purple in his getup

I think the suit could immediatly be made more useful if it served as a second hitpoint bar. Most stuff in the game serves as a weaker analogue to another classes ability – ie.

Call Warband -> Thieves Guild
Take Root -> Supply Crate
D-Series Golem -> Shield of the Avenger
Norn Forms -> Rampage

etc.

The golem suit acting as a second hitpoint bar could be argued to be Op – but I’d argue that it’d basically be a weaker analogue to necro’s Death Shroud – the attack skills don’t have to be very good, the primary function would be to allow the pilot to soak up an additional amount of damage (Bonus poin ts if the suit also provides a shedload of extra toughness, so that it draws aggro away from the team)

As it stands, any damage the golem recieves goes straight to the pilot and if the hitpoint bar reaches zero, the pilot is downed too – even if the pilot ejects, his hitpoints remain where they were when he was mounted.

Kudu actually has a hax outfit. It’s T3 light, but the colours are all out of whack (he has a grey longcoat, but a red omnitool – but the omnitool and longcoat MUST share the same colour in reality)

Here’s my current getup – but still lot of room for improvement, would like something closer to the authentic outfits.

I should try get a good shot of tazza; she’s an inquest mesmer – would be more authentic. (EDIT: Updated with tazza and another inquest agent pic)

I’d like to put together an inquest style outfit for my mesmer, but none of the inquest light armours are actually obtainable far as I can tell (And no, the “inquest” CoE armour is not actually worn by the inquest)

So I’m curious what dye schemes and (Light armour) outfits other folks have come up with that capture the inquest feel to draw some ideas from

What about sceptre’s dependence on range?

On paper sceptre’s single target DPS is superior to sword. However the reality is that each step in the attack chain is dependent upon the projectile landing before it rolls over to the next stage making the attack considerably longer than the stated half second.

This leaves you with a mainhand that does inferior ranged and melee DPS (Since you cannot strike multiple targets if you stand in melee). As for #2, there really isn’t a strategic use of torment, the extra damage from torment, even specced strongly into conditions won’t usually deter people from moving and the block really isn’t as useful as a damage preventer as blurred frenzy, and I don’t really see how a high DPS channel/confuse has anywhere near the same strategic applications of leap/swap (A clone generator, leap combo, gap closer, crippling immobilise)

As many people have said, that doesn’t make it useless – many people including me routinely make use of sceptres in certain situations, however sceptre is essentially a range weapon swap, greatsword is the swap it’s more likely to be replacing and in that respect it has many favourable comparrisons (GS3 is virtually worthless, GS2 and Sceptre 3 are comparable in damage, GS is subject to range penalties so in CQC sceptre does superior DPS and produces a clone – this also better positions you for melee swaps, GS has no block built into it and Sceptre allows you to choose your own offhand/phantasm)

if you go a step further in the thinking…

The dominion of the winds has remarkably little solid ground, there’s a lot of archipelago and open water; how did arenanet plan to house an entire nation of flightless bird people there?

If we go back to the concept art there’s long been pictures of suspended aerial structures with huge sails – like the bazaar is based on. Put two and two together; and perhaps the intention is/was that the tengu make extensive use of those “kite” structures to build their villages and towns literally in the air.

That’d be so insanely awesomely I’d want to play one there and then xD

Lothirieth.3408:

His point seemed to go over your head. If you were clever enough to make money in WoW (since you bragged about it), shouldn’t you be clever enough to do the same here?

He is… that’s why he brought it up.

(He’s already bought the massive piles of coffers; by drawing attention to it in such a public place he’ll increase demand artificially leading to a faster return on investment… see – clever)

A rocket powered axe that shoots lightning bolts?

This a serious contender against Warhammer 40k’s chainsaw-gloves/jaws of life-that-shoot-lightning

drongas.4189:

another crythief and crynecro thread?

crywarrior this time.

I guess warriors have been buffed so far into god-hood they’ve got nothing of their own left to cry about so it’s time to invade the other classes forums and cry about them having toys they don’t.

There’s few strategies more effective than hamstringing your opponent.

Xavi.6591:

If you don’t like the portal, don’t take the portal.

Pretty simple, isn’t it?

There’s a lot of current political issues that can be summarised this way, yet apparently they don’t think it is that simple :p

I think you might be misunderstanding Illusion X – this reduces the cooldown on phantasm’s attacks so they attack more frequently, it doesn’t reduce cooldown of phantasm summoning skills.

Which means this build kind’ve awkwardly straddles the line between a phantasm herder and a shatterer. You’re getting bonuses on shatters, but you also have high phantasm attack speed/damage bonuses, so it behooves you to avoid shattering your phantasms until the last minute (In which case the shatter cooldown bonuses are redundant).

If you only shatter infrequently then the shatter cooldowns and might are irrelevant. If you Shatter frequently, then the cooldown on phantasm attacks is redundant as they won’t survive to attack multiple times.

That’s just my thoughts anyway.

Bri.8354:

What is going on in jumping puzzle is less along the lines of helping someone, and more along the lines of completing the content for them..

Helping someone and doing something for them is essentially one and the same thing if they have asked for that assistance.

If someone needed help in real life, you wouldn’t be “breaking reality” by lending them a hand. (Well… there are some religions that would argue that helping people is intervening in their god’s grand plan, but I have my own opinion on people like that)

Nope.

I did the same thing to Rox’s quiver by accident and their response was basically “When you typed in the name of the character to confirm you wanted to delete them you waived all rights to to it. We got your money either way so lol, cry sum more sucker”

Fenrir.5493:

-We need acces to protection or some way to mitigate damage, classes like mesmer and necors have acces to them, why warriors dont since its the class that could benefit the most and its the class that will be justified to have because warriors wear HEAVY ARMOR.

That’s exactly why they do not.

Look at the classes you called out for having protection and/or evasion built into their attacks:

Elementalist: Evasion, Regen, Invulnerability, Protection – EHP: 10.8k
Thief: Evasion, Regen, Stealth – EHP: 11.5k
Guardian: Regen, Protection, Aegis- EHP: 12.5k
Mesmer: Evasion, Regen, Protection, Aegis – EHP: 15.0k
Ranger: Evasion, Regen – EHP: 16.2k

Warrior EHP: 21.2k

A warrior can soak up twice as many hits as an elementalist, and that is without factoring in armour attributes. An elementalist in full knights armour still only has EHP of 15.5k – let that sink in a moment:

A warrior in full zerker armour is still around 25% tougher than an elementalist trading off most of their DPS for survivability. If a warrior gears for toughness too, then that number skyrockets to over 30k EHP; but this is why warriors make such good DPS in dungeons and PvE; a warrior can sacrifice all of their survival attributes for raw DPS, and still come out tougher than any other class wearring full survival gear, and it is also why other classes are given active survival options like protection, regen and evasive attacks to balance the books. The only odd one out in that list is Mesmer, which has both a relatively high EHP, and also has very good access to defences; however this seems to be offset by the fact mesmers also have rather low sustainable DPS and is a point of contention in the mesmer community itself (Anet keeps bufing our survival yet nerfing our offence)

Even then in party PvE those non-warrior friends of yours are likely sharing their protection and boons with you so you’re only going without if you are running solo, or try running a party made entirely of warriors. PvE is not an area warriors need help or buffs in (Now, PvP… that’s a different story)

For those saying “but mesmer will never be irrelevant in PvE due to our support”, you might want to look closer at my original story. Psionics never became “unwanted” in fact they were incredibly desirable class for party play.

The problem was that their support was so good, that the devs kept trading in more and more of their DPS and survival, until they became little more than buff-bots who’s skills exist for the benefit of other people rather than themselves.

Where have we seen that before?

• “Portalbot”
• “Timewarp plox!”

Skills of dubious use to the mesmer themself, but we keep being nerfed due to their sheer power when given to a party or zerg.

wads.5730:

everything you’ve complained about only applies to pve. in that regard, the properly speced warrior may be able to do 50k/10seconds, but thats all he does. mesmers may only do a fraction of that, but they also provide great team utility and support.

it makes no sense to compare two different roles in pve.

That’s just. I’m comparing pure DPS spec mesmer against pure DPS spec warrior – the parity is a joke. A support spec warrior brings a hell of a lot to the table too while retaining DPS – AoE rezes, permafury/crit bonuses, stacks of might coming out your ears, party healing; you just don’t see them so often.

This is somewhat a different discussion for a different thread we’re getting into however; the DPS/support/control trinity in GW2, and how DPS counts for almost the entire game, support secondary and control is a joke. So saying support is our “role” in a supposedly non-role orientated MMO, and thats why we don’t do equitable DPS in any configuration overlooks anet’s manifesto promises.

Master of Timespace.2548:

But GW2 is in an interesting place b/c its emphasis on Interrupts rather than chain stuns.

As a gw1 mesmer / ranger player, I have only 1 word for that: lol.

Ditto – I mained ranger and mesmer (Guaranteed interuppts or your money back!) in my 5 years in GW1 and GW2’s interupts are awful by comparison.

Everyone knows large, intellectual foreheads and long ears are the most alluring feature; why would Asura want to expose their bodies…

…the fact Zojja shaves her head is a little risque when you think about it.

/End Asuran perspective :p

Arale.4207:

When you say DPS, do you mean damage per second or overall damage? I’ve never seen a guardian or engineer peel aggro off my shatter mesmer in dungeons via damage. Warriors can, yes, but if I play smart enough, I can pull aggro off of them as well sometimes. Phantasm Mesmers do fairly consistent damage per second, but low burst. Shatter Mesmers aren’t too grand in damage per second, even accounting proper pZerker spawning, but we have godlike burst in dungeons. 14-18k mindwrack crits every 10 seconds? Yes please.

Sustained DPS I’m referring to. Mesmer’s have great burst capabilities, but my analysis is based on PvE team and solo play (There’s no doubting mesmer’s PvP credentials) – and in that respect mesmer’s sustained DPS when specced for the role is pretty close to the bottom (The reddit number crunchers say it’s second worst, coming after ranger)

Aggro isn’t a good indicator of DPS as there are many other factors besides DPS that affect aggro (Toughness is the single biggest influence. A mesmer in full knight’s gear doing pathetic DPS yet easily pull aggro off an entire team of zerker warriors).

As for the 14-15 burst every 10 seconds as a selling point; a zerker DPS specced GS warrior I’m told can pull off closer to 50k burst every 10 seconds (This same burst is of course almost useless in PvP as people will just get out the way, but again, in PvE, where sustained DPS counts, mobs tend to stand in melee and rub their face all over your sword, so mobility of said DPS matters less)

It’s that time of the year again! – Time to review the warning from the future…

So, we’re now 10 months in since I raised my concerns about the direction mesmer was taking as the BWE’s progressed. Last big skill balance patch major concerns were that clones were not actually distracting enough, and that mesmer relied a lot on people’s lack of understanding of the class.

As well as my original long term concerns that nerfs over time would force players into just one or two principle build configurations and take away all our damage to balance against our control/defensive skills even though GW2 isn’t a game with discreet DPS/support classes and all classes should have parity if specced for DPS.

By this stage in Allods the psionicist had recieve their big rebalance overhaul that took away a sizable chunk of their control and support options in exchange for slightly better defences and DPS. Mez seems to have taken the opposite path, where they’ve improved our defensive and support otpions with time, but DPS and control has consistently decreased

So, how’re we doing?:

Build versatility:
Support, Phantasm, Shatter are the 3 fundamental paths left – we pretty much lost condition and glamour in the last few patches.

DPS
Even specced full glass cannon a mesmer’s DPS doesn’t come close to that of a DPS specced warrior, guardian or engineer; there’s no point even trying to go full on DPS.

As a trend, DPS decreases with every patch, while other classes, notably warrior tends to increase so that seems to be becoming true.

Control
Glamour blinds got a nerf, confusion got absolutely destroyed, (Even more so if we look back to BWE when i posted this and sceptre chain inflicted confusion… you know, when sceptre was a condition weapon?), and now focus has a destructively long telegraph before you can pull with it.

Again, seems to be a “yes” here.

Well that’s my opinion anyway speaking as a PvE/WvW mesmer foremost, how do you guys feel; is the sky slowly falling for mesmer, was it a much needed lowering from godhood or is this all just doom and gloom?

Don’t forget to tune in 6 months time for the next update in the saga! (If you’re still playing mesmer by then)

Astralporing.1957:

That’s… something that i really don’t understand. I mean, why? They don’t get any better drops (since they’re capped at their personal level), and only making it harder on themselves. And their personal level just couldn’t be anywhere close to 26, or they would have at least some AR already. Just getting to 20 guarantees one ring with a chance for more. And a single amulet is also not that hard.

I don’t understand it myself. Like you say by tier 2 you’d expect them to have SOME AR – it’s possible that they did have “some” AR, but it was too low to stop the agony being a death sentence in tandem with the hit from the boss itself.

When I asked “kitten” one of them claimed that “he’d changed his build lately and didn’t have any appropriate AR gear for it now”, when I told him “Well put it back on anyway it has to be better to have the wrong stats then no AR”, he told me “Oh i don’t keep that kitten, I vendor stuff I don’t need anymore”.

I don’t buy that excuse at all though, the other one claimed to be a really experienced player and he wouldn’t be a burden as he could just dodge the attacks (The fact he’d spent the entirety of mossman and all of the first cliffside fight dead says otherwise) while the other just apologised profusely and begged not to be kicked.

Oh wow, kudos on that discovery.

Might be time for some plastic surgery :p

The other night, in a level 28 fractal we had a guy just like this; his name was something to do with insanity. Right at the start of the run I explained that if anyone had any questions or if higher level fractals were new to them, don’t hesitate to ask; though seemingly everyone knew what to do.

Except insanity.

Luring the jellyfish away and tanking it with his face, standing BEHIND the ice golem and aggroing it backwards, luring mobs over to the guy on the control panel in the cage. All the while asserting that “No, i know this, done it LOTS of times before!”

Oh and he had no AR of course and spent most his time on his kitten . It reached the stage where we were deliberately leaving him dead during the boss fights, because it was easier to 4 man it than have him actively working against us.

…and let’s not talk about another level 26 run last week where people just kept dying on the bosses and i couldn’t figure why. Turns out 3 of the players had no AR whatsoever, and had tried sneak in hoping nobody’d notice… well kitten, 1 leecher might get under the radar but 3 of you?

I was host that day, I apologized to the other party member and closed the instance there and then, I was not gonna carry these guys through cliffside

Are they sure it’s only 1 second? – it feels much much longer, makes it incredibly clunky to make precise pulls in PvE, frequently enemies pass over or through the AoE before it can be triggered .

I understand the need for a telegraph in PvP, but do we really need it in PvE too?

Think of the dredge?