Guild Wars 2

In meantime our 38 run earlier had great success by holding ground towards the northern end of the tunnel.

When the north seal came up, everyone covered the hammer runner, when the south seal was up, our two mesmers took turns running the hammer under invisibility, then porting back to the group to keep things ticking over fast and clean. Did the run about as fast and smooth as we would have done using the “traditional” method of not killing the first two chanters.

Actually; there’s one Kodan in Frostgorge who if you speak to them about their beliefs demonstrates just how dangerously zealous they are. They basiclly go on to describe how the dredge with all their noisy inharmonious machines and dirty oil are an affront to the natural order and must die for it.

Which, doesn’t really bode well for them integrating with the Charr, Asura or pact forces if their view on technology borders on luddism

Congratulations, you managed invoke at least 3 logical fallacies in the space of a single paragraph. Shall we just invoke Godwin’s law now to make it a full house? ¬_¬

So, I was thinking today about the GW2 “currencies” and how this impacts the gameplay – I don’t doubt this has been discussed before so sorry if I’m going over old ground.

While GW2 has many MANY MANY currencies; more so than basically any game I’ve ever played (Karma, dungeon specific tokens, laurels, WvW tokens, fractal relics, gold, gems etc etc etc), almost all the content that matters comes down to gold.

Most of the desirable new skins come in RNG chests or on the cash shop itself; and that means gems, either by buying for cash, or with gold. This is unfortunate because gold is the singular currency in GW2 that does not experience meaningful diminishing returns; it is possible to determine an “optimum” source of gold, and then grind that source ad nauseum.

Given there is a “path of least resistance” there is no reason to do anything but this one strategy; you could go do a different dungeon and still obtain gold, but it’ll be less gold than you could have obtained doing the path of least resistance.

Contrast this against other MMOs.

Star Trek Online has around 4 or 5 currencies – energy credits, which is their throw-away gold-equivalent currency used for basic activities like buying basic equipment, paying for supplies etc. A few faction-specific credits earned by doing certain missions and tasks for those factions, and dilithium – which is the lynchpin currency that is central to all the big important transactions (new ships, high quality equipment, converts into cash shop currency).

Notice an important difference here:

Energy Credits (The gold equivalent currency) is NOT the lynchpin currency; dilithium is. Like the “special” currencies in GW2, you cannot “grind” for dilithium; you can only obtain a limited amount of it per day. How you obtain it however is the important part.

Unlike dungeon credits, a vast array of missions and objectives reward dilithium, ranging from dungeon-equivalents, to ground missions to space missions to duty officer missions (Something GW2 has no analogue to) – but each source typically only rewards it once a day, and even then only up to a hard cap. This serves to encourage players to go out and actually play the game itself – since there is a cap, and you can fill that quota from a very wide range of activities, there is no incentive to grind the same few pieces of content ad nauseum; indeed grinding the same content would be self defeating since you can only get the reward from any given activity once a day.

As long as the majority of rewards come through the cash shop, and the currency used to buy items from the cash shop (gold -> gems) can be ground without significant diminishing returns, people will continue to mash away at the path of least resistance while complaining the game feels flat – or worse, continue to walk away as many of my original GW2 friends have done since I started.

How to change the mindset and balance so late in the day however isn’t an easy question to answer without causing some serious upsets, any thoughts?

Fyrehawk.1674:

In my opinion, Arenanet was being entirely genuine with their comments regarding the planned implementation of ‘Ascended’ items but I am also suspicious of them stretching the truth. Just consider the name – ‘Ascended’ – it literally sounds like there should be lore behind it, a full blown story and with it new amazing content. ‘Ascended’ to me sounds like something that should of and was originally intended to be implemented in a full blown content expansion.

Strictly speaking thereis lore and a story behind it.

The original ascended gear are almost all relics from GW1 and/or GW lore. The implication is that they’ve turned up or been found during analysis of points of history and alternative realities that are the fractals you are helping stabilise for research purposes.

However, people wern’t happy with this implementation – because unless they participated in fractals they could not obtain the relics – story and reason be kitten ed. Hence we now have flavourless alternative pathways; laurels, guild commendations etc.

Once more, the old adages about the colour of the grass and what you wish for holds true.

Relevant /15 chars

It’s just another strange aspect of the human psyche, and how when multiple viable options exist, people will be horrified to hear how anyone could find the other options preferable when clearly their path is the “right” path.

I had a similar discussion to this in a fractal run – except he was saying I should run in magic find gear… yes, seriously – magic find gear

His logic went something along the lines of this:

• Knights gear trades damage for survivability, but a player in knights gear would never be called a slacker or leech
• MF gear trades off the same attribute for extra loot
• If a player can survive in zerker gear, they can survive in MF gear
• It’s kind’ve cute that I run full zerker, but I’m actually pulling more than my share of the weight
• QED: I should trade up for MF gear, as I could survive in it and still pull my weight in the party.

When I suggested that actually, people who could run zerkers should run zerkers, and running gear that trade off DPS for survival basiclly amounts to training wheels for players who havn’t yet mastered PvE survival, and anyone who could run zerkers but trades off pulling their potential weight for their own personal gain is very much a leech, he then started accusing me of elitism.

What “really” seemed to be going on was the application of two benchmarks. His benchmark was based on knights gear, and says “Why work harder than you have to”, where my benchmark says “Just because you succeeded, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try succeed even more spectacularly next time”

The idea is sound but the implementation is not.

Let’s take Mesmer Greatsword for example. Which does reduced damage below 900 units distance and a max range of 1200 – this means that once the enemy closes a mere 300 units; the damage penalty kicks in; that’s about 1-2 seconds even if the victim is crippled.

Then of course we have the common adventuring environments; cramped rooms and narrow corridors in dungeons don’t lend themselves a great deal of space n which to range a target from 1,200 units. Compounded by the fact at extreme range when a clone dies with the absence of no other nearby targets, mobs tend to shrug and reset themselves.

Now let’s have a look at the other attack skills on the GS bar.

• Mirror Blade: Throw an illusory blade that bounces granting might to allies and hitting enemies reasonably hard – despite the attack having a range of 1,200, you must be standing quite close (<600) to stand a chance to receive the bounce and strike the target multiple times. So, to do max damage with one skill you must sacrifce the other

• Mind Stab: TINY ground targetted AoE that removes boons. While 1,200 range, the short delay in casting and tiny target area make it all but useless at long range against moving targets, where the odds of actually clicking them is extremely small.

So, yeah… I understand what the devs are trying to do; but GW2 is too fast paced and too closed environment to actually pull it off, the window of opportunity is too small for the payoff.

Which brings me to the final part for mesmer GS: The payoff

While you might think this is the sniper weapon, and therefore logically it is very high DPS used at extreme range; it’s not the case at all. Mesmer’s scepter boasts significantly higher single target ranged DPS (And no range penalty!); as well as a superior selection of phantasms from the offhand, making the “sniper penalty” all the more dubious. (While the scepter has a range of “only” 900, that’s 900 units of useful damage, Vs greatsword’s 300 window of opportunity before it’s being under-ranged.

(If you’re wondering why so many mesmer’s use greatsword not sceptre, it’s because sceptres projectile is quite slow making it rather less useful in WvW. While greatsword’s phantasm is a good ranged AoE attack – sceptres however are very popular in sPvP)

AntiGw.9367:

A giant dragon threatens to destroy the world:

let’s give him a pedicure.

Heh, so I’m not alone in noticing that. I’m always cracking wise about that whenever I fight the dragon lieutenants.

“His defences are down. Pedicure team, ADVANCE!”
“We’re going to need a stronger pair of nail clippers!”

etc

I don’t feel so guilty now about giving up GS and staff for sceptre/pistol for my ranged option.

For high level fractals significant toughness isn’t really nessecary. Even if you run full knights you’ll die in one of two good hits, learning to properly dodge, block and distort through attacks will serve you much and leaves your gear free for functional stats (Power/Precision/Crit, or in this case, a bit of healing and boon duration runes).

The more DPS, the faster your enemy dies and the less you need to worry about surviving for an extended period. Running boon support build alongside DPS tuned stats will allow protection and regneration to further take the edge off the incidental hits without slowing down the fight

Or the worlds tiniest violin…

Female asura and male asura have a slightly different selection of ears and hairstyles – though both sets have their charms. And obviously the facial options vary quite considerably. Asides from that male and female asura share animations and clothing options in the majority of cases.

The female voice set tends to be a little catty and hostile (“You’re dumb, you’re gonna die and leave a dumb corpse!”) whereas the male asura voiceset epitomises the whole smart-and-knows-it schtick (“I have you beaten, you just don’t know it yet!”), overall I tend to prefer the male voice set, but nonetheless I main a female asura simply because I wanted to make them look ridiculously cute and male characters look odd in pink ;p

Every armour class complains about their limitations.

• If you’re medium, you’re gonna have to wear a longcoat almost without exception.

• If you’re light, you’re going to have a skirt or robe.

• If you’re heavy you can forget wearing anything soft, it’s all metal clasps, plates and spikes.

As a light armour user I often look longingly at the straps and buckles all the medium armours get, and wish I could have an outfit that didn’t have a skirt

darkace.8925:

That’s not how things work in civilized societies. If the right to ownership was determined by might alone the strong would own everything and the weak would own nothing. “You have a nice house. You’d better hope you can beat me in a fight, otherwise it’s going to be my house.”

We’re not talking about on a personal scale, but that of governments and nations.

And that is almost exactly how it works in “civilised lands”… take America for example. European settlers arrived, and promptly killed, converted or integrated the local population and took over administration of their land. (Application of force 1)

Later, the war of independence arose, and colonists took the land away from the British and formed their own republic. (Application of force 2). In turn there was the American civil war, where the South wanted to cede from the republic, and were basically beaten into submission (Application of force 3).

So, tell me – if that’s not how civilised countries set their borders, shouldn’t the folks in the US be giving back that land right about now?

Like I say, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and if you’re reading this in a first world country; you’re living in a glass house, because you are the charr

“…and they think they own the place just because their great great grand-daddy took a dump there 200 years ago” /paraphrased.

Seriously, Tyria’s long term history is relatively clean, with only a few known past owners of any given lands. Look at Europe and tell the current countries that they need to give back their land to the “original owners” – you’d first have to agree at what point in the last 120,000 years you consider “original”…

…look at the US for that matter. People living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones

So yes, the charr historically held the land, the humans took it, the charr took it back. If the humans want back ascalon they’re going to need to fight for it or negotiate for it but there’s no prescident to just give it to the humans

In GW1 mesmer’s were all about subverting an enemies actions to make them do what you wanted them to do, restricting their ability to act. ie. wastrels worry would injure them if they didn’t act now, while empathy would cause damage every time they attacked.

Torment and Confusion both epitomise this, the former forcing players to limit their movements, the latter forcing them to limit their actions – both on threat of serious injury.

Secondly, as you have said, (And according to the devs) this is a mobility thing too – wanting to give these classes a way of stopping enemies fleeing without giving them increased mobility (Mesmer has the fewest options for mobility of any class in the game – having only 1 on-demand blink and 1 swiftness skill the former taking up a valuable utility slot, the latter forcing them to use an offhand focus)

By contrast guardian already has a sizable arsenal of gap closers and control skills ranging from utility blinks, to leaps, to bumpers to ranged immobilises

Mesmer have an entire trait line and a number of skills and utilities dedicated to interruption, and they are likely to be buffed in the next patch.

But interruption will remain a dead art as long as we have no way of telling what the other guy is casting.

GW2 features telegraphs and relatively unique skill visuals, which was a nice idea to save cluttering the screen and instead you learn to recognise the tells; however in practice the lense flares and visual effects of battle often hide even the largest and most obvious telegraphs (ie. entire hazard markers, ettin smashes etc). Not to mention how different races tell differently, and some races like Asura are much harder to recognise the tells on than others (ie norn) at a distance.

If interruption to to become a viable feature in the game we need to bring back GW1’s casting bars, where skills and cast times of your opponent appeared under their health bar so you can decide which skill to interuppt and when. Until then interupts will remain a gimmick in PvP and PvE alike.

Sadly watching their animation and trying pre-empt it is the only way, which is IMO one reason why interruption is a dead art in GW2. unless you know the skills, weapons and telegraphs of every skill in teh game there is no way to really guess what your enemy is doing and whether it’s worth trying to interupt it

Even healing skills arn’t reliable, there are some heals that don’t create the telltale white/rainbow glow; and heaven forbid you want to interuppt an asura – their telegraphs are almost imperceptible to a large player like a charr or norn

I’m certainly intrigued – if the notes are real then I can foresee the possibility of making a high-DPS “boss killer” mesmer build that uses mantras/interuppts/GS to stack large amounts of might and boons and share them with the party while simultaneously burning the target hard through direct attacks.

When you strike a boss with an interuppt, even if defiant prevents the interuppt you still get a popup that say “interuppted” – I’m curious whether that interupption popup confers interuppt related bonuses

A hybrid shatter mesmer running it could stack some serious might

OP’s post is a giant strawman fallacy; or at the very least a misrepresentation of the facts.

Just because people engage in farming, it doesn’t mean they LIKE RNG farming; it happens to be the only source of income they know – and this demographic also makes up the majority of players, so you could reasonably draw any comparrison validly ie.

The majority of RNG farmers in GW2 like killing mobs
The majority of RNG farmers in GW2 like playing MMOs

The statement is fundamentally correct, but irrelevant. Secondly pretty much every trader I know is critical of RNG boxes too; perhaps moreso as they have the insight to not buy them

So, I worked my kitten off this week to get started on my magic find set for farming. Collecting pristine relics, mist essences etc etc.

So, I finally got Snaff’s gyre – it’s not a great item, but it’s better than any exotic MF jewellery by a fair margin at:
+68 power
+68 precision
+10% MF

I popped it into the mystic toilet, along with my hard earned mist essences… flushed the lever… and out pops a kitten and a wad of kitten-stained toilet paper. Sorry – Snaff’s Gyre (Infused), except this is it’s stats now:
+50 power
+50 precision
+18 toughness
+18 vitality
+10% MF
+5 agony resistance

…yeah. 18 less power/precision than it was before i put it into the toilet – you know, when you spend a weeks worth of materials on a POWER/PRECISION MF ring, it’s because you need POWER/PRECISION, not vit/toughness.

Seriously after getting the middle finger on another issue earlier in the week anet had better sort this crap out, if I get one more response from anet customer service to the effect of “I’m sorry we don’t have the power to fix bugs that robbed you of your items, go cry some more” Star Trek Online is gettign reinstalled…

I do believe this is the one place on the internet where you could post pictures of fuzzy kittens being happy; and they’d complain that they prefer puppies instead.

Some people just want to see the world burn

People always assume that a build is going to be capable of doing everything simultaneously – and do it well.

Like back in the day people’d complain how mesmers can create a massive damage spike with shatters, while simultaneously time warping their party while invisible, turning everyone into moas and then summon over 9000 phantasms to rip them to bits and reflecting every shot fired at them

People now realise that actually doing that requires at least 3 seperate builds and a single mesmer cannot do all of the above.

People now know thieves will be a recipient of torment, but they don’t actually know how it’ll be implemented, it’s not unlikely that backstab builds and heartseeker spammers won’t really be able to leverage this condition as fully.

Now condition mesmers… you’re gonna want to be afraid, so very afraid of those. Condition bunker mesmers are already a pain in the kitten to break, their greatest weakness is that they are also one of the slowest moving mesmer builds – but give ’em torment and running away is so much harder

I’ve played mesmer almost exclusively since beta and live and breath mastering the class. My non-adherence to “flavour of the month” builds is such that I’ve been accused of being a “noob” because I was using skills and weapons regarded as “inferior” even though the players doing the accusing’s knowledge of the class was typically flawed or limited to pre-fab builds.

Amusing anecdotes including being told I was a scrub for not being able to blink through a wall and shortcut a part of a dungeon (I eventually figured out the exploit he was trying to force me to do; but it didn’t involve using blink at all – the guy wouldn’t accept that blink could not pass through walls), or being told to stop using scepter/pistol on a boss fight because scepter was a “noob weapon” and GS is better. (When actually scepter/pistol does far better DPS for ranging single targets, and packs built in defences, as any sPvP’r will tell you).

…and let’s not forget the sheer number of times I’ve been accused of rolling mesmer because it’s flavour of the month or the easy option…

Alright, so, everyone knows scepter is absolutely useless in PvE right?

Well that’s just it, everyone knows it’s useless.

But I’ve been running over the numbers though and, I’m not entirely convinced it is anymore. In fractals and dungeons I usually run sword/focus/GS, using sword/focus primarily for it’s superior DPS/control, and switching to GS when I need to range stuff or want the extra phantasm up

A problem I often experience with GS is that in many scenarios where melee is awkward or undesirable (like mossman) it’s not possible to get maximum range reliably which undercuts DPS further. There’s also the minor detail that iZerker is an AoE phantasm, it does good damage but it does less DPS than the specialised single target phantys (Duellist, Swordsman) and dies easily – and when I’m ranging a boss, it’s usually a single target.

So, I’ve been running over the number of scepter and GS in a power/crit build – their baseline damage values are as follows:

Primary chain:

• Greatsword 1: 348 /1.5 sec channel = 232 dps
• Scepter 1: 168 + 168 + 252 / 2.0 second chain = 294 dps

Burst attack

• Greatsword 2: 259 / 8 second CD (32 dps/64 dps if bounces)
• Scepter 3: 840 damage / 15 second CD (56 dps)

Furthermore the utility skill – GS3, is almost completely useless and widely regarded as such, whereas scepter #2 is actually pretty darn useful (block/high damage counter, convert into ranged blind), and GS1 is even weaker in close quarters, a problem Scepter 1 doesn’t suffer

GS5 is pretty situational, throwing your enemies about in dungeons can cause more harm than help by screwing up your allies attack chains, and GS4 as I covered is great, but more adept at cleaning out mooks with AoE than boss killing (the main reason you’ll need to range anything in a dungeon) – while scepter leaves slots 4 and 5 for an offhand of your choice, such as duellist which packs superior DPS to iZerker on single targets and also benefits from being able to range at a safe distance where it’s less likely to get hit.

Is there anything I’ve overlooked that undermines my analysis of scepter/offhand as a boss-slaying set, or has the mainhand scepter just gotten such a bad name in the past that nobody has really stopped to look at it closely recently?

This is a problem for any class capable of damaging large numbers of enemies quickly.

Mesmer’s feedback bubble can be a death sentence too; every time feedback reflects a projectile, and the projectile hits a guy with retaliation you take ret damage. Dropping feedback in front of a large enough zerg can kill you dead simply because the zerg kept shooting themselves.

In general it’s pretty common for EB to have a queue to even get into, having a sizable group of players fighting an NPC is an equally sizable group of players who can’t get in who would actually be help

The whole idea of having PvE daily chests, JP’s and exploration objectives inside WvW is in my opinion a terrible idea as it encourages non-combatant “tourists” who take up valuable player slots but do not actually help

Today’s first brush with arenanet customer support has badly shaken my faith in the game’s long term playability.

Up til now I’ve been a very vocal supporter and fan of the game, but this incident has left me with a very bad taste in my mouth. Arenanet needs to recognise that the MMO market is a big place these days and you really can’t afford to treat your customer base like dirt if you want them to keep playing and paying. I’m already considering reinstalling Star Trek Online…

Yeah I got response back wiping their hands of the matter.

Please note, the character deletion process was designed to prevent accidental deletion and asks the player to confirm, by retyping the character’s name, that the deletion is desired and intended.

Sure – and I WANTED to delete the character, I forgot that they had my limited edition quiver still on them… and I’d buy a new one if I could but, you know… limited edition. If this was any other MMO I could just grab a new one, but nope, GW2 sells you a single copy at twice the price and won’t even refund you the item in the event of an accident (Which guess, what Star Trek Online did for me one time!)

The cash shop in this game is every kind of rediculous and is turning me off it bit by bit (Speaking as someone from GW1, City of Heroes and Star Trek Online, where the cash shop bought you permanent unlocks for a much smaller fee)

You really have backed yourself into a corner with that decision.

Condition builds REQUIRE precision to be viable so you can stack bleeds via sharper image. Without precision, you cannot generate bleeds, and without bleeds you’re basically doing no condition damage worth speaking of (With 50% crit chance, and maxed condition damage iWarden can stack up bleeds on a par with the damage dealt from a power/crit build)

My advice would be to start getting on dungeon teams or start banking some karma – then go to the temples in Orr and get yourself some appropriate karma or dungeon gear. That way you don’t have to blow all your gold on getting a new set of gear that isn’t awful.

As it stands, full carrion isn’t really something you can use by itself.

(Your predictament does make me wonder though how carrion/rampagers would compare against zerker/cavalier for DPS… I’d still advise switching your gear up for a power/crit build. So, berserker, cavalier stats.)

What should the support ticket be filed under?

I accidentlly did this exact same thing with Rox’s quiver skin – my own stupid mistake and I’d buy another if I could, but I can’t because they removed them from the cash shop leaving me to rely on their kindness to restore the item as opposed to giving them more money and fixing my own mistake.

Slow down and relax :p

When and how did it dissapear – might you have placed it in your bank by accident. It’s soulbound, so you can’t have accidentally transferred it to another character, capacitors cannot be salvaged, and it’s ascended, so you cannot delete it without written confirmation.

So logically it must be somewhere in your inventory or bank.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Glenn.3417:

Same for necro’s focus #4 Reaper’s Touch. It gives my jagged horror regen instead of stacking more vulnerability on foes.

Those jagged horrors are so useless and die so fast the regen is completely wasted lol.

It has bounced off minions for many months now.

Just like it bounces off the devs radar /bah dum tsh

Aeonblade.8709:

To answer your question: Maybe, but we the players have to keep being vocal about how displeased most of us are with the end game.

The “most” who happen to be the same few people on the forum complaining, as opposed to the dozens of “full” servers with hundreds of thousands of players who play every day without uttering a word of complaint…

The sad bit is that sometimes cheaters get mistaken for legitimate game mechanics.

The other day someone got angry and threatened to boot me for being a “scrub” in a dungeon because I couldn’t blink through a solid wall and portal people to the other side.

Me: “That’s not how blink works…”
Leader: “Mesmer did it last run, you have got the skill right noob”
Me: “Yes, I just tried it didn’t you see?”
Leader: “Other teleport the one that goes through walls, do it or I’ll get someone who can”
Player: “Seriously, they don’t have a blink that goes through walls”

Even without worrying about swiftness at higher level dungeons focus + wardens feedback really is mandatory. Mesmer’s ability to set up reflect/absorb is only exceeded by guardians making it about as close to as a class role GW2 has.

Not to mention the ability to pull large groups together for easy nuking and the swiftness/snare it provides – and the amazingly powerful (thought difficult to master) phantasm.

I figure it’s about time I post up my current and favourite build so far.

The Incredible Phantasmally Supportive Zerker

This particular build is orientated towards high-level fractals and dungeons rather than WvW or PvP, my aim in it is to bring a decent amount of support to keep the team standing and ticking over at maximum efficiency without skimping on personal DPS (Because, as any veteran dungeoneer should realise, the faster you kill the enemy, the less likely you are to die, support is no excuse to cut back and leave DPS in the hands of your allies.)

Gear
Mixture of knights, cavalier and primarily zerkers keeps toughness at a reasonable level (combined with high hitpoints from inspiration) to provide a minimally safe level of survivability while maximising your damage output.

A perception sigil on your focus offhand lets you stack perception to get your crit chance way up, combined with fury on phantasms this means phanties will be critting practically every hit once you get the ball rolling.

Traits
Both phantasm DPS bonuses are included – despite the apparent lack of shatter bonuses you should still make use of shatters, especially during AoE pulls or if you know a boss is capable of doing big smashes as in these cases it’s unlikely your phantasms will live to attack a second time.

Support comes in the form of

• Healing from phantasms to adjacent allies
• Spammable AoE heal for 2,880 a pop via mantra charging
• 3 reflects on short cooldowns.
• Time warp
• Boon sharing

Usage
The first thing to cover is your AoE heal. The mantra heal is powerful, and since you get to fire off the mantra afterwards your DPS isn’t a bust; but using it WILL decrease your overall DPS, you are NOT a dedicated healer – the optimum time to use it is when your heavy hitters are already on cooldown and you’re just spamming your basic attack. If allies near you look like they could use a top-up, edge your way over to them while casting the mantra and give them a pep. You should not be spamming the heck out of it to try keep your team fully healed, or casting it to the dertiment of casting your own heavy hitters except in exceptional circumstances

Next up is boon sharing, you might notice this build doesn’t actually have a lot of boons itself, what you want to do be doing is looking for members of your team who does – the guardian, the warrior’s banners etc. Keep in range of your boon-spamming buddy, and when you get a decent amount on your, use signet of inspiration to mirror them onto the rest of the team; with a good warrior it’s easy to get everyone’s might stacks up to 25 like this (An ideal time to drop timewarp and send party DPS to stratospheric heights!)

Reflects are a no brainer, but people arn’t always familiar with mesmer mechanics; in a fight where reflects are important, let them know that “standing in or behind the pink marks on the ground are really really good for their survival”.

Other than that standard mesmer strategy applies; use leap to root targets when you set up warden so they can’t easily escape it, make good use of sword 1 and GS1 when everything else is on cooldown (they actually do reasonable damage with this configuration (~2-3k damage)), use deceptive evasion to create clones to get that +9% damage modifier, shatter your clones if you can pop 3 more back up immediately and mind wrack is off CD etc…

…and don’t forget to swap weapons frequently to make use of both sets of phantasms. your playstyle should be that of a skirmisher, jumping into the fight to dish out massive AoE burst, then hopping back out before the inevitable counterattack

Huh, I consider myself relatively casual yet some of the folks here calling themselves hardcore make me look like a crazy person xD

- Love taking classes and builds to their logical extreme, taking them beyond simple theorycraft and maximising their effectiveness within my playstyle.
- In a similar vein I like sticking to a couple classes I really enjoy and utterly mastering them.
- Over 1,300 hours played.
- Have the gifts and gold, but not actually interested in any of the extant legendaries
- Fractal level 38

I just consider myself fairly casual because I’m always game to party with non veterans to show them the ropes, havn’t bothered to sit down and complete dungeon master (Though I am most the way there by accident) and don’t actively grind stuff for gold.

Having “mostly exotic” isn’t hardcore that’s undergearred in my books xD

Building around confusion isn’t wise; confusion is bad in PvE simply because mobs don’t attack frequently enough – thats not to say confusion can’t be part of a delicious balanced breakfast

However recent experiments of mine seem to indicate a degree of parity between power based and condition based if you aim to stack bleeds.

iWarden, and iDuellist can stack a collosal amount of bleeding. While basic sword, greatsword and staff clones actual put out decent damage due to bleeds. All added together and taken in context the resulting DPS is comparable to a similar balanced power build*

*Cavalier/zerker balanced set mix compared to rabid.

I should stress though that it is only comparable not preferable – stacking for crit/power remains the clear winner, and is also less susceptible to the exceptions that snare up condition builds (Foes with condition stripping mechanics, immunities, inanimate objects like the the elemental focus in the blizzard fractal or WvW siege etc).

RoRo.8270:

No and people need to stop attributing nonsense to RNG chests. If you stand at X spot it will increase the rng chests or wear magic find seriously? It is a coincidence

Man, I remember this in Diablo 2 – some people’d get really cheesed off if you didn’t pull the boss to exactly the right “lucky spot” to down it – and when the desired loot didn’t drop it was obviously your fault you scrub

“You’ll never take ascalon HWOARRRR!”

The ascalon commander’s dubious attempt at a battlecry in the invasion fractal never ceases to crack me up

Incentives in the form of semi-precious baubles (“shinies” in their native tongue) may help; if the skritt have been compressed to such a small scale then presumably even a very small sample of iridescent material would appear a monumentally sized incentive.

Furthermore if that holds true, then greater compression yields greater efficiency in terms of the amount of materials needed.

Shrink rays may not have the desired effect given they necessarily reduce the scalar values associated with the matter (If they did not, how would a miniaturized individual metabolise non-miniaturized atmospheric gases?), so while the physical displacement between skritt is reduced, so is the scalar value of the displacement by an equal value.

GuzziHero.2467:

OMG I sooo hope the next Living World story deals with the Steam Creatures.

I love those things!

Pretty sure the sky pirates and their steam tech are independent of the steam creatures. The steam creatures already have an explanation and story arc, though though they no doubt stand to be expanded upon.

Sebulon.7683:

I’ll pack my stuff and become a traveling hobo, eventually settling in Vietnam, marrying a local and starting a fishing company. And hopefully I’ll never hear of Crates/Coffers anymore.

Hate to break it to you, but South East asia practically invented RNG chests in MMO’s :p

They’ll do what they did with blurred frenzy/masterful reflection. They’ll change the tooltip description to fit the new behavior and call it a day

Ok. Infused items are always ascended quality.

Basic exotic/rare items cannot usually be made ascended, with a couple exceptions (like the karka shell or capacitor), and accessories and amulets cannot presently be infused.

To infuse a ring, you first need an ascended ring of the desired type, then you place it in the mystic forge with 1 shard, 3 globs, and 5 vials of mist essence. To infuse a backpiece, you need 1 gift of ascension, 1 glob of mist essence, and 250 ectoplasm.

Infused rings can be obtained free if you’re lucky at fractal level 26 of or higher. Ascended gear you buy at a vendor is never infused (Usually… are you sure the WvW ones are pre-infused?)

Don’t confuse “infused” items, with infusions/infusion slots; infused items are items that have an inherent +5 agony resistance built into them and are named like Cufflink of Awesome (Infused), and are only necessary for high level fractals (Beyond level 30 namely), any ascended item can have an infusion added to it, and those infusions are very easily obtained (75 fractal relics for a simple, versatile infusion)

The devs need to balance the usefulness of stuff besides DPS to achieve this however; right now the PvE metagame is all kinds of broken.

You talk about not making enemies bullet sponges; but take lupicus for example. One group downed him in 46 seconds using crazy DPS, no control, minimal support – most groups would take minutes to down him, and it’d be a tough fight – how hard people will find a fight is heavily dependent on how long the fight lasts and that in turn depends primarily on DPS.

Increase hitpoints, fights last longer, glass cannons are more likely to die, but then badly-built characters, or bunkerish characters get bored as the fight takes too long. Lower the hitpoints, fights become quicker but glass cannons literally faceroll through the content.

It’s quite the conundrum how to make things challenging while keeping the challenge relevant to all classes and builds.

So it wasn’t my imagination that their model had changed…

I’ll happily suffer 3 more months of messed up bounce mechanics and broken iZerker for this :P