Guild Wars 2

Norn Mesmer.

Giant …

• People don’t expect the norn to be a mesmer … so your clones confuse people even more
• Your illusions cover not only you but your allies.
• Putting on light armor with the Honor of the Waves skin makes you look like you’re wearing heavy armor.
• Weapon size is dictated by the height of the character so your weapons are as big as possible (if you are as tall as Norn-ly possible)
• Norn’s actually hover their greatsword when shooting with it … Asura do not (my first 80 Mesmer was an Asura)

Last night:
Sebrent = Mesmer, Khann = Elementalist

Khann: I’m moving at half speed so you can barely keep up.
Sebrent: I know … and I’m using Focus, Swiftness-on-heal, and Blink.

Crit chance is excellent for condition oriented mesmers because our illusions have a 100% chance to inflict bleeding per crit.

Your scepter’s skin is a Princess Wand and your focus’s skin is a flower.

Well … I almost missed it due to being aggravated with the class changes complete oversight on my 2 main chars (we changed quickness but compensated you … except very commonly used Mesmer elite and Ranger trait … you get no compensation).

However, thanks to guildies in TeamSpeak, I got to try out the new WvW experience (i.e. no culling) and I have to give props to ArenaNet for that. No culling and I encountered no noticeable performance hit.

The thing that was hilarious though was seeing all the bad thieves who thought they were good (thanks to culling) now simply die. I’m enjoying that this is pushing class diversity … though Rangers still seem to be getting less and less … poor guys.

You mean the WvW patch that forced them to disable WvW failed to successfully fix Ranger pet rez? … why am I not surprised …

When a mesmer shatters, you can still target them and even attack them unless it was distortion (60 sec cooldown) … horrible argument is horrible. l2p and not talk about classes you have no clue about.

Mesmer got knocked too for quickness … anyone notice anything to compensate for Time Warp (an elite!) getting a 50% nerf? Nope.

This constant lack of QA, the hush-hush policy ArenaNet has adopted, and apparent disconnect between the devs and the community is why I’m simply taking a break.

I’d rather go play in Firefall’s actual beta (completely different community policy there) than continue to play around in GW2.

Heck, we were promised there wouldn’t be a gear grind … I’m forced to do 10+ fractals, daily achievements, and/or guild missions if I want best-in-slot for back, accessory (x2), neck, and ring (x2).

Mesmer specific, but…
My clones still don’t show-offhand weapons.
Map completion star only shows up on the real Mesmer.

No or severely lacking QA …

… so I’m not a happy camper … even less so since I supported them with money for gems …

Dahkeus.8243:

Nice. However, after the quickness change, the best group is probably going to be a 5 warrior group, lol.

Which, amusingly (not really), got buffed …

Dastion.3106:

Oh.. Did they actually rename one of the Mind Stabs like JonP said they would?

Don’t hold your breath. 5 months ago he told Rangers that they were aware that that class was the most in need of improvements … 5 months later and they still are getting nerf after nerf, no pet AI, no pet dungeon fixes (except finally agony resist).

Dastion.3106:

They have the ability to tweak skills without bringing the game down or needing to patch.

I dunno … their “Big” WvW Patch brought down WvW … lol.

Chopps, the OP was about how the Mesmer’s illusions were not missing their attacks simply because he was moving while his Ranger pet was missing its attacks simply because the Mesmer was moving.

~5 months ago … “We know Ranger is currently the class in most need of help” … Ranger receives nerfs patch after patch.

“Big” WvW Patch gets pushed back 1 month because it’s not ready … patch forces ArenaNet to disable World vs World …

I’m again forced to question quality assurance.

I will say that Mesmer sword clones have similar issues to Ranger pets.

What I think you’re mostly talking about is the ranged clones and the phantasms.

FYI:
Illusion = Mesmer Clone or Phantasm
Clone = Mesmer illusion that looks like the Mesmer and does negligible direct damage
Phantasm = Mesmer illusion that obviously isn’t the real mesmer and does good damage.

Mesmer clones work somewhat like pets in that they auto-attack like the Mesmer (though somewhat slower … bug?)

Phantasms attack once every 6 seconds … exception being the Warden.

This makes them work differently.

That being said, I think Ranger pets need improved AI. Simply using cripple/chill is not always sufficient even though it should be. Taking a trait to make your pet move 30% faster should making it reliably against non-swift foes, but it does not. Even a pet that gets in melee range of an enemy with the same move speed should be able to hit more reliably than they currently do. It’s not difficult to stick to a target in melee.

I’m not a fan of when the devourer aggros other NPCs due to its use of this skill. Often it won’t be in any real danger and then aggro a group of NPCs. I’m not pleased with it when this happens … especially since I have no control over when it does this.

I think he’s saying he’d like for fights to last at least 10 seconds.

If so, I agree with that sentiment.

I wish ArenaNet had looked at the highest burst potential of each class in full glass cannon and tweaked the numbers such that if one glass cannon just stood there, it would take another glass cannon 5 seconds to kill them. 5 seconds is not a long time but it is long enough to prevent insta-gib garbage.

Oh well … another oversight …

evilapprentice.6379:

Oxstar.7643:

If there were classes that could just debunk bunkers (hah!) what would be the point of having bunkers at all? So you’re telling me that thieves should do full damage even if I hold my gear shield up?

THERE IS NO MIDDLE FINGER BIG ENOUGH!

Nope. The post specifically said “some % of damage, assigned on an ability by ability basis not just some blanket number for all abilities, probably very low for most abilitites”

The point wasn’t to completely neutralize bunkers – it was about forcing bunkers to fight a thief different than they would fight a warrior – force them to choose strengths and weaknesses, adopt a different playstyle, etc…

(1) That was not my advise to you on how to get flanking strike to hit

(2) I don’t have to face 180 degrees from my opponent to hit them with flanking strike.

(3) You have argued against the capability to turn during the using of flanking strike, including in between the first and second strike of it

I agree, Mesmer is pretty great. I love mine.

Engineer is the only class in the game with access to bleeding, burning, poison, and condition damage using just their class skills and they aren’t really short on any of them in a condition build.

Necromancer is the only class with multiple ways to give back conditions on their self to their foe … and the only class that can spread conditions from one target to other targets nearby.

Those are your top 2 condition damage capabilities in my mind.

My cat has hit someone for 5k, but I was using Rage as One and Sic’em. This was back when Guard let your pet up on walls and I was running with 4 other beastmaster spec’d Rangers clearing out enemy walls of towers and players. Amusing times, lol.

“Oh, I’m safe up on the wall … oh God, 5 cats!”

The issue is heartseeker has held far too many thieves’ hands.

Facing affects most abilities in the game … perhaps you would be aware of this if heartseeker was on of those abilities affected.

Low aggro is not 0 aggro. Do a high level fractal (26+) and run into grawl, ascalon, dredge, etc.. Dead pet when one of the horde of enemies decides to skin your pet.

Whoa now. Let’s not aim at the phantasm. Stay on topic. Changing the phantasm doesn’t change the speed of Mesmers.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Sebrent.3625:

I was landing FS easily on my engineer guildie without having to use IF. In fact, I was forced to use my skills without setting them up with IF because he quickly learned that IF was my “goto” opener for various combos.

That’s the point of other posters here. Once one learn how the skill work, the expectation changes.

Yep. I imagine many of the other posters complaining about IF here would’ve died to my guildie because they’d be too stubborn to change up their attack. Stubborness only gets you so far … it almost got me killed until I realized he was using IF as his cue to dodge, etc.

It’s March 21st. The next patch is March 26th. I think people can keep their pants on for another 5 days.

I for one am quite curious to see what changes we will have received. They had mentioned in the state of the game that they increased maul damage and lowered some cooldowns on the greatsword. The former is nice, the latter is interesting.

Heck, how knows, maybe we’ll finally be pleasantly surprised.

capuchinseven.8395:

Bryzy.2719:

That’s all well and good, but one of the original points of this thread was that there are few viable ranger builds (particularly for WvW, spvp, tpvp), and the power of a ranger severely lacks diversity when it comes to playing different builds.

Yup.

But we’re far from the only class with that issue.

As ridiculous as Elementalist is … it has forced them into a specific spec (some w/ slight variations of it) else they are considered weaker Elementalists.

Think about your current idea, Ratty. Aggro is going to have what affect on AOE attacks? Cleave attacks?

Ran.3251:

The only thing more I’ll say is this: If you haven’t dumped points into BM line then your pets won’t be nearly as viable. However if you boost them up, they become tanky, kittened DPS machines. Yes it is kind of lame that your almost forced to put points into BM, but it does make all the difference. GS defense skills plus a beefed up pet is a very formidable build IMO.

Formidable 1v1. Possible 2v1. I’ve found that the tanky beastmaster build does not scale well to larger fights except for serving as a delivery unit for entangling roots.

I was landing FS easily on my engineer guildie without having to use IF. In fact, I was forced to use my skills without setting them up with IF because he quickly learned that IF was my “goto” opener for various combos.

Faeyd.5094:

Actually it’s the perfect illustration. There has to be specs that are simple to play and still get some joy out of or the game dies quickly due to no new players. The fact that the thief is actually far better when played with the stabilizers off is good class design. Now rack up a load of experience on the thief and go back to warrior… bingo, thieves no longer a problem. You have Learned to Play so why is it you think it’s OK for the guy next to you dying to HS spam shouldn’t have to learn to play to stop it?

First, I disagree. Look at the Mesmer class. Go back in our threads from beta. People thought we were a horrible class, weak, hard to learn, etc.. Still, many of us chose mesmer as our first/main character and now look at that community.

Second, There is a difference between “simple to play” and “simple to be effective”.

Warrior is “simple to play”. However, a warrior can’t spam 1 button and continuously close on someone in melee. A Ranger is “simple to play”, but they can’t just spam 1 button to beat another noob.

The problem with the guy next to me having trouble with HS spam is that he is forced to get better to win. The noob doing noobseeker spam is not forced to get better to win. In fact, the guy dying to noobseeker spam may be the better noob, but still losing because they are at the noob level.

Dahkeus.8243:

@ ODB: Necromancers have no teleports like mesmers and have crap for mobility, so a 25% sig isn’t making them into thieves.

Oh really? No teleports like Mesmer eh?

• Summon Flesh Worm – Not only does it give you a pet that can attack, but it also gives you your own point to teleport back to. It can also be cast and then instantly teleported to to be treated as a teleport.
• Spectral Walk – your own personal teleport … except rather than being able to also teleport others, it has 30 sec less cooldown and gives you swiftness with a base duration of 30 seconds.

Mesmer has what?

• Blink – just a 900 range teleport & stunbreaker (your worm is 1,200 range, a pet w/ range attacks, and you poison anyone at the location you ported to)
• Portal – place it at one location, run to another location, have to be standing on the portal to portal to the other one (spectral walk you start it and move as you please … port if you want during the duration … enjoy swiftness

I’d stay they aren’t exactly the same but you definitely have things like them.

I fail to see how what I posted (and you quoted) contradicts what has been said about the ranger having few viable builds.

I’m not sure what you’re doing as a Condition Ranger that is so horrible. What other class has as much access to bleeds, burns, and poisons as the Ranger?

Elementalist only has bleeds and burns
Engineer has bleeds, burns, poison, and confusion (yeah, awesome condition class)
Guardian has burns
Mesmer has bleeds, burns, and confusion
Necromancer has bleeds and poison … except with one signet.
Thief has bleeds and poison
Warrior has bleeds and burns

… only the Mesmer and Engineer have 3+.
Only the engineer has all 3 damage per sec conditions.

Ranger has a pet that can do solid direct damage to aid them against condition removal heavy opponents … Engineer can’t.

Chopps. How about you make some more youtube videos showing the ranger dps compared to warrior but this time use greatsword … also have one where you have to make your pet stop fighting for 1/2 the fight.

I’d be curious how that impacts how quickly you can kill the NPC.

Stealth is only “superior” to the other two in that noobs are baffled the most by stealth. It’s like when using a reflection and a noob thief spams unload 2+ times.

Flanking strike worked very well for me again last night in 1v1 duels against guildies. Stripped my guildie’s engineer of his ton of boons and then proceeded with the kill.
Without removing those boons I would’ve died to retal.

Faeyd.5094:

Sebrent.3625:

Against other Thieves I was tearing them up because Thieves don’t like being dazed and I had a closer that immobilized. Weakness and cripple are also an issue for thieves.

Sword thief is a great way to troll other thieves :-)

So it was a divisive question Seb It proves fighting thieves is a L2 kitten ue.

If the ‘class’ was inherently overpowered you should at best get a 50/50 win rate. Yet here you are on a spec that noone considers overpowered destroying thieves who use the overpowered spec… you see where I am coming from?

You’ll have to elaborate because I don’t see how a Thief killing another Thief proves that a thief is not OP. I think the fact that some of those thieves could present a challenge to my warrior but my thief soundly stomped them is a bit more telling.

I don’t think dagger+dagger is OP. My issue with dagger+dagger is it allows a noob spammer to be more effective than an average player trying to make good use of their skills on any other class. They have one skill that turns them, closes gaps for them, and does good damage. Don’t need wasd, get in range and press 2 2 2 2 2 2. If your target isn’t good, you get a kill. That’s pretty dumb and I hate seeing those players get kills against anyone.

I think sword thieves are much more dangerous than dagger. Sword gives up a little of the raw damage of dagger for more mobility, a built-in stunbreaker/condition removal, and a boon removal that hits almost as hard as backstab. The cripple and weakness from the auto-attack is also quite damaging. It makes it harder to fight back with direct damage and harder to leverage mobility.

<edit>
@ Ant Boogy:
Sounds like you fought a thief who was dumb enough to:

• Be surprised that a ranger had traps
• Not use a stunbreaker to escape from KD, etc.

</edit>

Meh. Feel = Mastery ;-)

… Largely because it is derived from practice.

Unload would be a bit OP as some classes rely on block (some warriors for example) to counter it.

Interesting idea though … Perhaps something else though.

1 sec immob so sorry.
Easy cloak and dagger … Tough cookies.
Daze from tactical strike … Poor baby.
Weakness and cripple from auto attack chain … Lol.
Shadow return if things “go south”.

Yep!

I’m aware of the other abilities and that it doesn’t work except on actual dodge rolls. Take a look at that dodge thief video on the thef forum. It shows the thief with prett much 100% evasion while also dropping caltrops on dodge rolls

15 trait points in the tree that will give you +15% boon duration … vigor on heal and use less endurance per dodge. That 8 seconds of vigor is already 9.2 with that +15% boon duration.

15 sec cooldown on two heals (12 if signet traited).

Bountiful theft gives Vigor.

One heal has a dodge built into it.
One utility has a dodge built into it.
Dagger+Dagger #3 (Death Blossom) has a dodge built into it.

Yes, you have to invest points and/or use skills to gain vigor … so does everyone else.

If part of a skill is movement, it should move you even if you are out of range.

Warrior skills work like this.
Ranger skills work like this.
Elementalist skills work like this.
etc.

The ranger auto-attack chain has you evading for approximately 42% of the chain (if you go by the tooltips. Quickness does not change this percentage as the less time you spend in the third swing, the less time you are evading.

What if Thief has more built in evades on their weapon skills? They’d have too many evades with some builds… as they honestly currently do already due to easy access to Vigor and having the only trait that effectively reduces the cost of dodge rolling instead of increasing endurance regen … thereby stacking extremely well with vigor. That combined with dodgetrops would be too much.

Bad class design is plaguing the class and preventing it from having certain changes as “good” options :-/

I don’t think Signet of Shadows is an issue as I was running it, Refuge, and Shadowstep as my three utilities.

Enemy mobility was not really an issue either as I was largely using this on enemy elementalists who are quite mobile (ridiculously so). The times I missed them are the times an autoattack or even heartseeker (if I had been using mh dagger) would have missed them as well.

I didn’t say anything about QA fixing. It is their job to check if current fixes correct known bugs and to check for additional issues/bugs.

Programming is programming. You have your desired functionality and then there are issues/bugs that you try to avoid and/or deal with. Websites are not simply HTML/CSS. They are not just Javascript/PHP/etc. There are backends coded in any number of languages, including C, C++, Java, etc. I know for a fact that a good bit of Amazon’s backend stuff is coded in Java (I authored some of it … if you’ve used their cloud [AWS] or a Kindle, you may have used some of my code).

I just find it amazing that something as obvious as Mesmer clones not having weapons wasn’t picked up before the patch went live. That’s a blatantly obvious thing.

I found it amazing that the Mesmer spears no longer hit.

I’m still amazed that my target and I can be on an open field and I will (seemingly randomly) receive “obstructed” for some of my shots with my Ranger shortbow.

Perhaps it isn’t the QA isn’t finding them and it’s the devs introducing bugs more quickly than they can fix them.

Either way, I’m not impressed with the code quality given that you have what I and many other programmers would assume should be largely (if not completely) unrelated aspects being broken by changing one of them. Seriously, look back at the last patch for Mesmer changes and tell me what their is related to the spear’s hitbox or the Mesmer clones having weapons.

Laika.8795:

Sebrent.3625:

I’m actually confused by adaneshade’s need to turn around to get the stab to work. When I use it I simply have to turn my character to hit with each stab. There is a delay between the two that gives you time to compensate for your movement and your foe’s movement.

The first strike occurs as you are still locked in animation, so it is in no way a matter of turning. The second strike, you get about .25sec to control, but the first strike (if you want the boon rip) is completely reliant on the pathing the game chooses for you…

You control the way you are facing before you hit flanking strike. That is how you control direction for the first strike. You then have more like 0.5 sec (seems slow to me) to control before the second strike lands. That is enough time to control your direction for the 2nd hit.

If you are trying to close on someone with flanking strike, I can imagine you’re going to miss as that is not a good use of it. I’m on top of my enemy when I use flanking strike on them and I have yet to have a problem hitting with it.

Steal is relatively fine as is. A Thief stealing from a Mesmer is awesome (for the Thief … sucks for the Mesmer … who doesn’t want every boon in the game? It’s friggin Runes of Lyssa without having to take Runes of Lyssa.

As far as Thieves and stealth … I think the current reveal change could very well be sufficient. With it, anyone fighting a thief knows that they have 3 seconds after that thief pops of stealth, no matter what, before the thief has a chance to re-stealth.

Svarty.8019:

Aberrant.6749:

See… I took that more as them all thinking “they just need to l2p against these classes then… why would we balance for such low skill level gameplay?”

To which I would reply that they should balance for such low skill level gameplay because the thieves themselves can be more effective than most other classes with less skill.

Yep. One thing that annoyed me last night on my warrior and made me get on my thief was that there was a group of 3 thieves that were horrible but since there were three of them they could just heartseeker spam and get kills. It didn’t matter if I created a gap as their one button turned them and closed the gap on me for them every time they pressed the magical #2.

Amusingly, sword thieves eat dagger thieves and stealth is a great counter to noobseeker spam.

I have found the +300 toughness & healing from Shadow Arts very useful for the sword. I imagine it will be even more useful with the upcoming changes to stealth.

I’m actually confused by adaneshade’s need to turn around to get the stab to work. When I use it I simply have to turn my character to hit with each stab. There is a delay between the two that gives you time to compensate for your movement and your foe’s movement.

Perhaps what makes this harder for some to compensate for is that you have probably noticed that when circle strafing you are prone to going clockwise or counterclockwise more often than not. You have to be comfortable turning both ways quickly and smoothly to be successful with FS.

It really is as simple as turning.