Guild Wars 2

Hammerguard.9834:

Regardless of professions being able to build crit chance. There is no build inwhich the 500 ferocity is better than an extra 500 precision.

Ferocity is the only stat in the game that requires another stat to be useful. Putting it on an amulet with no precision inwhich stat selection is overly limited is just straight up stupid. Defending it is worse.

This statement is just wrong. Let’s take the most extreme example: a reaper.
This reaper has 50% crit chance in death shroud from the “Soul reaping” trait and can build 50% more from “decimate defenses” depending on how much vulnerability the enemy has. Then there is fury for 20%. If you want to push further, there is a potential of 2% extra per condition on the enemy. I believe there is 13 conditions, that makes 26%. So in total
50+50+20+26+4 (base) = 150% crit chance without any precision.

Obviously it is capped at 100%, but since you won’t always have 25 vuln and 13 conditions on the enemy, you still have pretty much guaranteed crit chance.

So you have no reason to get precision. On the other hand, with all these crits, you want ferocity.

Now, away from this extreme case. 560 precision is 26.7% crit chance. That is a 13.3% increased damage if you have no ferocity. 560 ferocity is 37.3% crit damage. That is more damage as long as you have at least 36% crit chance. It is not that hard to reach in general.

But how viable is stealth with scrappers around?

And as I said, I do not aim at running berserker, because I don’t see chronomancer as the ultimate roamer, I see it as a team fighter. I am currently running duel/chaos/chrono for this role. But I would have loved to be able not to be forced in those 2 lines. It is very hard to go away from dueling for mesmer, even as a team fighter, because (among others) of the vigor uptime. And I have not managed to go anywhere without BD (which gives in principle near-perma stability, even if it is only 1 stack, and more realistically on-demand stability when needed).

There are many builds I tried:

• offensive team fighter with domination: didn’t go well
• bunker with inspiration: wasn’t satisfied at all
• might stacking with illusions: nope

I just never managed to achieve anything without dueling and chaos. Maybe one of you managed, and I would love to see your build and explanation for it. But I really didn’t. At the end, it’s not that bad since I end up being quite happy with my duel/chaos/chrono.

I am currently playing crusader. It is fairly easy with some professions to get high crit chance without precision. So crusader allows to keep decent DPS with some tankiness.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Take daredevil runes. That way every dodge will grant a crit. Every crit will grant vigor. Constant vigor = more dodges = more crits. Sure, you’ll get 3 crits on weapon swap which you can use to generate that slow, and slow higher crit chance, but daredevil runes will cover the gap and not only ensure that slow output, but your VIGOR uptime. A mesmer without vigor is almost dead in the water.

Good idea!
I don’t know the new runes enough, I didn’t think about this.
It is probably better, because the problem only the sigil is that the 3 hits often happened very fast and thus did not proc 3 Lost time (short iCD). Your suggestion ensures a more “steady” crit chance.

I also tried scrapper runes, but I didn’t like them as much.

Hi all

I finally found a build where I don’t get mashed and still do some good damage.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAseRncfClphtfCmfCEgiFcjyMDylRqMAWtfpuVn1dF-TJBHABAcKAaZ/hsLDMwTAAA

I designed it to be a team-fighter, being able to remain in the heat of the fight for some time. So it has fairly high sustain from the crusader amulet (high toughness + decent healing power) and also very good CC mitigation from the chaos line (because I have been suffering massively of CC since the update).

But the key of the build is to try to loose the least damage possible. The crusader gives a power and ferocity almost as high as a marauder, so the goal is to recover the crit chance. Thanks to dueling and BD on F3, we get high fury uptime. And thanks to danger time, we can get to approximately 60% crit chance if the enemy is slowed. This means that the build can potentially have nearly the same burst damage as marauder.

The most difficult part is to maintain the slow. We have high crit chance vs slowed enemies, allowing to proc “Lost time”, but our crit chance is quite low if the enemy is not slowed. To make up for that, I used the sigils of intelligence. This makes sure that the 3 skills after weapon swap all crit, procing Lost time.

The ideal is to have your F1 or wells burst right after the weapon swap, to guarantee that most of it will crit.

I could in principle use time warp to have higher slow uptime. However, I found gravity well to be one of my best sources of damage, survivability and support at the same time. Place it on a downed body (ally or enemy) and smile. Trying to defend your lord, put it on him. Or maybe you just want to burst people down, that works too. I usually try to put well of action on top, to proc the slow and increase the crit chance.

What do you think?

Ross Biddle.2367:

Don’t discredit BD. For it’s effect, used appropriately for Mesmer, it’s a really strong trait.

The “worthless” only applied to the mantra. I love BD and I use it very often. I just wish we had more choices.

Quadox.7834:

So far, i personally believe its more that you basically can’t stay outside the point and help nearly as well when there are dragonhunters with range pressure, daredevils, revenant with shiro. You get chased down or just die from pressure. This is the reason i believe mesmers will switch back to stealth fairly soon- you need it to get away, since most classes are faster than you. (Reaper is one exception).

I would not be surprised if mesmers just go back to the old (non-chrono) PU. But I would like team-fighting chrono builds (type bunker or soldier) to be a thing, since it feels to me like the niche chrono should have. And in this case “fleeing in stealth” is not really an option.

I think the problem is a bit broader than that, it is that we lack ranged multiple target weapon. Both greatsword and staff have some AOE and some single target spells:

AOE:

• greatsword 3 and 4
• staff 5

single target:

• greatsword 1
• staff 3

bouncing (i.e. too unreliable to be called AOE):

• greatsword 2
• staff 1

So at the end, we have no good ranged AOE weapon nor ranged single target. Just a bad mix of the two on both our ranged weapons. I would love the staff phantasm to be changed to a AOE one (but still at range). For the greatsword, to some extent, the auto attack cleaves (it can hit 3 targets if you’re lucky), so it “may be fine” as it is.

I had that feeling a few time. Also with “quickness commune” on temple for example. But I have a bad computer and average connection, so I thought this was just a bad sync between the server and my client.

Well a big reason for which those specs are so strong compared to the core class is that we had the developers actively listening to us. And this is obviously a great thing. This means that there are very few “garbage traits” or “garbage skills” in the new specs, in strong contrast to the core professions. Also, most of the new specs include different traits covering both offense and defense, allowing the new line to be useful in most roles.

I have no problem with that, and I actually strongly believe that the devs will apply the same kind of treatment for the core specs (and I hope they won’t prevent themselves to completely redesign some skills, even if the result has nothing in common with the initial one). Fixing the useless traits and skills of the core class will bring the non-elite builds closer to the state of the new specs.

However, the new specs don’t shine only because there is nothing bad in them. They are also a few things simply stronger, either on purpose to increase the selling of the expansion or because the devs inadvertently gave a bit too much to ease people’s complains. Now it may not be a big deal: if everyone’s offensive and defensive capabilities are increased, we may just reach another equilibrium.

Hi all

After watching the few (only 2, the others switched to revenant) chronomancers getting smashed in Go4, and mostly after getting smashed extensively myself, I have the feeling that a big problem of chronomancers currently is the lack of stability to sustain vs the CC creep.
This is particularly important since it would seem chrono was built to shine in team fights (by opposition to the mostly roamer mesmer).

Currently, our only stability is a worthless mantra and 1 stack on shatter with Bountiful disillusionment. I really feel this is not enough and also reduced build diversity.

Do you think it would be a good idea to have one trait giving stability in the chrono line? For example: “Gain stability when you block or evade an attack” (similar but not exactly like the revenant trait stability on dodge since it relies on actually evading and also syncs very well with the mesmer and its many evade/blocks). Or maybe “gain stability when hit by a slowed enemy”? I particularly like the last suggestion since it makes a “slow bruiser” spec, defending itself by slowing enemies.

Or do you think I’m wrong in my assessment of the current problem with chrono?

rennlc.7346:

It seems like Revenant was crafted with many of the ideas which would have otherwise made warrior, thief, and mesmer elites more desirable. Instead these classes received lines which are primarily redundant (berserker), gimmicky (daredevil), and lack the disengage and sustain to escape coordinated pressure (chronomancer). It would seem that they had plenty of cool ideas but not enough for every class.

I cannot speak for the other 2 that I barely play. But for chronomancer, it feels like the elite spec was designed for team fights. The wells offer good area denial, good support. Also chrono has higher pressure-sustain with the shield blocks (which are quite insane if you think about it) and the 3s blur from the well. From my experience, and somewhat confirmed by the Go4, the problem is CC. There is no built-in stability for the chronomancer, and the stability of core mesmer is quite bad (1 stack for a GM in chaos, 2s stab with a worthless mantra).

Because mesmer has good stunbreaks (decoy/blink) that was not a problem for the “roaming role” which could just disengage. But for a team fighter, that just won’t do, and it seems the focus of fights moved even more towards team fights.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

Mantra having good base heal is also one of the greatest downfall as well tbh, because it scales terrible with healing power. So is most mesmer traited/skill heals etc. Making healing power reward not exactly match the opportunity costs in others.

The only ones worth invest healing power in is well of eternity and regen. So Illusionary inspiration is a must, but that trait is a mix bag of problem itself. Overall I’m not sure if healing power is worth the investment with extra 1.5k heal on 30s CD and a gradual regen only works on stacking…

That is exactly my analysis of the problem. I really wish the healing power scaling was fixed on all skills of all professions. Also, I would really love AOE restorative illusions (yes I insist :p ), with better scaling of course.

I think nobody claims that they do the DPS advertised in DPS estimates, especially the top PvE players who make those estimates because they know what they put on it. And I definitely think that going through DPS estimate is a good idea in general to optimize your build.

But I think a point Nemesis is trying to make (in his own unique way) is that the DPS estimate cannot necessarily be scaled down to actual values in a consistent way. In particular, his necro doing low DPS at range while being tanky may not need to dodge as much but can pretty much tank the whole fight head-on. Thus, when scaling down the maths to match more realistic scenarios, his build will keep essentially the math-calculated damage while a squishy ele will not.

Also, some fights have mechanics which necessarily favor one build vs another, the most obvious examples being condition damage vs high armor or high protection enemies. And it is clear we will see even more of that with HoT.

But I don’t think this means in any way that we should stop doing maths. I am a theoretician IRL, so I can say that maths are always useful, but the number you produce is not your final result. On top of this number, you have assumptions, and when you analyse your results, you should always analyse how your results behave outside of those assumptions.

So you can compute the DPS of a staff elementalist and say “well it is very high, but relies on your enemy not moving and you staying out of trouble, so it won’t work in this, this and this cases”. Already in core gw2, there are fights with very mobile enemies (I have in mind some encounters in HotW) where the staff ele is not as great.

You can also compute different DPS, and comment that one of them still allows you to be very tanky while doing it. For example, a reaper can have 100% crit without investing much in precision, so he can use tankier gear while doing as much damage as a berserker.

So in conclusion, one just need to stop speaking only about DPS. And as a matter of fact, the elite players already do that, the problem is just that the message does not necessarily propagate well.

I don’t consider 150-200ms latency to be too bad. On the other hand, 300ms (which is what I used to have as a european expat in NA before I moved my account) is quite awful. You can still play more tanky builds. For example, I had no problem with bunker guard or rabid mesmer.

sendmark.4731:

Although useful info listing the classes individually in a comment about balance will always miss the point a little bit. It’s also how they combine with others as well – for example the ridiculous amount of death shroud Nos’s reaper got from the two Abjured Revenants.

Yes, while reaper on its own seemed fine, that combo seemed a bit too strong. To a large extent, I don’t want this trait nerfed, because a large problem of necros has always been that they cannot receive any healing while in shroud. I often play bunker guard with my necro gf, and this trait means I can finally give her as much support as I usually give to non-necro. But it works too well with the ticking boons from revenants…

I would agree though that Chronomancer was disastrous, two of the best mesmers in game and both were almost totally ineffective. It’s still early days, but doesn’t look promising.

That was painful to watch, especially for me as mesmer main. And then all the NA mesmer (for example Mime) switching to revenants…

rennlc.7346:

Are there videos of the Go4?

On the guild wars 2 twitch channel. You can watch the replays.

I actually think in general, all recipes should be account bound when unlocked…

Yes, this is misleading. While I did end up being able to buy the recipe once more from the merchant for about 10k karma (which is much less than what you intend to spend in your legendary anyway), I found this annoying and confusing.

Krysard.1364:

Silverkey.2078:

So this Go4 clearly confirmed that a big power creep has taken place.

Disagree. Most builds were tankier than before HoT.

Maybe I used the wrong words. I meant power as “efficiency”. So the new builds are better than the old ones. That includes more damage, more tankiness and/or more support.

It is obviously way too early to know what specs are strongest and definitely we can’t speak of a meta yet. However, anyone who watched the Go4GW2 tournaments on sunday could see that elite specs dominated the battlefields by far. I went through all the teams showed in the videos and simply counted how many of each professions. I counted only once per team, even if the team played more than 1 game, and I counted “half” if the team swapped.

• 0 mesmer, 2 chrono
• 0 necro, 4 reaper
• 6 ele, 3.5 tempest
• 0 engi, 8 scrapper
• 0 ranger, 5 druid
• 4 thief, 1 daredevil
• 3 warrior, 0 berserk
• 2.5 guard, 7.5 dragonhunter
• 0 rev, 6.5 glint

Now more than just numbers, here is what I felt watching:

• chronomancers just don’t work anymore. We all agree they are stronger than mesmers, but everything else is even stronger. The only 2 chrono spent their time at respawn. Many of the old mesmers went to other things (revenant mostly). I believe the main problem for chronos is the insane amount of CC everyone is doing. All of you saying “chrono is OP”, please reconsider.
• Reaper felt “comparatively” balanced.
• D/D ele, OP in the previous meta, seems now almost underperforming. Tempest was doing fairly good, and most used neither water nor arcane!
• scrapper was very strong, both high sustain and high damage
• druid replaced many of the shout bow warriors and felt very strong in both defending and supporting
• thief was killed further with this specs. This is probably because of the reveal from engineer (actually the few thieves didn’t take shadow refuge) and the increased damage combined with the change to vamp rune. Many thieves moved to revenant
• warrior felt like more of a relic of the old meta than a competitive class
• Guardian still felt “ok” as a support class. Dragonhunter felt extremely strong as a damage class, especially with the huge AOE damage from traps.
• As expected, all revenants took glint. They felt strong in damage, though often comparatively “squishy”

In more general ways, the “rez” meta seems over with all the AOE damage (from DH especially).

So this Go4 clearly confirmed that a big power creep has taken place. Also I found it interesting that the elite specs most complained about (dragonhunter and tempest) actually seemed to be in a strong place.

Phy.2913:

You can buy the chest from the legendary crafter NPC.

Oohh thank you!

Phy.2913:

Precursor crafting implies you will use crafting. Make an alt and start working on that profession.

I do have an artificer. The problem is that I unlocked the recipe on the wrong toon

Hi all

I have been trying to acquire “The Legend” precursor for crafting Bifrost. I have completed the first collection tier and gotten “Chest of Ancient Mysticism” including “Box of Recipes: The Legend”. However, on this this box is was said that it was available for artificer, huntsman and weaponsmith level 450. Being on my character with huntsman craft I unlocked the recipe but because of that only got access to the “Legendary Inscription” and not the rest.

While I can see that it was stupid from me to do that since a staff is done on a artificer, the description was highly misleading and now I am completely stuck without any way to solve my problem (I don’t intend to learn artificer on this character from scratch!).

What should I do?

Have a look at the Go4 of sunday, and count the number of mesmers as well as the amount of time they spend at respawn.

Then reconsider who needs nerf.

In any case, healing mesmer is far from good. Our only outgoing hearings are:

• mantras with inspiration traits: 2900 in clerics when you finish loading a mantra
• well of eternity: about 5000 in clerics when the well expires
• ridiculously low amount from healing prism on 10s iCD

While you may think the values of the two first ones are not bad, they actually have one drawback in common: they are not instant! With a guardian, a Ventari revenant, a druid, an elementalist (not sure about the other classes), if your team is in need for healing, you just pop your heal and they are better (near)-instantly. With a mesmer, you have to wait 2.75s cast time with the mantras or 3s with the wells… By that time, they could be dead.

I have been asking this for a while, but I would really love restorative illusions to be AOE. This way, we would get some instant AOE heal. That would make much more sense in “inspiration”, a line focused on support…

With reaper, you can get fairly decent condi damage.
With base necro… not so much.

You would think coding something like a 20% recharge reduction would be easy… Apparently it’s not!

This being said, isn’t that boringly low in both cases? It’s not like if the effect was OP…

nomdeplums.5780:

The healing per second is the glaring issue for me with Mirror.

Ether feast: 5560-7480/20s => 278-374/s
Mirror: 3915/15s, 3915/12s traited => 261-326/s

Traited mirror heals almost as much as ether feast with 2 illusions. It’s far from bad. I agree reflects are situational, but whenever I take the manipulation trait (for blink) I usually take mirror too.

My list:

A:

• Ether Feast
• Well of Eternity
• Decoy
• Portal
• Blink
• Well of Precognition
• Signet of Humility
• Gravity Well
• Mantra of Distraction
• Well of Action (the mini time warp I ask for below :p)

B:

• Mass Invisibility (I still think it is a long CD for 5s of stealth)
• Mantra of Recovery (amazing heal if you take 2 traits, but still long cast)
• Mantra of Resolve (maybe our best condi cleanse… still bad if not treated)
• Null Field (It just takes too long to remove the condis. Best if traited in a support build.)
• Well of Calamity (would be good if there was a better damage balance between first and last pulses)
• Time Warp (I would clearly prefer it if it had half CD and half duration, though F5 makes it better…)
• Mirror (reflects are situational, but traited gives as much as ether feast)
• Well of Recall (great in principle, but the trait makes the other wells almost as good for alacrity)
• Signet of Midnight (actually not too bad: good stunbreak for condi build. However, the signet trait should not be in domination!)
• Signet of Inspiration (really great for boonshare. It would be a good utility if support mesmer was a thing, so it’s not its fault)

C:

• Mantra of Pain (nice but not very “utility” except if traited for heal)
• Feedback (very situational, would be much better if it was ground targeted)
• Signet of the Ether (mostly good for PvE, the passive healing is too low even with 3 illusions up)
• Mantra of Concentration (2s stability…. )
• Signet of Domination (it feels that this should be a good skill, but the passive and the active don’t fit well together: you don’t want to confuse and torment an enemy and then stun him…)
• Mimic (has its uses, but mostly for open world, jumping puzzles and stuff. I’m glad we have it, but not so great for PvP. Maybe if you could use it after a skill to recharge and if it took the same cooldown?)
• Phantasmal Disenchanter (actually not awful with its faster attack speed, but dies too fast like all illusions…)
• Mirror images (slightly long CD just for a few clones, but can be useful + stunbreak)
• Illusion of life (too situational, if your whole team is down and one enemy is low/down, great, else not so much… it would be better if the revived people just go back to down state after 15s if they didn’t kill anyone).

D:

• Signet of Illusions (nope… too long cast time, too situational, pointless passive…)
• Arcane Thievery (great skill in principle, but it never works and too long CD)
• Veil (too long CD!!! I would love more stealth sharing, but this one is not great)
• Phantasmal Defender (dies too fast)

Both the cooldown reduction and attack speed did work before. What “fix” are you expecting? The fact that it should not also increases speed of utilities and stomp?

Isn’t “Bounding Dodger” better to get some stealth?

Yes I believe they are also available in PvE but I don’t know how, and I don’t know if they are account bound or if they will appear slowly on the TP.

Well yes, you could also play rabid to be more defensive. But I thought having range may be enough to increase your survivability..

Then try condi, it is more ranged while still fairly strong:
scepter/pistol + scepter/focus
rampager gear (sinister works but hard to get), krait rune (bleed duration)
in dueling take duelist’s discipline.

Your phantasmal duelist will hit like a truck thanks to the bleeds, and scepter is fairly strong.

So first, why is it this “does not work” for you? Is it a weapon you don’t like? Is it the playstyle of putting your phantasms and letting them do half the work while you auto attack that you don’t like? Is it that you don’t feel that this is very efficient? Is it that you feel you are dying too easily?

The metabattle is a glassy power-phantasm build. You can instead play shatter (power or condi) builds, they do less damage in optimal conditions but they are more active. You can also play a condition phantasm, which has a nearly comparable DPS to power.

The metabattle is usually the “fastest way” to clear PvE content. If you play open world, or events on your own, you really don’t care that much (except for the gain of time). If you play dungeons, you can also deviate from the “meta”, but you have to make sure the group you are playing with agrees with that.

Sabre.8627:

Our runes suck but Chonromancer runes on a reaper? Aw yisss

gimme that quickness on gravedigger or lich form!!

In general, unrelated to the condi vs power, I do not think I would keep torch for a shatter build. Especially with the loss of PU, shield will probably provide enough defense (if I remember well, Helseth mentioned that too, but then again, he was already playing without torch for a little while).

Ether feast is probably a better heal for dueling, but the condi cleanse from the well is also quite attractive. So power would be something like this (note I didn’t change rune nor sigils)

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAsfRncfClph1fC2qBEgilTjiMAWggqMDauwpeaz2vF-TZBFABiXGotjAwCnCgW2fAgHAAA

and condi maybe something like this?
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAreWncfClph1qB2fCMrhlZjqMAqtkpeXD2jFdJipiA-TpRFwALOCAAeAAK3fIxJAIaZAFHCAA

though I actually may just stick to the duel/chaos/illusions for condis…

Daniel Handler.4816:

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Don’t you sass me! The Condi build was total guesswork. xD

/edits

… Uh.. Can one of yall Condi players build-edit me a condi build? Can’t from phone.

Go find out the concentration to boon duration conversion rate. And only then may you find peace .

15 concentration = 1% boon duration.

It’s confirmed, I am the peace bringer!

didn’t they move the reset on saturday?

When you buy a game, you don’t start at max level. Leveling is actually a part of what you payed for. Same with this expansion. We will have clearly enough time to enjoy our max level/max masteries/max hero points characters before the next expansion!

Apply 2s of quickness when casting a well … enjoy! :p

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Rune-Chronomancer/first

A problem with mac client? What are you speaking about….

Seriously: it is usually not as bad as that, but sometimes it is just awful (while I have absolutely nothing else running on my computer)…

I find it cute how some people think because they have trouble beating some specs, “all of us PvPers” know those specs are OP…
I don’t play burn guard, yet I don’t think it is OP. Actually I tried it and got destroyed so I went back to my bunker guard.
I don’t play PU mesmer. I don’t like fighting PU mesmers. Yet I don’t think they are OP, just annoying.

mordran.4750:

You should never go after the videos of somebody. In these videos you see of course only the best moments which is not what you will find always for obvious reasons. It comes down how much tolerance you have to dying. You can´t reset a fight, if you go in or get jumped on, you win or die. Of course you can roam, every class can, but you will have a 10 times harder time than a mesmer for example. You should ask yourself if that´s a clever thing to do. If i were you i would spend a few days in eotm, level a mesmer and join the condi pu aids force, this will spare you some headache.

Or you can take your necro and send them back their torment and see them die while they try to run away…

Saiyan.1704:

Silverkey.2078:

I personally think burn guards are fine. But it appears some can’t deal with it, so since they don’t want to learn to play, I was suggesting something that I don’t think won’t impact high tier players as much as low tier players. But I would personally keep things as they are.

Ele’s RoF is on a shorter cd (12s vs 28s) and it’s instant castable. That means that players would have a higher chance of crossing the field inadvertently. Considering PF has a 3/4 cast time, it gets interrupted all too easily.

That said, no single skill should have a burn burst of 12++ because some one crosses it multiple times. Yes, it’s a definite l2p but for newer players but the mechanic is still unhealthy for the inexperienced.

PF should stay the same with the exception that a single player can only receive 2 hits from PF. Whether that’s from the initial hit from PF or blocking the initial cast but crossing it twice – PF should give no more than 6 stacks of burns on a single player.

One should not forget that initially, purging flame is a condi cleanse, not a purely offensive skill. 3 stacks burning for 5s on a crossing is fairly insane.

Contrary to what many people seem to say, surviving as a mesmer is not easy. The key is really mobility. Stealth does not protect you much on its own, it just ensures that you can go without enemies able to follow you because they don’t know where you are.

If you are not very experience with PvP, I would recommend starting a more forgiving build like condi mesmer. You use the same utilities essentially, and replace sword by scepter and greatsword by staff. Use “illusions” instead of “domination”, chaotic Chaotic Dampening or Chaotic Transference, rabid instead of marauder/berserker, rune of undead, and you’re all set.

This build is more tanky and also, thanks to staff 2 has even more mobility. Learn to properly use your phase retreat to go around the map (many videos on youtube). This build is similar enough to the usual power build for you to get familiar with mesmerizing in PvP. Once confortable you can switch back to zerker.

skcamow.3527:

Silverkey.2078:

Thanks for the answers

If going for illusions, I can see switching to celestial, and grabbing the might on shatter. In a sense, condi (or hybrid) build makes sense for a more sustained damage, because all shatters deal damage. However, we also know that in a team fight for organized teams, there is a lot of condi cleanse… I’ll probably try it.

For the soldier build, I’ll try to play around it too. You seem to really overload it with slow, which is of course very good for defensive reasons, but also offensive with the major trait. Do you feel the difference from the 30% crit that much?

I don’t see celestial working as well with this because of the lack of condition output (even with illusions taken).

As for the crit chance, it honestly remains to be seen (in a PvP environment anyway). I’ve just posted a video in the main build thread so you can see. It’s definitely random but I only had a day or two to kick the tires with it.

Celestial adds crit damage and base crit chance. If you compare raw damage:

• soldier + pack rune (10% crit base + fury + slow = 60% crit chance) 2375 * (1 + 0.6*0.5) = 3088
• celestial + strength rune 1735 * (1 + 0.8*0.87)*1.05 = 3090

add some might and celestial wins hand down. Then the confusion from shatters is not insignificant. Also the build I had in mind was sword/shield+scepter/pistol. I loose chaos armor, but I add up significant damage pressure + much faster hitting rate allowing slow proc from lost time.

This is only an idea though. In particular, for this to make sense, I have to see if I should sacrifice dueling or chaos. Without dueling nor CP the illusion generation is low, only improved by the reduced recharge from “illusions” minor (and maybe adept?). On the other hand, scepter has good illusion uptime. Will have to try to see.

Sword has theoretically higher damage because the phantasm hits more often. But the duelist is more survivable thanks to the range and if they are shattered fast anyway, the damage is about the same.

The interrupt from pistol is more reliable and can proc on 2 enemies. But the sword has a block. Traited pistol is great for interrupt build.

So I think pistol is overall quite better for PvP. Sword is still best PvE offhand.

Thanks for the answers

If going for illusions, I can see switching to celestial, and grabbing the might on shatter. In a sense, condi (or hybrid) build makes sense for a more sustained damage, because all shatters deal damage. However, we also know that in a team fight for organized teams, there is a lot of condi cleanse… I’ll probably try it.

For the soldier build, I’ll try to play around it too. You seem to really overload it with slow, which is of course very good for defensive reasons, but also offensive with the major trait. Do you feel the difference from the 30% crit that much?

nearlight.3064:

Silverkey.2078:

I think they can do a similar thing for bun guards as they did for D/D ele: change purging flame so that you get the main burns when cast but then only 1 stack when crossing. This allows burn guard to still work somewhat in high tier PvP (where it is balanced) but allow low tier PvP not to get smashed as much.

I disagree. It would only serve to hamper build diversity within burn builds (by making shield a non viable option) and would be a huge loss in damage in teamfights where those burns need to stack kinda high before they’re AoE cleansed 2 seconds later. Burn guard sustain is also considerably lower than that of a D/D ele, so it’s more balanced that they can do so much potential AoE burn at the cost of being frail. This would also shift dps guard back towards power builds which as saiyan said, really have a ton of potential that most people don’t expect right now.

I personally think burn guards are fine. But it appears some can’t deal with it, so since they don’t want to learn to play, I was suggesting something that I don’t think won’t impact high tier players as much as low tier players. But I would personally keep things as they are.

Tetsuji.5937:

Dude your not seeing the point You do understand that you can do the furry dodge for like 3 seconds then shatter stealth and hide away then set up for another burst then repeat. not only thaty ou reset the fight. Mesmers have extremely good condi clear the only class that doesnt have good condi clear is thief Ive seen rangers clear condis faster. Ialso changed it because people are stupid and dont understand what im trying to point towards with the title. The issue atm is Mesmers are getting babied by anet and not getting hard nerf’d like they need. Burns are ticking for way to much. and Celestial ammy is allowing players to full heal like Eles and Engineers. Not to mention sigil of blood is still broken after 3 months. No healing from it.

Another hilarious example of the 66666 mesmer build (and soon to come 666666). If you played mesmer, you would probably know that domination dueling is the core and then:

• either you place PU in which case you have long stealth but no condi cleanse
• either you play inspiration in which case you have no stealth but good condi cleanse
• or you play “illusions” and you have no stealth and no condi cleanse

So please, before you accuse a class of OP-ness, try to play it yourself. You will discover that everything is counterable.