If this is a “ideal case” PvE question then… yes, dagger does more DPS. RS does cleave though. One thing to note, with reaper if you take soul reaping, you can take dhuumfire since you already max crits with decimate defense. This gives a mild DPS increase of RS AA.
If this is a PvP question: RS AA is quite more powerful because of all the traits applying on it (Unyielding Blast, Reaper’s Might, Death Perception etc…)
Really? Even with dhuumfire and the 15% attack speed traits? That’s a little disheartening ._.
I haven’t made the calculations, so maybe this is enough to make up for the DPS loss. With 25 might, the burning tick is not bad. In general, reaper shroud is still great because it ensures a very easy 25 vuln. Ideal situations always assume 25 vuln, but reaper is actually one of the best (if not the best now) class to apply them in the shroud and make that “ideal situation” an actual thing.
If this is a “ideal case” PvE question then… yes, dagger does more DPS. RS does cleave though. One thing to note, with reaper if you take soul reaping, you can take dhuumfire since you already max crits with decimate defense. This gives a mild DPS increase of RS AA.
If this is a PvP question: RS AA is quite more powerful because of all the traits applying on it (Unyielding Blast, Reaper’s Might, Death Perception etc…)
Death spiral should be our projectile defense, not death’s charge.
Looking at the engineer gyro’s compared to our useless shouts depresses me. Selfish shout for mediocre, redundant boons and effects.
Meanwhile engineer gets a remote finisher/rezzing tool, a remote shadow refuge+reveal pulse, an aoe condi removal pulse for the group and activated poison field, and the traits give them super speed when blasting a lightning field.
We’re still stuck with mediocre minors like shivers of dread, when we only have fear on a 30 sec cd that does 3 seconds of chill with that mediocre minor (which doesn’t affect half of pve to begin with). Cold Shoulder, a 20% damage reduction only for ourselves.
Still a class completely devoid of meaningful group utility and adept/minors/grandmaster traits of terribly little use for PvE.
Signet passives still don’t work in shroud, so I lose my power passive from signet of spite.
You forgot the part where our debuffs got nerfed even harder in the new PvE with the break bar system…
So skcamow, what would you consider highest priority for a bunker Mes? I’m thinking…
- mantra heals (restorative mantras, MoPain or Recovery)
- Protection boon (chaotic dampening)
- Blur/Block (sword/shield well of precog)
- condition removal (uh..)
Condition removal from self at least is mandatory. You can get it to self thanks to shatters (Restorative Illusions), and AOE thanks to heal (wells + inspiration) and thanks to a dedicated skill (mantra, null field, etc…). In my experience, you need at least 2 of those sources to pretend bunkering, the only thing which works decently on its own is traited mantra of recovery (harmonious + mender’s purity), and yet I still prefer it with the added Restorative Illusions.
@Chaos Archangel
I realize Mental Defense has good defensive value (the virtues of which I just extolled in the BWE3 thread), but with alacrity you’ve still got Signet of Inspiration procs on at least a 20s cooldown via Illusionary Inspiration. Since you’re running BD anyway, wouldn’t that still be a lot of boonsharing?
I mean, classic boonshare is only doing a share once every 15s on average anyway…
But using the signet is of much higher value than the automatic proc (except the first one that you can control by just casting the first phantasm at the right moment: I usually start with staff 5, 4, 2 , 3, this way, I share immediately a lot of protection + possible chaos storm interrupt boon-procs since I play an interrupt build). I do think the automatic trait is still valuable, but not half of our usual boon output in a boonshare build.
An obvious problem is to see how much we can stuff in there. We have quite a lot of worthy support utilities now… I feel like the utilities you suggest lack condition removal (only 5 conditions removed by the heal on a “burst” every 30s minus alacrity, with a big gap in between). So I think null field is a must, especially since it also offers a potent boon removal. Well of action is also a must (for rez). But then of course we start to be short on utility space… In the last BWE, I just decided to give up on the mantra heal. That means our only outgoing heal is the healing well, and thus I was wondering if going cleric was really worth it (celestial? soldier? or maybe just go offensive?).
So yes, I think there is a strong potential, but not sure yet the best way to achieve it.
this is exactly what i mean. We HAVE TO Play different, other elite CAN play different. We are the only profession who gonna lose something important ( 5 skills including range ) completly automatic and its replaced with something completly different. our playstyle will be replaced without exception. no other class have to sacrifice so much for a new elite.
Other elite dont have to. you can play your berserker like your warrior, with banner, greatsword maybe even phalanx. Maybe finaly some good F1 skills -> completly worth -> update. You can still play your mesmer, with your weapons, skills, maybe even PU + some good traits and a new F5-> update. And then there is the Reaper, trade 5 skills with 5 other skills and lose the ability of 10k range cris -> worth? maybe, maybe not.
i dont say that the reaper isnt good, thats a completly different topic. I just feel there are some designissures compared to other speccs.
But the elite spec is SUPPOSED to change our playstyle. It is not a sacrifice, it is a trade.
Now if you feel this is not the case with the other elite specs, then you should instead complain to them because then the specs is not doing its job properly. If you look at the elementalist or guardian forum, many wonder what is the elite spec bringing new to them. The tempest brings party support… oh wait, isn’t that already what elementalists do? It was announced as “finally ele will be able to stay in the fight”… yes because D/D elementalist is a backline support!
Reaper is one of the best designed elite specs, it fulfills its job in an amazing way!
edit: you seem to say that because mesmer got a F5, warrior get a F2, then those are improvements. They are not! You do get the mesmer F5 at the cost of one trait line. Is it worth it? well it gives you new builds but it removes some others which depend on the 3 core specializations! No specs is an update, all are a change.
Since the well of precognition discussion seemed to get very heated on the question and since I am very fond of the mesmer bunker playstyle, here is a thread for that.
the idea is to buff allies with boons + healing as well as good rezz abilities and debuff the enemies with the interrupt. Its main weakness is as expected the mantra loading. In my (casual PvP-er) experience, it performs very well and I definitely carry my team in team fights. I believe it offers a support which is nearly as good as a bunker guardian and mostly falls shorter in terms of survivability (“altruistic healing” is immense!), but compensates by better debuffing.
It is also clear than chronomancer will offer excellent support and good survivability with wells and shield.
So will bunker mesmer be a thing? Is it already a thing?
Well I guess there have been different kind of posts here because there are different possible bunker mesmer:
the bunker core-mesmer which almost only work properly with mantras because of the way the inspiration tree is designed. Since I play it, I can tell you in does produce boons in huge quantities! The main downside, as was pointed, is the mantra recharge.
the chronobunker which uses wells for a lot of chaos armor uptime (with both staff and sword leaps on the wells) + very strong and unique support (high quickness uptime, high alacrity uptime, now AOE blur etc…). For this one, I actually personally abandoned boonshare because the signet just didn’t fit in my utility bar (null field + 2 wells). However, alacrity is really strong: don’t forget, it reduces the cooldown of both the offensive burst skills AND the defensive ones (healing in particular). So by speccing into alacrity and wells, you are helping your team immensely. Also, most wells require your team to stand in them only for the last pulse (except precognition but in this case this is not a risk :p ) so it is easier to pull in an organized team without exposing it to too much risk.
Since this discussion went beyond the scope of the thread, I suggest to start a bunker thread. Actually I will do it right now.
Now just imagine a burn guardian and a reaper together…. The burn guard puts its fire field then both guard and reaper spin on it for probably more than 20 stacks burn and 12 stacks poison in 4s…
Only problem for me: this seems to be mostly on NA… I would love if something like that happened on EU. I’m afraid my post seemed too serious and scared people: don’t be afraid, it is meant to be VERY casual!!
With all the discussions we have about bunker mesmer (is it a thing?), I would really love to see it in action in a more organized team. And I thought a good way would be to start a regular full mesmer PvP-ing even on week-ends.
Goal: create one or a few balanced full-mesmer teams in both EU and NA to prepare for upcoming guild PvP teams. These week-end events would allow to
find out the best builds compositions
find out our best OMFG mesmer PvPers
learn to play together
and most importantly
have loads of purple fun!
I do not know how many people would be interested, so I don’t know how many teams (if any) we can make. Ideally we would have at least 2 teams per region to play against each other, but if only 1 then we can just queue.
I am myself a below-average EU player, recently specialized in “bunker/support” mesmer.
If anyone is interested, please indicate which region you play in.
As I discussed in the very top of the thread, thief and necro are in the same situation on being hurt by that. The only difference is that thieves always brought in
more damage than necro
useful abilities in most dungeons runs (stealth).
And those 2 differences means thief is a part of the PvE “meta” while necro isn’t. Necro do have a lot of unique abilities (or a better access to it than many other classes) to bring to a party. The only problem is that 99% of them are partly or totally negated by the PvE design.
Colin said about raids something like “we have a very good combat system, but it is only used to its full extent in PvP. Raids are meant to change that”. Well sorry to say, but this thread is a proof that PvE is not going in the right direction for this statement to be true, quite the opposite.
We give a mass of boons with mesmers. Without boonshare you only give:
regen as long as you have a phantasm around
chaos storm gives a few boons including aegis fairly easily
bountiful disillusionment gives its boons AOE by default
random staff boons
With boonshare, this just becomes insane
You can do an easy rotation to give near-perma protection
you have random boons from many sources
might quite easily if you use chaotic interruption
duplicate any boon given to you
the main problem is the random component, you cannot exactly give aegis when you want. But perma regen + protection + high might is nothing to sneeze at.
And the healing is fairly strong with mantras, condition cleanse too.
And no quickness on 24s CD, but guardians keep it for reviving, we use the rune for that.
Seams like there is one big flaw in your build. you will get interrupted like crazy when channeling your mantras. The thing is, every time you charge a mantra you have to blow TWO charges from mantra of concentration because the stability lasts 2 seconds while the mantra cast time is longer than that. And the mantra has a 25 second cd.
This is indeed a problem. You don’t really need to use 2 stab charges. One charge covers enough of the animation so I just take the risk for approximately the first 0.75 . F4 also helps as you mentioned. Finally, the various daze I can produce cover a bit too. At the end, it works often just fine. But sometimes, when I am heavily focused and all my mantras are off-CD, things are indeed more difficult.
A solution would be to use Bountiful Disillusionment instead of chaotic interruption. This would certainly help quite a bit to cover my mantra charges (although only 1 stack…). But I currently prefer chaotic interruption.
You assume that the trait would heal allies for a percentage of all healing sources. Currently, it works only on healing skill, and the percentage could also apply on the healing skill only.
Also you assume bunker guards take the elite signet, which they usually don’t. But I guess your point was to compute a max, in which case mesmers could also have more mantras (although on higher CD)
Good at holding points and great at team support (healing, boons and rezzing/stomp) while also hindering the enemy teams (interrupts).
I play only PUG-unranked (usually with my gf) and I found that in those games, nobody really hold points nor support so I found this to be preferable to the usual offensive mesmer role. The only very difficult moment is those unfortunate times where all my mantras are on CD while I’m alone defending a point. Loading mantras under the pressure without the help of F4 or the stability mantra is difficult.
Guardian is an amazing bunker, no doubt. In terms of class design, this is somewhat expected. But we are seeing more and more shoutbow warriors reappearing in the ESL with settlers amulet. Honestly, I do not see how a shoutbow warrior is better than a bunker mesmer or chronomancer. I feel like if the best mesmers gave it a try, those builds may appear in tournaments.
I actually found it rather strange in the last BWE that, between playing a Reaper and playing a Thief of any stripe, I could accidentally drop an entire break bar in a few seconds on Reaper but as a Thief I could hardly make a dent in most of them—I don’t even mean bosses, just the Mordrem Guard with the Hammers couldn’t really be stopped with any of the abilities a Thief brings to the table unless I dumped my entire Initiative bar into two or three Headshots, which momentarily stops a single target doing a single attack.
The amount of break bar “damage” depends on the duration of the hard CC. Headshot is 0.25s which is really nothing… It is probably linear, so you will need 20 head shots to get the same effect as one “deep freeze” from elementalists (actually with the added chill of deep freeze it is probably even worse).
It seems ice bow will still be as broken as it is now…
I actually agree with you here. I think the global feeling of the community is almost more affected by the communication than by the changes themselves. For example, Robert started interacting only more recently (Roy was the first one to jump on the heavy communication train). Up to then, the necromancer forum was one of the gloomiest spot in the forum. But the little added communication (and the success of the Reaper) changed that a lot and people now have more faith in the future. Now the gloomiest place is probably the ranger forum, I hope the druid will be good…
More importantly, they are purple and fabulous, and whoever made the sound effects for them and pretty much all of the chronomancer’s audio thematics needs a raise.
This is an often underestimated fact in a meta, but definitely enough of a reason for me (isn’t purple-ness the reason we continued playing mesmers when it was weak before the specialization patch?)
It does offer essentially as much support (both boons + healing + rezzing), a bit less self-survivability and clearly more enemy debuff thanks to interrupt. At least, that is my feeling, but as I said, I’m no pro player and so my own experience does not prove anything.
I don’t want the END of PU. But I want other playable options too. Not only oneshot nuke mesmers or condi mesmers. How about a supportive cele mesmer? If that’d work GOOD, that’d be great.
I personally feel like bunker mesmer is already close to bunker guardian in efficiency (though with just 10 times the amount of work)
Pretty sure you just said that bunker mesmer is 10 times less efficient than guardian.
Not really. To be fair, bunker guardian is fairly easy to play. Even bunker guardians admit it:
I perfectly agree. Moa can destroy transformations, which is already punishing for necros, but makes sense thematically.
However, there is no thematic reason while minions would be lost in the process and in general, no transformation (including our own elite skills) should destroy minions.
I want to add a small something which is that both these suggestions have some flaws:
the “frost” effect would be uncleansable (because it is not a condition). This reason alone would probably prevent this solution from being applied. A way around it would be to link it to the chill, so that if the chill is cleansed, the frost effect too, but that would probably require some coding + would behave very weird.
the “torment” idea loses the “executioner” theme. Currently, most “executioner” effects are power-based, so having chill has the condi-executionner was a great idea. A way around that which I believe is the best compromise is to apply more torment if the enemy you chill is below 50%. This has the best of all worlds: it is cleansable, it stacks and it executes + it also punishes enemies trying to move which fits the “chill” idea very well.
So best suggestion (numbers are obviously just examples): Deathly chill
Apply 2 stack of torment (5s) whenever you chill a foe. Apply an additional stack for enemies below 50%.
This has been discussed a few times already. The best answer we got was
create a separate effect (“frost”) which stacks in intensity. Each time you apply chill, the “deathly chill” trait will apply the “frost” effect which deals damage, additional damage below 50%
proc an existing condition (torment has been suggested many times) each time you chill.
This would fix 2 problems:
allow “chill burst” for example by combo-ing RS 4 in an ice field (RS 5)
allow more than one reaper to play on the same enemy (the old condition cap problem all over again)
And what is this chrono bunker you are talking about that is"close" to guardian efficiency? I would have to see it to believe it.
Well I have been playing around with a (non-chronomancer) mantra + boonshare interrupt bunker. It is probably ambitious to say it’s close to guardian bunker. I feel it is from a theoretical point of view + in my experience I get as good results with both although it is way harder to pull with the mesmer. But I’m not a great PvP-er and I don’t play in organized team, so my impression in the subject is fairly irrelevant.
I don’t want the END of PU. But I want other playable options too. Not only oneshot nuke mesmers or condi mesmers. How about a supportive cele mesmer? If that’d work GOOD, that’d be great.
I personally feel like bunker mesmer is already close to bunker guardian in efficiency (though with just 10 times the amount of work)
It’s a nice well for sure.
But is it really that important?
We already have this minor trait in inspiration trait line that lets you share blur with teammates. And guess what? The radius for that minor trait is larger!(300 compared to the 240 of the well).
Nope, it shares distortion. That is very different:
distorsion = no cap points
blur = cap points
The minor in inspiration is actually a curse in conquest, because each time I try to save my life with it, the points gets uncapped…
Also, one a note of balance, I would really love to see the developers opinion on this.
I feel like classes have initially been balanced around the idea that they all support their team in a different way:
by buffing allies (guardians, elementalists, etc…)
by debuffing enemies (necromancer, thief etc…)
Isn’t it completely unfair that most important PvE enemies are immune to debuffing while buffing remains as strong as usual? Why is blind not ok while aegis is? Weakness not ok, Protection ok? Those effects are supposed to be a different side of the same thing.
I think this is one of the main thing that has been hurting the PvE balance since the beginning of the game, especially for classes like necromancer who are amazing at debuffing but are completely ignored by bosses.
For example I think:
the vulnerability duration should be decreased a lot on bosses, because it is too easy to stack 25 vuln without even trying
the might duration should also be decreased around bosses (area debuff?) because this is also too easy to stack
and all other buff/debuff should be balanced the same so that they cannot be full time without a minimum investment AND make sure that both the buff and the debuff are as valuable.
I haven’t used Decoy in the last year…. Blink has always been my only stun breaker for quite some time. lol I usually value condition clear over Decoy and portal is usually on my bar as well.
Keep things in context though. Chronomancers aren’t regulated to just Blink/Decoy/Portal and based on twitch streams and videos, that’s been proven to be true thus far in these betas. On the contrary, if the chronomancer is providing a different role than classic Mesmer, then indeed defense might just be more valuable than blink. Though it’s hard to imagine not being able to blink on top of kitten tower. >_<
Now for a “classic” meta build, that’s a different story.
Just because some people who play the betas use other stuff than blink/portal doesn’t mean its a good/effective thing to do. I think its safe to assume the meta ( blink, decoy, and portal ) will stay the same unless the wells are useful. I think well of precognition will take decoys place. What do you see in the other 3 wells? If you take neither blink nor decoy your gonna be left with well of precognition as your only stunbreak. And I think the idea was to use it to save your allies not to use it as a stunbreak.
Well of action is extremely useful for rez/stomp too. It is essentially like FmW for guardians and there is no denying that guardians are now rez-heroes! Also, on a team fight, alacrity can be extremely powerful. It is way too early to claim wells have no place in the future meta.
Also, when claiming blinks and portals are mandatory for the meta, let us remember that we have many classes in the PvP meta. Actually all classes but rangers are regularly in ESL tournaments. And yet, none have portals and few have blinks. Portal and blinks just define one specific role for the mesmer: the roamer. But as I mentioned earlier, currently mesmers have no place in the team fight while wells + slow + channeled-blocks will work best in precisely this context.
I think the blur does get applied to the downed person but he can still get stomped ( is this right silverkey? ). Even if the downed person is totally unaffected by blur, you can still probably get the rez off ( unless its like a thief with poison with all enemies ready to cleave or something ). If the blur does work as I think with a downed person then I could easily see a 90 second cooldown if not more.
I do not know for sure, but I would guess not. I feel like I sometimes have to fight my way for a rez despite using distortion. I think someone should try it with 2 friends and show the video to know for sure.
I think it will be nice for group support and will be picked by because you can use it in many situations not only in PvP, also for wvw and pve
Stunbreak, damage negation, rezzing, regrouping, stomping.
A free rez not all just like with shadow refuge. I don’t expect that the blur is applied to the downed person. Else a stomp could be evadable by this?! :O assuming that is not applied to the downed person you can still damage the downed person apply poison and so on. Also the stomper could be quicker than you rezzing. But yes it makes it safer for your group to res.
We gonna see in the next beta weekend.
I expect a little increase of the cooldown like up to 50~60sec afterwards :S
I thought it was only 2 × 1 second Blur ticks, and the third tick simply gives the 35 endurance?
Maybe I’m interpreting it wrong, but to me it seems the Blur was moved and split over the first two ticks.
Well of Precognition: Updated functionality. Now gives blur for 1 second per pulse during its active portion instead of on end. When it ends, allies within the well regain 35 endurance.
Wells first tick on cast, then 2 ticks and the final tick (after 3s) does something different.
There aren’t that many underwater skills, a-net could easily balance them to a decent level IF THEY WANTED TO. But the community does not seem to care much for underwater combat, so it is not a-net’s priority.
This is no different from shadow refuge, the well is fine. A shadow refuge pretty much most of the time guarantees a rez or a group opener.
Shadow refuge still allows you to cleave the refuge area. Stealth-rez is hard to counter only if the elementalist uses its downed skill 2 while the thief stealths him/her.
Tbh I think it’s way strong. I think it would be balanced if it didn’t apply the blur to a downed body, that way they could still poison/cleave to try and prevent the res. This way it’s literally a free res every time you use it.
I’m also curious as to whether blur stops a stomp from landing, same with distortion (distortion sharing). This came up a while ago, but I don’t think it was ever tested.
I was the one asking about the distortion sharing on downed people. The answer seemed to be negative, and while I can’t say for sure, this is my impression on the battlefield.
I would not be surprised if the same thing happened for this blur.
3 seconds of blur for your entire team is very nice especially for guaranteed stomps and safe rezzes. Its hard to say, because right now all the wells are awesome at this point, and each one could find a place in any build.
I think this is the key point in here. All wells now start to be worth of a spot in the utility bar. And that is the way all skills should be. In any case, it will be difficult because we have only 3 utility spots. Action + Precognition are great tools. But so is Blink, portal etc…. So taking wells will be at the cost of some mobility. And that is great because it now defines 2 different roles for the mesmer:
the roamer, as is “meta” for mesmer, with great mobility and great single target burst, currently with stealth
the team-fighter/point defender: less mobile but a great addition to any team fights. Using wells, maybe glamours (time warp/null field), maybe boonshare etc…
I still wish they’d do something else. Blood magic is for stealing life. Reaper needs more access to standard Necromancer things.
I still Suggest:
- Soul Eater rips 2 boons per target hit. Heals for 100 per boon ripped.
- Augury of Death – Shouts ‘consume’ 1 (Or 2, but unfortunately, might be too strong as an adept with 2) conditions, healing 100 per condition consumed (only on self) and make it a 15% base cooldown reduction + 3% per target hit. (Total of 30%)
Reasons: Reaper loses a lot of base necromancer synergies that cover these gaps in curses(or Death, condition removal)/spite/SR. Adding a bit of boon removal to SE keeps some extra boon removal in the class but less corruption, saving that for more specialized trees. And consuming conditions adds some non-hit based (transfer) condition removal which the class could use.
I agree: we are flooded with life steals… When you hit something, you have so many numbers that you can hardly see how much damage you really do. Boon corruption would be nice, but too strong without iCD…
:O assuming that is not applied to the downed person you can still damage the downed person apply poison and so on. Also the stomper could be quicker than you rezzing. But yes it makes it safer for your group to res.