Guild Wars 2

@Zenith
Ok, let’s try to avoid frontal attacks. I don’t think mesmer is a particularly difficult class to balance PvE and PvP separately. PvE is defined by phantasm builds while phantasms really don’t live long in PvP. So they could easily buff mesmer PvE DPS without completely destroying the PvP balance. I am not sure exactly why they don’t do it, but it could be
1-they don’t care about PvE
2-they want to redefine PvE as not only DPS-maxing but also a challenging experience where mesmer utilities will shine

I (naively) believe it is reason 2. They don’t see mesmer as a DPS-maxer but as a utility wizard, and that is already the reason we are still somewhat “meta” for PvE. We have gained new good and interesting support (distortion sharing for ex) which makes us even more relevant in this role.

Now I agree, the GM currently look uninspiring for PvE, but it may change with the new defiance system (not sure about that but one can hope) or with “challenging group content” whatever that end-up being.

Ok now I see this all monologue does not fit in the subject…

Of course it could not taken together with CS, since both would conflict in their effect, so they would need to be moved to the same tier of the same specialization line.

Take a language which sounds cool. For me it’s swedish (+ I speak it which helps).
So I use a swedish first name and a last name which describes my idea of the profession in a poetic swedish way.
Ex: Selja Vildsjäl (=wild soul) for my ranger, Ljusa Dunkel (Ljus=light, Dunkel=mild darkness) for my mesmer (somehow “light and darkness” is my feeling for mesmer, don’t ask why), Linda frostlöv (frost=frost, löv=leaf) for my ice-themed elementalist…
I also sometimes try to somewhat respect the racial feeling.

I don’t think that is bad. You have less power but more of all other stats + a full set of specialization + all your skills. So at the end, you would still beat the actual lvl 2. Going to lvl 2 zones with your lvl 80 characters in the past was not easy, it was trivial, basically one shot everything. I haven’t tried myself but I guess now it is somewhat fun.

I agree with most changes suggested by thetarot. For healing prism, I think the % way is best, and I don’t see how this could be a difficult thing on the technology side.

For the torment, just one thing I wanted to mention is that torment is not such a deadly condition. Its damage is 75% of a bleed if no movement and 150% if movement. Classes can stack 35 bleed on their own (including mesmers), so I don’t see why 8 torments would be that OP. So I think keeping 2 stacks but reducing it to 4s is the best suggestion.

@Carighan I do think the added protection is nice and should remain. It’s actually potentially more interesting than a CD reduction. I actually like the idea of CD reduction through chaos armor, but it must be worth it. I think 3% is a good compromise.

I haven’t used much mantras post-patch so I am not sure I understand everything: Even if they recharge in the background (which I still think is a bug) you still need to channel them which takes 2.75s. So as a spike damage it works, but after 3 uses you still need to charge it right? Is your point simply that since we get 3 instant casts worth more than 1s AA DPS each, the 2.75s channeling is still worth it?

I find it interesting that you stay in staff the whole time. What made a fast weapon swap to for example scepter/pistol for a short DPS burst a bad idea? Is it the lack of survivability or the annoying lacklusters scepter clones?

@Xyonon I know the feeling… Everything could be different if the scepter didn’t overwrite phantasm. On its own, in rampager it can be on par or better than sword (depends a lot on the enemy’s attack/movement rate obviously). But this clone in the AA… I don’t even get it, I think almost nobody likes this clone anyway! It’s too slow for a shatter mesmer, its AA is so bad even condition mesmers don’t want it to overwrite staff clones, …

It is mostly for HoT, since there are places they want you to reach only with masteries and stuff.

I actually tried Teqatl and triple trouble for the first time since the patch. It is the first time I saw Teqatl fail and people get demotivated. I have never succeeded triple trouble, but this time, we were barely 30 trying it and after about 2 min, most had left. I really feel that the average gamer who found triple difficult but fun because challenging now just left.

Not easy. You have a minor trait in chaos which increases boon duration for each boon you have on you, but you rarely have many boons on you out of combat (basically 2 with the signet, which means + 6% boon duration). So to get 100%, you have to go for the runes (and/or Doubloons) and/or food.

An easier way is to also have focus and use focus 4 when the signet’s swiftness is gone (and remember, focus 4 does not stack swiftness, you have to wait for the signet’s swiftness to fade before using focus 4).

Signet of the ether description: “Heal yourself and refresh all phantasm skill recharges.”
This signet has a long cooldown, so its active heal is weak compared to ether feast for example. But it is very much used in PvE in particular since once you know well the dungeons, the heal is not needed while the added phantasm is.

What you say is basically how I understood it. There is one thing which I am not sure about though which is boons and conditions. All stats modifiers (might essentially) applied to you affect phantasms, while if they are directly applied the phantasm, they do nothing. On the other hand, if I understand well, all % modifiers (weakness, fury…) do the opposite, they only affect the phantasm if they are applied to it, right?
But let’s say a ranger blows his warhorn for party fury, if phantasms are in the range, can they also get fury? So to get straight to my point, can phantasms have fury without having the trait?

We have always fought things like stunlock warriors, engineers and the CC abilities of the coming dragonhunter seems very scary also. But if mesmers can do it then everyone complains. Landing an interrupt is not always easy, since only our mantra is really fast to cast. And there are counters to it, like stability.

@Kaseus
But if mesmers can’t stack torment to annoy people, who can?
I do agree 2 stacks/shatter was too high, but 1 is not enough.
I am looking forward to chronomancer for the super-speed shatter. That would be a fun way to wreck people who are trying to escape. Our clones will be able to reach them and then, escaping with torment should be fun

I don’t think they benefit from harmonious mantra. It’s a damage multiplier, not a damage addition. Fencer’s Finesse should work, the increased damage from Compounding Power should not work, but the added condition damage should work.
I think this is a weird thing in general, and I do not understand if it is an on-purpose thing or a code limitation.

When doing DPS calculation, it is difficult/impossible to include effects that depend on the enemy’s reaction. So yes, power block is a thing which can increase spike damage on mobs. Most boss are defiant, so this is a different question. Now the pistol 5 is a good interrupt skill, but sword 4 (used in assassin’s build) and focus 4 can also interrupt. And the damage output of power block is higher on assassin’s build (rampager is at least 25% less direct damage), so this is not much of case for rampager…

The ramp/sin balance is similar to the zerk/assassin balance. Ramp+krait is very much assassin+scholar in terms of stats. It is difficult to reach 100% crit with sinister, and we need high crit to get a good bleeding output on pistol, even more so as we don’t have phantasm fury. The loss of crits is too strong to benefit from the increased condition damage.

So sinister can work if you boost on crit food/utilities and have a spotter ranger, to get close to effective 100% crit chance (which is still only 80% crit for your phantasm).

But even if I now say that assassin is better while I was one of the first and foremost supporter of the post-patch rampager build, the difference is minimal. In the optimal situation that we can create in the calculations, rampager is a 1s loss of DPS compared to assassin, which is nothing except if you want a record run. So go and play what you like, nobody should kick you off because one a 1s delayed DPS simply because they would loose more than 1s DPS doing so

The good thing with condi build for a reflect build is that you also get distortion sharing which works well with signet. This can be useful in fractals. As you can’t take mantras, this may be better than the usual assassin.

Shatter PvE build? :p

OOh, so you did the calculation too. Do your conclusions match mine?
Since my work heavily uses programming, it didn’t take me that much time to write a small program for that and I trust my results better than when I started counting the bleeds on a sheet.
Yes, the pistol trait is the key to the rampager build, but right now it does not work, so, one more reason to burry this build :p

I think the reason why condis are somewhat viable is because the mesmer does not benefit as much from damage multipliers since only our personal damage (around 40%) is affected.

For the reflect point, I perfectly agree, and that’s why I stopped trying to find ways to make condi-reflect build. I first thought that investing in conditions would allow to drop domination for inspiration, to keep the nice phantasm haste from illusions (=full reflect with only 2 wardens). But in absence of ferocity, I don’t expect it to be so good + the only viable condi-main hand has a phantasm overwriting.
I’m still hoping for a weird condi, precision, ferocity stats mix

So what I used for this is a rotation
phantasm1-phantasm2-signet-phantasm2-AA for ever
and because I didn’t want to bother, I assumed the mantra fully stacked for the assassin.
So the playstyle is identical except it’s a different phantasm2. All equipments are exactly the ones on metabattle, but I didn’t add food. I assumed 25 might, ferocity, 25 vuln just for the damage multiplier on domination minor. I also took into account the faster swordsman.

I initially got excited around this build because the announced bleeding damage was quite higher than the one finally released. When I did the calculations with the new bleeding, the DPS was mostly identical to assassin which meant the build was inferior to assassin because of the slightly longer time it takes to build up + higher cooldown on duelist compared to swordsman. It’s only if you can’t keep much of your scholar bonus and your mantra charges that the rampager comes back. On the opposite, the rampager does not react as well to time warp because the sword AA does not do as much damage while the phantasms don’t benefit from quickness.

I could then advertise the rampager as a viable alternative, but since the playstyle is not amazingly different, that’s not so valuable.

I am still hoping for a buff to bleeding…

PS: no math sheets as such, I wrote a dumb program since counting the bleeding stacks was awful.

I love necro (2nd favorite class) but they are not as challenging because they have more passive defense, no difficult skill rotations in PvE-levelling, and do not rely much on mobility (actually they have none). But as I said, in PvP everything is fun and challenging (except maybe grenades engineers currently :p )

Mesmer and ele are complex in their own ways. The big advantage of ele is that you will easily find a group because they are very useful in most gameplays. Mesmer is not as strong in DPS (although it got buffed in previous patch) and although it has great utilities it is not irreplaceable for PvE or zerg WvW. All classes are fun and challenging in PvP.

It also depends what style you are looking for. In high tier WvW servers, you have more group fights (zerg/blobs) but less roaming. In low tier, it’s the opposite. And as mentioned earlier, it is harder to find people off hours in some low-tiers server.

The problem is they advertised a doubling of HP in exchange for allowing crits, and I can buy that. But It is hardly critable. I did it this morning, 80% of people did not know bout the HP-crit change and the crit spot is not obvious at all (btw is it a bug or a feature that we can only crit him there?). So people don’t crit him, the fight is twice longer and very difficult to do in time.

Let’s just make an estimate
1 year to fix turret engineer while everybody was complaining about it
1 day to butcher mesmer’s chaotic dampening that nobody complained
… don’t hold your breath, next WvW year, your nerfed PU won’t allow you to escape engineer’s doomsday devices. But if by miracle you do, just shatter 4 stacks of torment to your enemy while he puts 30 stacks of burning on you

I did a rampager vs assassin comparison here assuming a match start.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Mesmer-PVE-PVP-guide-after-update/first#post5216755
The DPS is basically identical but it takes about 1s more time for rampager to reach the same damage as assassin. Rampager beats assassin only if you have 3 duelists up or when your mantra charges bonus ends (about 10s if you use them all in the beginning).

The swiftness of focus is definitely welcome to be a bit less slow. The signet of inspiration now also grants 50% swiftness uptime (+ if boon duration).
Also focus is our only AOE phantasm, which is useful in open world. I would guess mantra of pain is nice too as a AOE damage.

I think healing prism should have healed allies for a percentage of your own healing and thus without ICD.

If you look at the data mined artworks
http://imgur.com/a/cIOW3

you see one unknown ranger one which most likely corresponds to the elite specialization. This is a picture of animals. It is hard to deduce anything from it, but I will give a wild guess on the theme… : transform? (A bit like the Norn racial skills)

PS: we can also see the name of the warrior and engineer’s elite (berserker and forge) as well as something which looks like a staff (but can be a riffle) for the thief

Most classes are not given a chance to retry if they miss, and you should reward active defense. So if the thief misses the backstab because he was too far, then don’t reveal. But if he misses because of a blind/aegis, it is HIS fault (he can see that he has a blind or the enemy has a block) and should be revealed for that.
You should allow and value counterplay.

I think it could be useful. Sometimes, in a messy fight, I am not quite sure what is phantasm and what is clone and the mess around prevents me from seeing properly on the field. I think it’s a small quality of life improvement.

And maybe mesmer is not the most urgent to nerf in any case…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lQbbUJQroM

That would change my life in PvE. Finally a use for the GM!

Duelist in rampager is superior to swordsman in assassin/berserker. The problem is sword AA in assassin beats everything’s AA in rampager :p

Yes, I’m not exactly sure but it seems I can’t get more than 7k damage on a mind wrack, while our sword AA is 5k DPS. So it we take more than 1.5s to respawn the dead phantasms, we are loosing DPS (as always this is in an ideal situation, if our phantasms are going to die anyway…)

I don’t think we are doing so bad in PvE that we need to fix things. But yes, most GM are not so useful there, and I think it is because they want us to shatter… And maybe we should shatter more. I haven’t done calculations to see how useful could shatter be now with IP baseline and persistence of memory, but I am not so optimistic. It just takes so much time to summon phantasms that even if we have our phantasms and signet off-CD, shattering + respawning phantasms is not worth it.

Inspiration: Like in all professions, the developers have tried to bring support in different flavors. Phantasm support is one of them, hence the adept, master and GM phantasm support traits. Then there is the ‘glamour’ support, the shatter supports etc… All of these correspond to different playstyles, so they don’t fit as minor. Minor should fit in any build: condi cleanse on heal works for any build, healing prism the same. The only somewhat weird one is the distortion one, since we get it from sword, signets or shatter only… but well…

Confusing Combatants : they want to have confusion as bursts and not continuous application.

And one thing I didn’t think about, but since both warden and duelist are combo finishers, I got some extra condition damage from the ethereal fields I put or more often the fire field the party put.

I have been playing Sc/P-F on a pug which wanted to range everything, and I think it’s the best DPS we can achieve at range, close to the DPS of melee zerk. It helped also that in this dungeon, a few of the boss are both mobile and reasonably fast attacking for torment and confusion to hit hard.

I love the idea, but for illusions, we already have reduced recharge on illusions summoning which I guess is good enough. I love your domination idea. For Chaos, maybe desperate decoy should actually be moved there (it is a selfish-survivability skill after all).

Clones were supposed to be a distraction, but once you target the real one, you can’t loose him/her except if he/she stealths (+ we shatter them all the time anyway). So that’s not it.
Confusion/torment were supposed to act as soft-lockdown, so that people would actually hesitate attacking until they got rid of them. But I don’t feel people are doing that. They just die and blame us for being OP.
So the only thing left I would say is hard-lockdown, meaning interrupts build. There’s nothing more frustrating than missing your attack + having a 15s CD on it + being severely punished for it by vuln + high damage + boons on opponent + …
We are not the only class being able to interrupt, and one may even say that some other classes have more ways to do it, but no other classes is as punishing as we are when we interrupt.

I’d like to insist on my point. This debate does not work because we don’t agree on what is the place of conditions in gw2. I try to explain my point in this thread
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/What-should-conditions-be/first#post5217604
Before asking for any adjustment, we have to agree on what we want!

Essence Snow.3194:

This really seems like balance that was not at all thought out. “Double health allow crits?” “Sure why not!” I can’t fathom any real thought was given to this.

It makes perfect sense. With berserker, allowing crits about doubles the damage. So double the health to make up for it. They had to do this because conditions now hit as hard as berserker regardless of the crits (which is why world bosses died faster recently). As soon as all hitbox will be able to crit, this should get back to normal.

I would have guessed they didn’t allow crit to reduce server pressure.

Is there something you cannot crit in dungeons?

Isn’t it the point to balance conditions? Conditions gave massive damage regardless of crits which made them stronger than direct damage in world bosses. Now, the balance is restored.

Interrupt + condi… This is essentially in line with my thread
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Suggestion-Condi-interrupt-build/first#post5216871

Well the duelist/wardens are not for soloing
It’s a build meant to compete with the berserker one, so full DPS, less sustain.

As I said, I have no experience at all with soloing dungeons/FotM.

As I mentioned, I would see instead a crit on application (makes more sense physically + better for server). So you normally hit 200 damage/stack for 5s, but on a critical, it would be 300 damage/stack for 5s. Since condi damage would be on par with physical damage, it would be as hard as if you crit during a direct damage hit.