Guild Wars 2

Well but I understand his point. Having high health helps you sustain the 1st blow, but then if you don’t heal more, this does not help you at all for a longer fight.

I don’t have major experience with that, but staff is definitely used in solo-play. When I did compute the DPS of staff, chaos storm hits hard, but the AA is very weak. Also, staff is a condi weapon, but the warlock is a direct damage one. It can hit very kitten a berserker/assassin setting especially if your party is stacking conditions on the enemy but not much in a condi gear. Overall, staff is a good defensive weapon, not a great offensive one.

They are not. Precision is needed in some builds to proc conditions, but by far not all. So in most cases, the precision does not add significant bonus to condition damage. And condition duration is there, but in almost no rune nor stats-prefix (PvP amulet or PvE armors).
Also, if you want to implement this 3 stats systems, you need to scale down conditions. So basically, you would need those 3 states to reach a high damage. So make conditions shorter so that we need to invest in condition duration and make them less damaging so that we need them to crit.
It’s technically a nerf to conditions, but without preventing you to use them efficiently as long as you actually invest in them.

Well but that’s the thing, PvE does not care so much of those stats so if they could get 3 “real” offensive stats, they will be happy. On the other hand, PvP uses defensive while keeping high condition damage which is unfair. So both want the same thing really: 3 offensive condi stats, so that if you get more defense, you loose some offense, but if you want to be a condi glass-cannon you can.

I’ve always felt that there is a surprising number of people starting whenever I start a new toon (+ many higher level chars trying to get map completion although in lv 1-10 they tend to 1-shot everything)

I love interrupts, it is a very active playstyle. A bit random sometimes as it is not always easy to predict an incoming skill, but well, randomness is in the DNA of the mesmer.

I also love conditions, especially confusion and torment. They don’t only add damage, they actually require you to act differently to minimize their effect (although I don’t think anyone does… but that’s a different subject).

And confusion and torment actually play into a “soft lockdown” style. Therefore, it felt very natural to me to try condi-interrupts. We even have traits for it!

But then I realize that this is a bad idea. Interrupts and conditions actually play against each other. You interrupt thanks to dazes and stun, thereby preventing the enemy from moving and attacking. You can chain daze enemies for quite a while. So you remove most of the confusion and torment potential.

So it lead me to think of a possible new traits to fix just that and allow this playstyle. The trait could basically be a rework of mistrust:
1) Deal confusion and/or torment on interrupt
2) Reduce massively the daze duration (0.25s, just enough to proc the interrupt) but add a blind instead

Since we “weaken” the daze/stun by transforming it into a softer CC, ANet can balance it with a higher reward in terms of many stacks of confusion/torment. But at the same time, the blind still add a bit of survivability without preventing the proc of confusion. It’s higher risk higher reward and sounds fun.
What do you think?

@Excludee
So you prefer solution 1 then. So do I

@Wolfric
But if they are not meant to burst BUT bad at long buildup, do you just want conditions to be pointless?

Duelist’s discipline adds bleeds without crits, so this works perfectly fine. That’s about 5.3 bleeds/unload. The sharper image gives bleed on crits. With 100% crits that is 8 bleed. In sinister, with banners, your phantasms get to about 60% crit (80% for you thanks to fury). That’s about 2 bleeds less per phantasms than Rampager. And you partly make up for it by the extra condition damage. At the end, the DPS loss is minimal. Also, if you add some crit food + some maintenance oil + a spotter ranger, you’re back in business (Rampager + banner + fury is already above 100% crit for himself).

I did write the small code (not as ambitious as initially planed, but it works). Assassin-scholar vs rampager-krait. Both builds converge to nearly identical DPS, but assassin is faster to get there. Overall, this corresponds to a 1s DPS loss (0.2s if you assume a group of 5 with same DPS). I didn’t include the damage from mantra of pain which obviously adds to the assassin DPS since it’s instant cast. On the other hand, I did not include the loss of DPS after the charges of mantras run out (so after about 10s).
In non-ideal situation, assassin has an advantage as it relies less on phantasm damage and the swordsman has a lower cooldown so you can respawn it faster if your phantasms die. On the other hand, the scholar bonus may not be that easy to keep. So here, I guess
I believe the only reasonable conclusion from all of that is that both builds are perfectly viable. The assassin build is better, so more “meta” but people who want to use rampager should not feel that they are sacrificing much.

Below is the damage over time for both builds.

If you use duelist’s discipline to increase pistol bleeds, then go rampager to make up for the lack of phantasm fury and use sword. If you use phantasm fury, you loose bleeds but you can invest in sinister for the extra condi damage. Then scepter may be a better main hand.

I have done reasonably accurate calculations, and the rampager build takes a bit more time to build up damage than assassin (but converge to the same DPS). Rampager thus corresponds to a 1s loss of DPS. If you are 5 people, then that is 0.2 s DPS loss. So this is perfectly viable.

I believe the problem is the question of what conditions should be. Please go to this thread
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/What-should-conditions-be/first#post5216410
to give your opinion about this.

I agree, I don’t quite see the reason for this in the first place. Same with veil btw.

I think the key problem behind the current condi damage debate is what should conditions be. People fight but all constructive argument is prevented by a disagreement on the core problem. I see basically 2 possibilities:

1) conditions are an alternative to direct damage. They just represent a way to have variations in builds and gameplay

2) conditions are meant to be a way to keep pressure while having a defensive gameplay.

I believe, the game was balanced around 2) initially but tried to evolve towards 1) which leaves us in this current non-satisfactory situation.

I personally see arguments for both:
1) some people just like conditions. They are very thematic, torment and confusion are super mesmery, fear is necromancery, burning is what a fire elementalist or guardian do… They exist in both burst type (burning, confusion, fear) or real DoT (bleeding). Some classes are almost designed around them (the necro is not best at applying condi, but particularly good at manipulating them). They also introduce variety in tanking since they ignore toughness. + they can now be played in PvE where defensive stats are usually useless (hopefully HoT will change that)
2) conditions are often paired with defensive attunement (bleeding for earth ele), defensive weapons (staff or torch for mesmer), defensive stats (rabid, dire…). They take time to reach their full damage, so you’d better survive in the meanwhile.

The reason why it is so important to choose a side is that that has a large impact on how to balance them.
To balance 1), you need to make sure that conditions also need 3 stats to reach their full strength (I suggest condition damage, precision and condition duration, allowing conditions to “crit” on application). They should be balanced around medium armor to give a bit more damage than direct damage to make up for the possibility to cleanse them. Burst conditions should be on cooldown so that you can’t apply them all the time while bleeding can be even on AA, thus having the same difference as direct damage with high burst which you can counter.
To balance 2) reduce significantly the burst possibility, pure conditions should be weaker than berserker but with higher survivability. The condition cap should still be like it currently is (because a cap is unfair and stupid) but the damage from conditions will anyway be low.

I personally like nr1 better. I love conditions, I would like more variations in both PvE and PvP and conditions are one way to do just that. But then many balances issue have to be fixed (in particular, the 3-stats system).

What do you think? If we could at least agree on the premises, we could send a stronger signal to ANet.

Well but in the meanwhile, he was doing some damage. It’s not “just” a 19k burst in 10s (which is already strong), he did direct damage and massive burning before he got that 19k tick. I haven’t counted how much damage in total during those 10s, but that is insane!

They only removed the clone-on-death because it was cheesy. They didn’t nerf phantasms, quite the opposite.

Btw, I don’t know how efficient it is, but I had fun with some interrupts build in PvP where I didn’t shatter much. I just lockdown the enemy while my phantasms destroy him (+ the interrupts hit fairly hard also). Fun, active and not particularly shatter-based. And it does not seem ANet is preventing you from playing that. As a matter of fact, many lockdown traits compete with shatter traits (especially in domination).

I think it’s not so different to guardian: if you keep your virtues, you gain benefits over time, if you use them, you get a “burst” of benefits but then no passive before recharge.

I don’t think the discussion makes much sense in PvP. Your phantasms have a big chance to die before they can land a second skill. I actually think YOU are taking the risk by not shattering them.
When you play PvE (for example while leveling), it feels like shattering is a bad idea. Your phantasms give more damage over time than shatter + most mobs are aggro-ed by illusions, so as soon as you shatter, they run straight to you. In PvP, I first thought like you, let’s avoid shatters. But then you see your phantasms dying, and you soon after and you start shattering and you realize it’s way more fun and active

Chronophantasm may change the situation and allow shatters and phantasms to partly coexist.

Well but we have even less access to torment. What I would like is for staff to apply some confusion and/or torment. Currently the scepter and shatters are our only reliable sources of both conditions.

You have to be careful with ‘@ss’ because the forum kittens it…
But I just checked precisely that and got basically what you got (not exactly the same value, but most likely an error from my side).

The staff daze is not only for interrupts build, it’s also very useful in PvP in general, to save a teammate, to secure stomps, to just save your skin at a critical moment. Plus it works in a very chaotic way, fitting well with the staff idea. But even for PvP I don’t think the condition duration would hurt. I feel that the staff is a good defensive weapon and good for clone generation, but its own damage is close to 0… Adding some extra seconds of burning won’t break it!

I think this has always been the case… and it has always been weird to me but nothing new.

The value you mentioned for torment and confusion are the base only right? In PvP, players attack permanently and move permanently, this is the reason why these are strong conditions in this context (and why people hate us). It’s also why confusing combatant was removed: they already mentioned they wanted confusion as a burst and not continuous application. I would have liked confusion on phantasms, a bit like sharper image but with confusion… This would have helped PvE without destroying PvP since phantasms do not last very long anyway.

Daze on Chaos Storm: just no! Mesmer is made so that basically all weapon sets have some interrupt, and I rely a lot on the staff interrupt when I play condi. On the other hand, I agree with some more condi duration on staff. We are the only class who didn’t get a buff to burning to make up for the stacking in intensity… So basically we got nerfed.

Well to be honest, calculating the damage of the scepter is not as trivial, because it applies confusion and torment which deal damage according to the enemy’s reaction. When I did DPS calculations, the scepter beats the sword for the DPS in rampager/sinister BUT overwrites a phantasm. Assuming no movement (so only base torment) and one enemy attack per second (so 1 tick active confusion per second), the increased personal DPS almost make up for the loss of the warden (not a duelist). So scepter + clone + 2 duelist is approximately as good as sword+warden + 2 duelist. But I wonder if 1 attack per second isn’t optimistic in most cases in PvE…

The main problem in sinister is the lack of crits since we don’t have phantasm fury. With some precision boost from a spotter-ranger + some crit food, it can be better. The other advantage from scepter is that since we hardly need power, the bonus from domination are not so great so this gives one spot for a potentially more defensive/supportive role using chaos or inspiration.

Hi
I first wanted to write a code to do the calculations for me (currently my code only gives me the stats + damage for each skill), but I ended up doing it manually with excel, so it takes more time and is less accurate :p
Sinister did not seem promising, the lack of crits reduced too much the amount of bleeds, which more than made up for the extra condition damage. Assassin why not, but I’m too lazy.
Else I used
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Mesmer_-_S/S_/F_/P (except that I used berserker + ranger rune)
and
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Mesmer_-_Dungeon_Hybrid
I did not put any food. I assume 25 mights, 25 vuln for the minor in domination (not for the overall damage, but just scale it by 25% for both condi and damage). No mantra for the hybrid, passive signets instead.

I will most likely make my program and then everything will be accurate with maybe even food and I will be able to try more combinations.
This is to get a first idea only, I don’t pretend this is 100% accurate or relevant.

I did it… I did an estimate start of fight
berserker: warden, swordsman, signet ether, swordsman, AA….
rampager: warden, duelist, signet ether, duelist, AA….
Doing so, there is hardly any difference between both. Berserker starts above and after about 8s has a 12000 damage better than rampager (computed assuming 2200 armor for enemies). From then, the spread reduces and at 11s, both build are identical.
The converged DPS in both those cases is essentially identical, the rampager is better only if you can replace the warden with the duelist when cooldown is finished. It would then beat the berserker with 3 swordsmen. However, swordsmen is off-CD sooner assuming you don’t interrupt anything with pistol. Another important part is that I assumed you maintain the 5 charges from mantras, but after about 10s, this is unrealistic.

So overall my conclusion is that both build are very similar in damage output but berserker has a small edge for fights shorter than 10s. So we can keep the berserker meta

If they bring back the bleeding formula they advertised first, things will most likely be different.

You are obviously more used to those calculations than I am, so you may as well perform them, I would trust them better than mine
As you may know, the build I have most hope for is a hybrid which uses the same weapons as power builds, so what you have is probably good enough for me to start. On the other hand, you’ll have to explain me what those numbers mean

So far, the traits they have nerfed where not very much PvE -related. So I don’t think the PvE experience is currently dropping.
There are a lot of PvP complaints as well as PvE complains, and it seems that they have one point in common: the damage of all classes simply got buffed too much compared to the defense of players or NPC. We are burning (literally) everything too fast. Hopefully, they will fix it by a global nerf of damage or buff of NPC and player’s HP. So if we are currently equal to other classes, then this would hopefully remain.

So far I only did calculation based on DPS (assuming a group environment) and sinister or rampager won over berserker by about 15-25%. However, as Jerem said in metabattle, the damage from conditions take more time to build up. I am planning to do some calculations to model a fight starting to see how long it takes for condition damage to equal and then beat direct damage. If this is below 10s (which I currently expect) I believe we could say that the condi is as viable or even better than zerker. Above 10s, I would opt for zerker as best.
I wanted to do these calculations earlier, but seeing how people complain about conditions, I am not sure how long those results will hold. I really hope bleeding won’t get nerfed, and the community seem to mostly want to buff bleeding but nerf burning applications which would be perfect for our PvE mesmers.

They have updated metabattle. Now I think the new “meta” is matter of debate: currently, it’s just the old meta adapted to the new traits, the actual meta will slowly emerge by itself.

Well chronomancer will most likely be a very different beast in PvE than the current mesmer core. With party-wide alacrity, AOE damage from wells, interesting new traits, it is hard to kitten exactly how much, but the mesmer meta is not unlikely to be a chronomancer.
Else, the “meta” for PvE seems to be essentially the same as before the patch but a bit stronger for all professions. Mesmer is definitely stronger than before but I’m not sure that its ranking in DPS has changed (so… quite low). It is still too early but I feel that mesmer’s role has not changed and is still nice utilities-low damage, not indispensable profession.

Agree with thetarot. It’s the same thing with conditions being “op”. Conditions are op in sPvP partly because they were not really present in high-tier PvP before so people got used to run with hardly any condi-cleanse and without much defense.
Let players get accustomed to the new situation and then see what is really op and nerf it.

I am quite curious about how well alacrity will perform in dungeon. Currently, the meta is using AA for most professions (sounds fun right?), will alacrity give any buff at all? Will it allow people to use other weapons (like ranger using GS or longbow instead of sword because maul/rapid fire has shorter cooldown)?

The best formulation of the situation I think.

Exactly my thoughts on all points but one:
I do believe the stats situation is actually a problem. If you want them to be balanced in terms of final damage, then having 2 stats slots free for defense makes everything unbalanced. If you take this defense into account, then you have to reduce the condition damage, but then this kills condition in PvE where defensive stats are redundant.
The only solution I believe is to nerf conditions but allow them to crit on application to make up for it. You thus have a 3 stats combo
-condi damage, precision, condi duration
to get most of the power of conditions.

Except that they are chain-nerfing mesmers… People were not used to see us winning duels, so they complained.

I may sound weird but I would love
condi damage, power, ferocity.

Because sometimes you get high crit from traits (for example necro DS) so I would love a super hybrid build.

@Phantom I don’t understand your point. In principle, instead of dodging a damage burst, you’re dodging a condition burst. There is nothing broken with conditions in the mechanics per se. On the opposite, condis have one more way to be negated which is condi cleanse.

The problem is when some hard conditions (like burning) are applied on the AA. Hard condi should be on cooldowns and thus dodgeable, while AA should apply weak conditions like small bleeds or so.

+ I also think condi should crit on application (nothing wrong with the idea that you applied a particularly strong condi hit). This way you can nerf the base condi damage but get it back with a high crit chance. This would ensure people who want high condi damage cannot also take a defensive stat. So to get full condi power you should invest in 3 stats:
Berserker: power, precision, ferocity
maxcondi-prefix: condi damage, precision, condi duration

One nerf for engineer, but except for that, all other professions got bug fixes

I think it has always been the case for mesmer, there are so many nice mechanics (interrupts, reflections, shatters, phantasms) and it’s impossible to have them all.
I assume your build was the second one in this link
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Mesmer_-_Fractal_Phantasm
You can actually have it all with the current system! You take domination for the phantasm damage, but we already got 15% baseline (the one from inspiration minor that you did not have). So accepting to give up the extra 15% you never had allows you to get the dueling line.
As a bonus, you can now get bonus damage from the mantra + some extra supporting abilities (distortion sharing, some healing…)

This one also seems worth trying:
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Mesmer_-_dungeon_hybrid

First I will say regardless of your profession, the leveling experience is smoother like this. You can get meaningful traits earlier in your leveling (and you don’t have to unlock traits in a stupid and painfully long way as it was these past months).
Then, people may have different ideas but I love the patch. I feel like they have managed to bring more variations, and even after we all get nerfed (that is bound to happen in the near future) and the meta will settle I believe we will have more viable playstyles.

I think the idea was to create a PvE/PvP balance without actually having a different effect in PvE and PvP.

The nerf to vigor is annoying because most players don’t look at their endurance bar but we just had a “feel” for how long it takes for it to recharge. We know when the next dodge is available. But since it has changed, we get constantly stuck thinking we have the dodge available but it is not.
It will take a few days to sink in.
I personally think it’s a good idea. Many classes had perma-vigor and that almost means infinite dodge :p This mechanics was broken. Especially in PvE since you can basically dodge all attacks considering the NPC attack speed.

Time warp got quite buffed anyway and you can still trait it to extend its duration, add superspeed and resistance. I just love our new time warp and glamours in general. The superspeed just synergies so well with veil and portal while the resistance just makes null field so much better (since it takes time for the condi to cleanse).

I think also it was honestly too strong. But on the other hand, I feel only 1 stack is too weak (haven’t tried yet). If only 1.5 was possible (or just change the whole torment so that it is half as strong, double all other sources of it, and put 3 stacks per shatter?).
There are just so few sources of torment in this game, if they don’t want it to disappear, we mesmers need to be able to apply some.

In Rampager, both direct and condi damage just wrecked my opponents in sPvP. Added a not-nerfed-yet maim shatter with confusion + blinding→confusion = they died like flies.

It’s sad to say but we don’t have many very good sources of confusion….
The scepter 3 is basically the only one (a strong one I admit) except for shatter (or weird blind-confusion combos). Since we rarely play shatter in PvE…
Also the efficiency would depend strongly on the enemy (usually slow) attack rate (the base tick is not very high)….
I think confusion will remain a good PvP condition but sub-optimal PvE condition even after those changes.

No!!!! Maim!!!!!
Couldn’t they just reduce duration? Half is just…. sad
They already nerfed torment as a condition compared to last week’s announce (the passive at least), now we just can’t apply torment anyway…

I had a small party with a condi-cleanse guardian and he told me he felt like he just never could get rid of them (and we were not amazingly outnumbered).
Myself, as a mesmer, I didn’t expect to survive condition bursts anyway :p

We discussed mostly the DPS build right now, what about reflect build? Do we just leave the job to guardians or did we come up with a reflect build that also gives some damage?

I don’t know what you mean Levetty. They did reduce bleeding, confusion and torment compared to what they announced last week, which reduced significantly the expected efficiency of condi (or hybrid) build in PvE. But as we discussed in this link
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/PvE-Dungeon-Mesmer-Builds-for-June-23
the hybrid build is not only viable, it is potentially somewhat stronger than the zerk/assassin build. I actually believe that until they decide to nerf something, both alternatives work as well right now.