Guild Wars 2

I couldn’t find another thread mentioning this, but none of my stacking sigils work in the Crown Pavillion. Tested it with corruption, perception and bloodlust sigils. No stacks obtained when killing mobs.

Is this intended?

I’ve not heard a single person outside of these weird threads mention how annoyed they are that the old LS reward minis and skins are available again.

Nobody cares.

I’m not sure giving Necros more stability would be wise. That susceptibility to CC is what allows Mesmers and Engis to compete against a class that hard counters them. It would certainly allow Necros to have a better time against Warriors but then again, most classes struggle against Warriors in their current state.

I haven’t touched my Necro in a while, but does nobody use multiple stun breakers anymore? I mean, if I don’t take Blink and Decoy on my Mesmer I will get obliterated by the first competent Warrior or Thief that comes along.

I gave Triumphant Distortion a whirl last week with my shatter build and it really is a useless Grandmaster trait. For something so situational it really really needs to have that ICD removed or at least reduced so a Mesmer can utilise this trait in some meaningful way.

My absolute favourite arrowcart spot in EotM that one. So many zerglings intent on capping a point with little space to move. One Superior Arrowcart later and you’re soon drowning in heavy loot bags

Could we maybe change this so you don’t lose your stacks when equipping another weapon with the exact same sigil? I was kind of miffed to see that swapping from Greatsword with a perception sigil to a staff with a perception sigil completely removed my accumulated stacks.

Honestly, I see what Anet was trying to do with this change, but it’s just made stacking sigils too awkward to use and I imagine this will be quite confusing for new players.

Oh wow that pre-nerf quickness too. Probably best to not encourage pew pew Rangers to play any worse than they already are. Although my Mesmer will have a great time reflecting all that kitten back into the Ranger’s face. I remember when I downed a Ranger in WvW by just chaining a few reflects. It was depressing to watch.

I personally think it’s great that newer players have a chance to fill up their wardrobes with older skins so they can create as many cool and unique gear combinations as possible. I actually find it a bit strange that someone would want anything other than that.

Your survivability will be high but your condi output will be extremely weak. Generally, condi builds not using Sharper Images and a decent amount of Rabid gear aren’t particularly threatening.

I would certainly love to see confusion focused Mesmer builds revived at some point. I think a flat damage increase would probably make things a bit ridiculous with the existence of perplexity runes though.

It would probably be better for Anet to reverse the ICD of Blinding Befuddlement and up the Confusing Enchantment stacks from 1 to 2, to revive those heavy trait investment builds. Anet could even introduce a Grandmaster trait that increases confusion damage by 25% in a similar vein to Poison Master on Ranger. It could even replace Disruptor’s Sustainment which is as unnecessary and redundant as Grandmaster traits get.

It will go down as one of the most frustrating changes Anet implemented. It’s so easy to exploit the way stacks are replenished. Also, with just one or two covering conditions it’s so easy to prevent a cleanse and further aid immobilise stacking. My best was 8-9 seconds on a Necro. I bet he/she really enjoyed that fight….

It’s stuff like immobilise stacking that really holds PvP back in this game. Disappointing.

The Chosen Link.3247:

Mesmer stealth is different than ‘thief’ stealth, therefore when you use ‘Sic Em’ it will reveal debuff the mesmer but they will still be able to stealth. For example, if you use sic em when they’re casting mass invis, they will still invis.

It’s one of my gripes about the skill. According to the bug report thread I made it’s intended and not a bug.

Only the Mesmer skill called ‘Decoy’ works through the Revealed debuff as intended. Mass Invisibility will not apply stealth if the Mesmer is revealed.

Using Illusionary Wave to knock a bunch of guys out of Shadow Refuge is just about one of the most satisfying things in the game.

Also, Mirror Blade + Illusionary Elasticity is just delicious.

I don’t think this build really needs PU. Torch + staff is already offering you lots of survivability, so I’d probably opt for some more offensive traits to balance things out. Compounding Power would work nicely with this build, or putting 10 into Domination to pick up Dazzling for pre-Phantasmal Warlock vulnerability stacking and then using Crippling Dissipation to improve your control.

Karl McLain.5604:

2. Increase the number of boons removed.

This would do for me. Also…

*Make it a Blast Finisher.

I’ve just really wanted this to be the case in such a long time. I always feel a bit left out during WvW guild raids when other classes are happily blasting each others fields on demand and I just can’t do that with my Mesmer (The Prestige just isn’t a viable option). Would be nice if Mesmer could offer even a little more group functionality in this respect.

Damage numbers all round are lower on my shatter build in WvW. I too went more glassy to compensate. Double sigil procs are useful, yet shatter is undoubtedly the worse it’s ever been.

It would be nice if Anet at least attempted to revitalise one of the funnest build types the class has to offer. Buffs to Mental Torment, Precise Wrack and Shattered Strength would be a nice start.

I was looking through some of my old WvW footage the other day and I got all teary and fuzzy when I saw my Phantasmal Warden attack every single time I summoned it. It was a bit like watching a video of an old friend who had long since passed away.

I will never forget you Phantasmal Warden – you were one of the good ones…

These days, the only class that really abuses massive confusion stacks is perplex Engi. Fortunately it’s a one trick pony and all you have to do avoid the 15+ stacks is dodge magnet pull.

I still feel like all classes should have an increased movement speed signet, simply because it provides more flexibility in how we build. Don’t forget that slotting a movement speed signet will mean one less utility slot too. It’s that sort of trade-off that every class should be able to mull over.

In the case of my Mesmer no matter what build I am using, I always have increased movement speed runes, because 1) being slower than everyone else is boring and 2) Focus is not a viable weapon choice at present because of the bugged phantasm. I used to run around WvW with my inventory minimised at the side of the screen swapping my focus in when out of combat but I honestly got fed up of having my screen filled with more UI elements, so I went back to centaur runes because it was simply more fun.

Removal of downed state from WvW will make things terribly dull. It will allow you to sequentially remove one player at a time instead of having to devise tactics to overcome an enemy force as a whole. It will just make it so easy to burst targets down with no need of a follow through.

I feel it would be better to just remove resurrection from defeated state if the revivers are in combat and also perhaps limit the amount of people that can be rallied from one defeated enemy.

To me WvW is just a great big PvP sandbox that is not to be taken seriously. It’s a place to PvP unrestricted, testing out various builds and small group roaming compositions with little to no repercussions, especially now with the removal of armour repair. PPT and seasons are uninteresting to me and have very little influence over my participation in WvW. In my opinion, all you really need to enjoy WvW is a fun, strong guild and a little bit of imagination.

So, what on earth is going on with Spatial Surge at the moment? It seems to be showing up cumulative damage numbers between each use, but often it simply shows no damage numbers at all. I was in WvW earlier and attacking a Veteran Scout and there were absolutely no damage numbers and every 3rd use of Spatial Surge was being obstructed. It was truly bizarre.

Edit: Oh I see it listed on the OP. Nice.

I will admit that PU is pretty ridiculous and will eventually be brought down a peg or two, but not until more pressing issues on other classes are addressed.

But did you really need to create another “PU OP” thread? I mean we all know about it and I’m sure Anet are aware of its potency. Just rage in guild chat instead like everyone else. Internalise that hatred and share it with your guildies!

It will be nice to have it fixed, but I am worried that it might make staff clones a bit ridiculous. It would certainly make my current condi build extremely strong. Would be a nice buff for my shatter build though.

You would probably be better off taking sword/torch + scepter/pistol really, which would allow you to root whenever you wanted to shatter. You could then remove the 10 points from Chaos and put it into Inspiration to get Mender’s Purity, which in turn would allow you to drop Mantra of Resolve in favour of Mirror Images so your torment burst potential becomes much higher. You could then take Mantra of Recovery to increase condi removal as well as allow instant proc of on-heal torment whilst shattering.

Sounds good. I’m honestly not interested in server loyalty and all that nonsense anymore. Anet should focus more on providing the functionality for players to build strong reputable guild alliances instead. It should all be about the guilds.

Immobilise stacking is pretty broken. It’s hilarious just how long you can root people now with very little effort. As a Mesmer I like to partner up with a Warrior for maximum immobilise hilarity. If they don’t have a specific immobilise removal skill, then it’s pretty much a death sentence as all you have to do is dump a few covering conditions. Necros in particular are great targets for this as Consume Conditions is very easy to interrupt. Rangers and Mesmers are also easy to to perma-root.

I used to find immobilise stacking unpalatable but I have now learnt to embrace the cheese and am personally looking forward to Daze stacking

Also, since when has every class had the ability to specifically remove immobilise? One only has to spend a few moments perusing the wiki or exploring their alts to see that this is limited to just 4 classes.

Like Pyro above, I have also tested my phantasms and there’s been no noticeable damage increase after patch. I’ve hit targets for more than 9K with Phantasmal Rogue, but it requires all sorts of additional factors to come into play, so it’s pretty rare.

Power shatter is kind of bottom of the barrel at the moment. It’s kind of like playing backstab Thief only there’s additional external dps juggling and your survivability is much lower. However, it’s still such a satisfying way to play Mesmer, so despite its many shortcomings you should definitely try out some shatter builds.

I don’t think I’ve ever been killed in WvW whilst in Moa form unless it’s coupled with a root. When I use Moa on people I almost always couple it with Grasping Vines or Signet Of Domination otherwise they will quite easily run away.

As soon as you’re Moa’d use Flee and Kick to make distance to a location where you can abuse LOS restrictions for the Mesmer. Then double dodge through the Mesmer when it pursues. By then Moa duration should be over and you are now ready to murder the Mesmer without Mass Invis. That Mesmer has probably also blown all his/her CDs in order to try and kill you so, GG. Alternatively, you can simply run into deep water and that will remove Moa form too.

I fought a Mesmer using a signet build once and it was just weird. The Mesmer did so little damage and spent so much time just running around trying to mitigate damage from me. All I had to do was wait for the Mesmer to hit an inevitable CD wall and then burst it down. It was a tedious to fight but never ever threatening.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

I tried it today with full torment rune and sigil but 15 stacks is a bit hard to achieve. Could you give me some tip? A bit hard to generate 3 waves of shatter right now…

I achieved 15 stacks mostly testing on PvE mobs. However, I did hit 15 stacks on one player in WvW last night, but it was one of those players that does not dodge, cleanse or even kite, so basically no difference to a PvE mob.

To get 15 stacks, I was running 20/20/0/0/30 with condi duration food + torment duration from the runeset. I did it with two waves of shatter, illusionary counter, Power Return (so the AoE torment of the rune set is instant cast) and then 2 procs from the sigil. I need to spend more time with it though, as I imagine there’s probably a better way of doing it. Realistically, you’re looking at 9 stacks AoE if you mange to land two full shatters + heal proc + sigil proc.

It’s fun to play a more active condition build, but it is stuck with many of the limitations of traditional shatter. Most people will naturally kite out of the range of your clones sent to shatter unless you’re using Illusionary Leap, which in itself has some easily exploitable flaws for your opponent to avoid a full root+shatter. It is very very good for small group roaming though, as you essentially become a walking torment bomb.

Yep, Anet decided not to change this trait as it would have had been too damaging for other Mesmer builds. I imagine they will still change the way DE interacts with clone death at some point though.

Yep. I’m using torment runes and sigils on a full rabid set. I’m getting around 15 stacks max (more if my friendly venom share Thief is with me). I’m finding it particularly good for small group roaming in WvW. Promising indeed.

RedSpectrum.1975:

Someone has fought Priscilla the Crossbreed in Dark Souls recently

Probably one the most unnerving bosses in the game. Those dainty footsteps in the snow and then wham scythe to the face.

Yeh I’ve got to admit, of all the things one can do from stealth, this is probably one of the worst (along with phantasm summonings).

I’ve seen it suggested many times before that Choking Gas should do 1 damage to prevent a Thief from quite literally sitting in stealth whilst dishing out AoE dps.

After all, wasn’t the Revealed debuff kind of introduced to prevent this very thing from happening?

I really quite like some of these suggestions, especially allowing Blade Training to stack when using two swords. Also, making interrupt effects dependent on player activity would certainly make things more interesting.

However, I don’t think it would be fair to revert the nerfs to Blurred Frenzy and Temporal Curtain, seeing as these were introduced to provide more counter-play options against these quite powerful skills.

Will Main the Disillusioned have an ICD and will it only work with one shatter skill? If not, I would probably work deceptive evasion into your build. You’re in full dire so you probably won’t need PU anyway.

I agree that there needs to be more counters to stealth, but I honestly think that it is the Revealed debuff itself that is flawed. Until Anet change Revealed application from “when you land damage” to “when you land an attack irregardless of whether or not you caused damage” stealth will continue to be a tad ridiculous and very very accommodating.

But meh. Just stick it on the “never going to be addressed pile” along with immobilise stacking, rampant condi spam, ridiculous passive stacking and all the other things that prevent this game from harbouring a truly competitive PvP community.

Gosh that was cynical. I will end on a high by saying that I do really love my Endless Mystery Quaggan Tonic. Especially when combined with my Queen’s Jubilee balloon

It’s so easy to permanently root someone with immobilise stacking by simply refreshing once the first immobilise stack has worn off whilst dumping covering conditions. Changing it from 5 stacks to 3 stacks did very little to prevent people like myself from abusing this flawed mechanic. Sorry Necros, you’re incredibly easy to immobilise and interrupt……which funnily enough will get you immobilised again (Chaotic Interruption). Are we having fun yet? Probably not.

I remember the good old days where you had to get your timing just right if you truly wanted to permanently root an opponent. It required you to actually be aware of tick durations and therefore required a certain amount of skill and patience to pull off. It’s just laughably easy now.

Perma-daze? Are you sure you weren’t fighting a Raptor or perhaps even a Moa? You can totally move out of their frontal cone perma-daze attack.

F1 – steal
F2 – 1st stolen item
F3 – 2nd stolen item
F4 – 3rd stolen item

That’s kind of what I was expecting when the game was released. More emphasis on stolen item acquisition and use would certainly make the class more interesting. Would obviously need some rebalancing to prevent some ridiculous combinations, but I’d honestly love to feel like my Thief was actually carrying around a bad of swag, albeit without anything of monetary value

Dee Jay.2460:

Even in PvE Immobilize stacking is ridiculous. Running past a pack of Spiders earlier this day I found myself rooted for a solid 15 seconds.

15 seconds….wtf.

And as more and more Spiders added, they added to the immobilize too.

It’s quite obvious this change was never really thought-through.

Imo, every added stack should only add 50% of its standard duration. This should apply to every condition. At least that way timing your skills becomes slightly more important.

I’ve had the exact same thing during the jungle worm events. I was on my way to help one of the events and I was getting immobilised for 10+ seconds by a group of risen spiders whilst my condi clear was on CD. It was one of the only times I’ve raged quit from the game. Although I was more dumbfounded that Anet consciously allowed this to happen.

Honestly, one of the most frustrating changes to witness was the introduction of stackable immobilise. Many people have been hoping that Anet will revert this change, but it looks like Anet are going to continue to nerf skills that apply immobilise instead.

Quite silly.

There’s a thread in the Mesmer forum discussing this. It would probably be better to have this as an entirely different interrupt trait rather than replacing Power Block. The new Grandmaster interrupt trait for the inspiration tree is going to be pretty useless so maybe that would be a good location for some signet-hate on interrupt instead. Would also mean that interrupt Mesmers would need to sacrifice other important Mesmer traits if they really wanted signet-hate and a bunch of the other interrupt traits.

It would need to be something like 5 seconds of deactivation on interrupt with an ICD of at least 10 seconds. I think it would be more interesting if it only affected the passive part and did not prevent active use of the signet, so opponents can decide whether or not it’s worth using the active part of the signet to make up for the passive downtime, with the Mesmer essentially attempting to manipulate a target into using the active part of their signet.

I’d be entirely okay with a 3 way faction system, but only if Anet implemented some strong features that emphasised the importance of belonging to a good core WvW guild. Guild halls, guild alliances and WvW based guild missions would be a good start.

I’d quite like to see an interrupt trait that deactivates signets for a set time (get rid of that useless healing power interrupt and add this instead). Or perhaps a glamour trait that does the same thing for the duration that an enemy is within the radius of the glamour.

Is anyone really surprised? This is simply the product of the way in which Anet handled the pre-season transfer sales. There were a lot of people on other servers that realised there was little to no chance of their native server performing well, so a free transfer to last seasons 2nd place server was a real no brainer. There was nothing the native Gandaran community could do to stop this.

In my condi build I consider my main defence outside of my endurance is my fully traited Phase Retreat (6 seconds). It creates distance between me and my foe and acts as a sort of stun breaker, allowing me to actively avoid damage whilst my Duellists pummel the baddies.

In my shatter build, it’s a combination of Blurred Frenzy, on-demand cloneless Distortion/Diversion and The prestige. It’s all about active damage avoidance.

When fighting Thieves I find the effectiveness of my active damage mitigation as a Mesmer it often dependent on the patience of the Thief. Many Thieves will go for a backstab, seemingly panic when you’ve dodged the first attempt and then go into a ridiculous auto-attack spam allowing your illusions to eat away at them. However, a half decent Thief that has missed their initial backstab window will simply CnD (off of you or an illusion) or BP + HS as soon as they’re stealth ends and try again. Then it becomes a case of preserving and intelligently pacing your damage avoidance.

Or you could just go full rabid PU and then you don’t really have to worry about Thieves (unless they’re P/D).

Shatter is still super fun, but yes less effective in this day and age. I use either 20/20/0/0/30, 10/30/0/0/30 or 10/20/0/10/30 with Greatsword + sword/torch and it’s crazy fun for the most part and that burst still catches many people off guard. Just don’t get too disheartened when you’re rolled by another Mesmer using a build that is inherently much stronger than shatter.

Sensotix.4106:

Risk and reward on thief:

The main problem I want to point out is attacking when in stealth

If the thief hits the target he will get revealed BUT let’s say the enemy has aegis it will first rip off aegis without revealing him -> attacking an enemy out of stealth should always reveal the thief imo

I’ve always thought that this should be the case, but NOT for Aegis. It could create some ridiculous situations where the Thief can never get off a stealthed attack and also Aegis is often quite easy to obtain from friendlies. However, I really do think that actively blocking an attack from a stealthed target (Riposte, Counterattack, Illusionary Counter) should reveal the stealthed foe. This goes for all classes though, including a Mesmer summoning a phantasm from stealth. It would be a positive change that would allow for definitive counterplay.