Guild Wars 2

Rainbow Sprint.3215:

lordkrall.7241:

I would say that the pain of loss is a very good opportunity in the coming chapters, and that will be much stronger if there is an actual partnership between the two characters, and there are already hints that something will happen to Kasmeer.

It’s anet, when you start to like a character, they kill the character off.

Did I mention how much I love Scarlet? Yeah. Tots. Scarlet forever.

@Above: It’s on the wiki….
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dream_and_Nightmare

Because games (like life) are about the journey. Not the destination. If your goal is to 100% the world, then yes, a zone is probably only good for four hours to you. If your goal is to get lots of money, prestige, loot…then yes, a new zone is probably a waste. You can accomplish all of those things already.

But if you’re like me, the best feeling in the world is to open up your world map and see how far you’ve come and wonder to where you’ll go next. I don’t go where the loot is the best. I just go wherever I want. In games like WoW (hate it or love it) you can open that world map and just revel in vastness of it all. Anywhere you see, you can go. Anywhere you’ve been, you have a story.

In Guild Wars 2, I open my world map and I’m genuinely impressed at its size. But I see empty space in the Tengu territory, the Maguuma Jungle, the Desolation, & Battle Islands, the Crystal Desert, & Far Shiverpeaks…and I can’t go there, and for half these places, I probably won’t ever get to. It breaks my heart. When there’s expansions (whether you blow through it or not) there’s always that sense of wonder. “Where will my next adventure take me?”

I feel the living story just cannot (or will not) deliver a zone that inspires that feeling. It will either be too small or with a linear progression (see tower of nightmares) or too punishing to ever play (see zerg content/southsun).

People wonder why I’ve got a few level 80s and have never been to Orr. It’s because once I explore Orr, there will be no wonder left in my world.

I never watch the livestreams. But….I knew it! Majory & Kasmeer. They make an adorable couple. Also, Lol +1 @ Rym.

Black powder! Yes! Sorry lol.

Also every thief ever runs shortbow secondary weaponset. #2 is AoE stealth.

At 25% you use blinding powder. If you’re disabled and a warrior is wailing on you, PBAoE blind. If you’re fleeing and it procs, smoke field for blast finisher/heartseeker. Still gives the stealth if you want it, doesn’t reveal you when you don’t.

Thanks for the replies! Still wonder about Primordus though…is it our name for him or his name for him…I’d lean on the side of Primordus being his actual name though.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

Actually, there are icebrood and branded that do talk, though admittingly hardly any of the later.

When you say icebrood do you mean a Norn that has accepted Jormag or do you mean full on ice sculpture. Because if it’s the former, the Norn could have various reasons why it “thinks” it knows Jormag’s name, without the dragon ever whispering in his ear. Even moreover, unless it’s something created by the dragon or with no knowledge of the dragon at all prior to corruption, it could have various reasons why it thinks it knows its master’s true name.

EDIT: In fact, if it’s true that things affected by dragonic corruption retain their prior knowledge, then we may not have ever known their names in the first place. Imagine this: Person X sees Zhaitan for the first time in Tyria. X calls the dragon Zhaitan. It catches on. Suddenly everyone is calling it Zhaitan. When Zhaitan acquires minions, his minions refer to him by how they know him; Zhaitan. It’s possible that none of the dragons’ names are true, even Zhaitan. I guess it depends on how much influence you think dragons have on their minions?

I just had a thought, and now it’s bothering me…How do we know the Elder Dragons’ names? They can’t talk and excluding Zhaitan, neither can their minions (branded, icebrood, destroyers). They have no method of communication that would be understandable to any race on Tyria…so how do we know the big fiery guy is called ‘Primordus’?

Let’s assume the Dwarves had the names of the dragons in their tomes from the last time the dragons rose. How did they know the names of the dragons? Were they able to communicate with them? Probably not. So how did they know that their names were as such? Furthermore, where does that leave dragons like Mordremoth or Bubbles who have no record in the Dwarves’ tomes of knowledge? How will we ever learn their names?

What I’ve learned from this thread:
Engies counter everything
Brb. Rolling engie.

So you saw:
3 humans (most popular race)
3 females (most popular gender)
in t3 cultural (most popular armor)
with legendary greatswords (most popular legendary)

Statistically speaking, across 1 million players, it’s bound to happen numerous times. I would chalk this up to random chance. Maybe if the dyes & hairstyles were befitting a pattern, but it seems like a halfhearted attempt if that is indeed what they were going for. Asura Mesmer video much better example of lulz clones.

PU Mesmer:
1) Good lockdown mesmer
2) S/P Thief
3) PU Mesmer (Not hard, just a PITA beyond bunker v. bunker)

Lockdown mesmer:
1) S/P Thief
2) Bunker engie
3) Warrior (dat stability)

Shatter mesmer:
1) S/P thief
2) bunker anything
3) PU mesmer

Phantasm mesmer:
1) Any thief build
2) bunker engie
3) minion builds (dem meatshields)

Chaos Archangel.5071:

• Works with Sigil of Paralyzation. (15% Daze/Stun duration)

I think we’ve established that nothing a mesmer has other than magic bullet & signet of domination work with sigil of paralyzation. You may not want to encourage people to use this as it’s gimping their builds.

Also very curious how viable mesmer will be once CfS & CS interaction gets fixed/nerfed.

@Pyro, I see. I guess I was misled by fear being affected. Even if it does affect both stun & daze though (as opposed to just stun) it still doesn’t seem to affect any of the skills that we’d want it to affect and thus is still for the most part a useless sigil for a mesmer to wear.

It was my understanding that Sigil of Paralyzation originally worked on the following:
Daze
Stun
Fear*
Knockdown
Sink
Float
But was patched recently to not work on fear (hence the asterisk) since fear was decided to be a condition, not a control effect.

Either way, from what I can gather, the sigil of paralyzation has no effect on any of your control effects until they hit a total of 1.75 second duration total from other sources (runes, traits, base duration). This would make it essentially useless on almost all mesmer builds since we have only three skills that can apply a control effect that long (illusion of drowning, magic bullet, & signet of domination) and those are not used often enough to merit the use of a sigil.

EDIT: This changes, of course, if control effects can round up to the nearest second instead of just down. I’m inclined to believe that they would not ever round up, however, based on ArenaNet’s track record with rounding up control effects (see warrior mace f1).

Minion masters? That’s a thing? My mesmer eats them for breakfast. Lockdown mesmer has lots of AoE stuns, dazes, interrupts, etc. Minions doing nothing, necromancer with no stunbreaker, plus obscene burst damage. It’s pretty much a free kill even without resorting to moa morph which makes them all the more pitiful.

Minion masters are just all right. But they have a low skill ceiling and that means that at a certain point, no matter how good they are, they’ll still get facerolled by a better player.

Mash Hog.5672:

This has more views than all of the stickies combined.

This has more views than everything on the first page. Stickies included.

If you drop your exit too far from your entrance, you can’t use your portal. Just make sure they’re within range of each other. Max out the size of your minimap & zoom it in as much as possible. Turn on rotation (not always face north). Now put a personal waypoint where you drop your portal entrance. Once that personal waypoint is on the edge of your minimap, that’s the maximum distance you can portal in the x/z plane. Not quite sure what the rules are for y plane.

As for sPvP (since this “question” was in the sPvP forum), the minimap trick can’t be used so it’s just a matter of memorizing distances in each of the maps. If you play a lot of sPvP and fail dropping your portal a lot, you’ll eventually learn your distances. Things to note:

• Portal can span the distance between the trebuchet and the repair kit on Khylo
• Portal can span the distance between middle & any of the other two points
• Mostly use portal to support far point assault & assist in middle

I thought after recent nerfs that thieves were just generally terrible at life and the only ones that would stick it out were diehard contrarians. But according to this:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Best-PVP-Class-1-January-2014
many people consider trickery thieves overpowered/the best class in the game.

I got a good laugh out of it since trickery thieves are still not in a great place compared to some of the powerhouses available now, but hey, maybe the thief community has a different outlook on life.

Thoughts?

bOgz.7263:

Dont have any answer, I also would like to learn about duration stacking of daze/stun for my shatter lock build.

afaik increasing on stun/daze duration is more suited for lock builds, would do less for interrupt builds. you cant interrupt an enemy that is dazed/stunned.

Edit: got some good info from this https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Analysis-Confounding-Suggestions

I have no idea how that guy is coming up with a “2 second daze.” I’ve never seen anything near that long with CfS, SoP, & 6RoM. I’d be inclined to say it’s in the realm of 1.5s~1.75s. I also think he just assumes sigil of paralyzation does something. I’d rather not assume anything. Especially when the difference between using it and not using it is a potentially wasted slot versus a 5% damage increase.

There are some very fundamental questions that need answering about stun & daze duration, especially considering the meta of the shatterupt mesmer (30/20/0/0/20).

• First: How does stun duration stack? If I have 6/6 runes of mesmer and the trait confounding suggestions, do I get 58% (33+25) daze duration increase or do I get 66.25% (1.33*1.25) daze duration increase?
• Second: Does stun duration round? If so, how? If I have 51% stun duration on a 1 second stun, do I get a 1.51 second stun? or does it round down to a 1.5 second stun?

I’ve tried testing myself using a video recording and a stopwatch then playing it back at 1% speed, but for such miniscule differences in duration, I am unable to distinguish any answers myself. I can’t tell if I’m getting significant results or simply having video recording error. Does anyone in the mesmer community have such answers for me?

Conditions are strong in solo PvE because you can build high damage & high sustain simultaneously. Solo PvE doesn’t have things that will one-shot you when you have toughness/vitality, so putting into those is more helpful. A similar reasoning applies to PvP where other players will not one-shot you if you build some sustain.

Conditions are weak in group PvE because even without other conditions users around, random traits/weapon procs will deal enough conditions to a focused mob to reduce your damage by a fair amount. Furthermore, conditions are back-loaded DPS which means they can’t tag things in zergs.

Lastly, the DPS of a condition build without the condition cap is still inferior to the DPS of a berserker build. Removing the condition cap would make bosses take more time to kill rather than less. As more people play condition builds, there are less people playing berserker builds, and with the DPS loss between a berserker & condition build, you’d overall lose group DPS and bosses would take longer.

The reason they don’t remove the condition cap is mainly for processing reasons (as I understand it). Do you know how intensive the game would become on their servers if for one world boss they had to calculate the damage done by 200 or 300 bleed stacks of various durations and damages? Yeah. That’s why.

Shockwave.1230:

Backstab Thief still has solid burst, you’ll just need to figure out what available defensive tactics work for you.

If you want a bit of staying power for a point go with pistol offhand.

If you don’t care about staying power use stealth/shadow steps.

There was a thread for testing backstabs on the thief forum. I think the highest realistic backstab one could hope to acquire is 7k on a glass target (with a 0/30/30/10/0 standard D/P build). That’s not enough to kill anything that’s not already hurting. And there’s a 3 second revealed period before you can do it again. To be honest, he’d be better off going with pistol whip haste. But still, conditions can do everything direct damage can do, but with more sustain. If he really hates conditions, I’d suggest a bulky DPS class like a stun warrior. But still, best burst is condition burst. Necromancers, engies, & warriors.

Pretty sure it’s all US servers as one queue & all EU servers as another. The reason for your excessive queue could be numerous:
1) There were only 10 people doing solo queue at the time, and they were already in a match so you had to wait for it to finish before it could find you a team & opponents
2) The MMR of everyone queuing was vastly higher than yours (the queue will first try to match people with a similar MMR and when that fails “loosen” the requirements slowly until you find a team)
3) You picked an odd time. There were not enough people doing solo queue for a match

Maybe I’m confused on how it works…So I was in Solo Queue the other day (I know…) and I was fighting a warrior. Fine and dandy, kill her, move on…except when I went to engage, I noticed a red/black skull buff on her.
“That’s new”
I know all buff/debuff icons. That’s not one of them. So I stopped to mouse over it. It said “Dishonored. You are dishonored and cannot participate in tournament PvP. Time remaining: 9 hours, 47 minutes, 33 seconds.” (paraphrasing, I can’t remember exactly what the buff icon description was).

Okay. So at this point I’m sufficiently confused to cause me to cease my aggression on the warrior. While the warrior is autoattacking me to death, I’m typing out my question (far beyond caring if I die) “How are you in Solo Queue if you have dishonored?” Warrior ignores me and stomps. I proceed to ask my team if instead I have rolled into a hotjoin, they respond as if I’m stupid, so I find the warrior again and call a target on her.

This time I ask my teammates, “Do you see dishonored on the warrior?” and yes, they all could see her dishonored debuff as well. I wanted to take a screenshot but the match was over and we were shuffled out before I could find the warrior a third time.

So here’s my question: how does dishonored work? Clearly it doesn’t prevent you from doing tournament PvP. My theory is that there are two different dishonoreds, one for team queue and one for solo queue. Can anyone tell me how I fought a warrior with dishonored in solo queue?

tldr; I was in solo queue with a warrior who had 9 hours remaining on a dishonored debuff. How?

There’s a bunker meta right now. That means almost every person is running as much defense as they can. That means burst can’t kill people quickly anymore (they just sponge up all your damage and dump all their conditions on you, you either die or flee). That means burst is no longer a thing. Closest you can hope for is a necromancer or engie. They have a burst…but it comes in the form of conditions, not direct damage.

All is most definitely vain.

Zelulose.8695:

Simplicity.7208:

• The burst doesn’t work on anyone with a brain (easy to dodge & split amongst your various clones instead of one hit like backstab)
• The burst is exponentially harder to play than any OP warrior or necro build you could run and achieves similar DPS
• Mesmers are very condition weak + there’s a condition meta, so mesmer counters are everywhere
• Shatter mesmers are too glassy; PvP = bunker wars, if you can’t hold a point until reinforcements arrive, you don’t have much place in PvP (note the bunker meta)
• Mesmers have lower mobility than a thief and thus are less adept at roaming, the primary goal of a glass spec in PvP
• Shatter mesmers are not typically as useful as other classes in team fights due to clones dying before you can shatter them and phantasms not having cleave
  Any questions?

(you don’t have to shatter out of stealth or after leap)

Anyone who knows how a shatter mesmer works knows 2 things:
1) When clones start running at you, a burst is coming
2) If you dodge towards the clones (or pop a block/invuln/etc) it completely negates the burst

Those two things mean you have to drastically outplay your opponent to be effective. I’d say shatter mesmer burst is easier to evade than eviscerate, which is infamous for the most obnoxious wind-up on a burst ever.

• The burst doesn’t work on anyone with a brain (easy to dodge & split amongst your various clones instead of one hit like backstab)
• The burst is exponentially harder to play than any OP warrior or necro build you could run and achieves similar DPS
• Mesmers are very condition weak + there’s a condition meta, so mesmer counters are everywhere
• Shatter mesmers are too glassy; PvP = bunker wars, if you can’t hold a point until reinforcements arrive, you don’t have much place in PvP (note the bunker meta)
• Mesmers have lower mobility than a thief and thus are less adept at roaming, the primary goal of a glass spec in PvP
• Shatter mesmers are not typically as useful as other classes in team fights due to clones dying before you can shatter them and phantasms not having cleave
  Any questions?

Unrelated: Never run torch on a PvP shatter mesmer. Not only is torch a condition weapon with a terrible phantasm but stealth decaps points which hurts your team more than it helps. Mantras are also a poor choice for various reasons I choose not to go into.

I learned something about elementalists today.

Huh, guess it’s been a while. Oh well, thieves are terrible, so I don’t really need to remember how to play one or what stuff does lol. By the time thieves are not terrible anymore, I’m sure their playstyle will be radically different, so remembering what I once knew is irrelevant. Thanks for the answer!

…has a 3 second ICD? Since when? Granted, I quit my thief like 4 months ago because I saw the kittenstorm coming (and I wasn’t wrong), but wasn’t this proccing once per second back in the good ol’ days?

For those thousands of essences of luck. I’m so sick of carpal tunnel after a few dungeons, fractals, or hours of farming.

Solo Queue win = 400 glory, 700 rank points, 25 silver
Solo Queue loss = 150 glory, 150 rank points, 12.5 silver
Team Queue win = 500 glory, 1300 rank points, 30 silver
Team Queue loss = 175 glory, 175 rank points, 15 silver

Assuming 50% win ratio for Solo Queue, you get (on average, per match):
275 glory, 425 rank points, 18.75 silver
For Team Queue you need to attain a 30.769% win ratio to get the same average glory per match.
You need to attain a 22.222% win ratio to get the same average rank points per match.
You need to attain a 25% win ratio to get the same average silver per match.

Of course, 100% loss in a Team Queue is still typically better than anything you could hope to farm in a hot join. So if you’ve been using hotjoins for farming, just go lose a load of Team Queues…who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and win, then it’s way over the top compared to hotjoin. Of course assuming the Queues are relatively short. Otherwise as you were.

Weird. It glitched on me then, because I added him to friends list to look up on leaderboard and it showed him on Solo Queue, but nothing on Team Queue. I think I found a leaderboard glitch.

EDIT: See, this is what I see on the leaderboard. JTan is not ranked. Thus has 0 games. If this is untrue, then the leaderboards have betrayed me, but I suppose it’s my fault for assuming the leaderboards were ever functional to begin with. Edited out my friends’ stuffs for their privacy. Considerate, yay.

JTan.1687:
Solo Queue victories: 948
Solo Queue losses: 514
Team Queue victories: 0
Team Queue losses: 0

Obvious photoshop troll is obvious. Learn to leaderboard.

Flawless victory!

…Possibly better than the OP’s post are the responses to this thread.

It was YoloQ, but we had a d/c….so yeah, there’s that. Still won, but not by a lot.

This happens with the Skyhammer & the cannon on Raid on the Capricorn occasionally. Anyone know what causes it or how to fix it? It’s really problematic since my team relies on me to be the secondary objective capper. When this happens I can’t do anything.

EDIT: Clarification: it makes everything “Out of Range” so I cannot use the cannon.

I know it’s getting removed in the future. But will we still be able to obtain it after the 10th? I ask because that new glory vendor is amazing…and I’d love to be able to buy more stuff, but I only have a few hundred thousand glory saved up. Need to grind more!

Unrelated note: thanks for keeping ranks in the game!

Dramatic duration reduction in PvE? Oh yes, I forgot about all the high level fractal speed runs that abuse portal’s 10 second duration. I’m sure reducing that to 3s will fix all those problems.

(Seriously, what’s the problem with portal in PvE? Jumping puzzles?)

I remember the good ol’ days. My phantasm retaliation bunker….ahhh….Oh well. ArenaNet saw fit to kill that particular build.

Mesmers are unlikely to run a bunker build even half as well as most other classes. Warrior, Guardian, Ranger, Engie….to a lesser extent even Necromancer all run bunker a hell of a lot better than a Mesmer could ever hope to. Sponging up damage is not our strong suit, we’re more in the business of avoiding it. As for team support, that’s an entirely different ballgame. I think the biggest utility a mesmer brings to team fights would be either glamour, DPS, portal, or time warp. Moa gets a honorable mention for flubbing up petting zoos.

X/X/X/20/X
From there, you really can’t go wrong as long as you have a traited iWarden & a feedback bubble. I personally run 10/10/0/25/25 but I didn’t know about the phaste glitch with iWarden until today, so I’ll probably swap that up lol.

Moving on, everyone here seems to think you can just waltz away from a PU mesmer. Yes, you can walk away from a blackwater variant, but blackwater is not the only PU mesmer in existence. Swap out that staff for a sw/p. Suddenly it’s a lot harder to just “up and leave.” And yes, mesmers can have permanent vigor right now with a decent critical hit chance and critical infusion. Note that critical infusion comes free with all clonedeath builds by virtue of taking deceptive evasion.

I’d also like to note that I don’t think phantasm mesmers or less aggressive playstyle counter a well played PU. When it’s mesmer v mesmer, the victor is simply determined by who can set up their phantasms on the real target first. Against a PU mesmer, a phantasm mesmer is at a distinct disadvantage since the PU mesmer can stealth to initiate, ensuring they get their phantasms up on the real target whilst simultaneously disabling the opponent from doing the same. Add in the fact that a phantasm mesmer usually only has null field as their condi cleanse and all those clones act as meat-shields from some of the harder hitting phantasms (looking at you iDuelist) and you’re at an even farther disadvantage. As for less aggressive play style…well, if you don’t kill my illusions, I’ll just do it for you. Spawning an illusion when you have 3 triggers debilitating dissipation. Odds are it’ll hit you.

Thoughts in general: PU mesmers are in a weird place. The PU mesmer has some pretty glaring weaknesses in that they cannot really pursue opponents in WvW, are generally terrible at PvE, and are unviable in tPvP. If one were to just look at that, odds are it won’t get nerfed at all. However, they are extremely easy to play effectively and extremely powerful in duels. Couple that with more sustain than a bunker, more escape than a thief, and enough stealth and clones to confuse even a veteran, and you’ve got a build that is extremely overpowered in one specific aspect. For this reason we may see a nerf. But since guardians have been the be-all & end-all for bunkering since forever, maybe mesmers can be the be-all & end-all of dueling.

I think this build is also extremely anti-warrior/thief. Their reliance on melee makes them easy kills and the warrior meta makes this build seem a lot stronger than it is. Also, it is drastically more effective against terrible players (of which there are a LOT), which makes it seem even better. I kill almost every necromancer I see with this…and necros can pretty easily stomp a mesmer with all those conditions if they know what they’re doing.

Incurafy.6329:

lolwat?

There is only one thread regarding Mesmers and it was posted by a Thief of dubious skill level who mistakenly believed that Mesmer’s can stealth more often than Thieves. He has since been corrected.

Don’t exaggerate, it just devalues your own thread.

Because threads never get merged or bumped off the front page. Surely, such a thing has never happened before.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/MESMERS-THEIVES-Stealthier
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Question-about-mesmer-stealth
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Fought-some-mesmers-guardians-last-night

I know there were more but I don’t care to find them right now. Could also have been in other subforums. I know I’ve seen tons of threads about PU mesmers, it just didn’t occur to me until I saw a great deal of them all of the thief forum front page.

Once ladders are implemented, ranks will be retired. To honor the effort that players have put into the rank system, existing players will be able to keep all unlocked rank finishers and will earn a special title based on your rank to show that you were there from the start. Variants of existing rank finishers will move to the ladder system and will be used to show your current standings on the ladder from season to season. The original finishers will not be earnable again.

This seems like a reward for those who took the time to do Skyhammer glory farm/abuse. “Congrats on illicitly getting vastly more rank than the regular players. As a reward, have a finisher that’s getting removed before the legitimate players can get it.” What are your thoughts on this?

Well, it’s been a good run. But with warriors and necros getting the nerf, PU mesmers are up next. I give it til the end of January. If you have doubt, go look at the thief forum, there are at least 8 different threads on the front page raging over mesmer stealth. It’s only a matter of time before the rest of the forums go into an uproar and ArenaNet knee-jerks into a nerf.

They kind of have a point…When I first started with this build months and months ago, I realized it would become mainstream and get subsequently nerfed. So here’s to the good times.

Anyways, my question involves a new build…something with a similar level of deception. My favorite part of my mesmer (and my thief before it got nerfed to bejesus and back) is deception. I love the PU build because when I play it right, my opponent won’t be able to tell up from down, clone from me. So are there any other builds that can accomplish that?

The closest victory so far goes to Darkhaven in the North American bronze league, for snatching the week two victory from Ferguson’s Crossing by a mere 2,156 points.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/world-vs-world-midseasonreport/

arKRazor.8654:

Berserker benefits substantially more due to the scaling of critical damage.

Conversely condition focus build won’t see much improvement at all.

There have been exhaustive threads covering it in other subforums… but…. you know…. there’s no functional search option…. so have fun finding them.

In terms of HP/toughness the gains are modest, though once ascended armor comes in to play it will likely become significant.

Based on what you see with the stats, that would be the case. Way I heard it though, ascended armor gets scaled down to be roughly the same as exotic armor in WvW. So that’s not the case? It just gives you whatever advantage ascended has over exotic?

I’ve heard rumors that the difference between ascended and exotic in WvW is negligible due to scaling regardless of how drastic the actual stat difference may appear. So I pose these questions:
What would the difference in DPS (as a percentage) be between two identical classes (with same traits, weapons, runes, & sigils) both in 100% berserker stat gear (Power/Prec/Crit Dmg), one with ascended & one with exotic?
What would the difference in HP/toughness (as a percentage) be between two identical classes (with same traits, weapons, runes, & sigils) both in 100% soldiers (Power/Vit/Toughness), one with ascended & one with exotic?

Devildoc.6721:

Dear Kiel voters: We tried to warn you

So long and thanks for all the fish.
All I could think after reading your title.

Will this be getting a second slot/ability to become infused?
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sclerite_Karka_Shell_%28ascended%29
Or will us apothecary players get thrown under the bus again when it comes to back-piece agony resist?