Guild Wars 2

While you do get various members of Destiny’s Edge with you in dungeons, you do still need other players to complete it. Having henchmen 100% of the time would make it a very different game. Maybe better, maybe worse, there’s no way to know without seeing how it would play.

It is indirectly a good point in that open world does seem scaled for the player base that was around during release and, outside of the events in starting zones and world bosses, most people aren’t going to hang around for events that can’t be solo’d with relative ease nor try to scrape up a 5-10 man group for the larger group events in mid to high level zones for a couple hundred karma and some loot that vendors for more than it sells on TP.

At the end of the day, it’s a game. If the difficulty is too high, it’s not fun. If it’s not fun, no one’s going to want to play. Why do you think CoF1 is the most run dungeon path? It’s one of the easiest and there’s loot. Fun. Why is Super Adventure Box so popular right now? It’s easy and rewarding. Fun.

Both Rift and Cataclysm lost large portions of their player base when casual players realized how challenging their raids had become, and how little reward there was for doing it. I’m afraid if Anet doesn’t lose this mentality of accomidating the competitive crowd the same is going to happen, or at the very least those players will just ignore the content, get bored of everything else and leave.

Making content easier also offers more incentive for players to level alts which will increase circulation of items in the Trading Post, repopulate dungeons, and increase the amount of players participating in the open world. It’s a synergetic benefit across the board. What better time sink is there than people enjoying content MULTIPLE times in a row? Not so long ago we called it “replay value.”

They’re not there for bragging rights. I don’t suspect that, “How many acheivement point do you have? Oh I have this much! Neener neener!” comes up very often between guildmates, friends, etc.

Acheivements are time sinks for completionist players when there is no other content that interests them. They need to be retuned so that they don’t feel like a waste of time.

5,000 warhorn kills? Yea.. no thanks..

While precursors are rediculous to get, I think this wouldn’t work since the price on TP would probably always be cheaper than the cost to throw in x,000 shortbows to get all the tokens you needed. You would have the people getting lucky selling them competing with the people who were farming tokens and selling them, thus driving the price down. It would be more linear to just say, “buff the chance of getting a precursor.”

But yea the return on the Mystic Forge rediculous, I spent over 100g worth of rares (mostly greatswords and scepters) and netting maybe 10% exotics at best with no precursor. Cashed in for $100 US dollars worth of gems and bought exotic greatswords because “the chance to get a precursor with exotics is better.” Nothing.

If you want my advice, listen to everyone else and just farm CoF save and buy it. It could take months but it’s better than gambling and losing. The Mystic Forge is a sham.

Osicat.4139:

For the setup you use I suggest try get aonother 10 into 0-20-20, if you going versus burst thiefs, This will give you protection when you hit 75% and 33 less taken dmg. Also I dont know what weps you use but the backstab can be avoided with a sword 2 block.

Thanks for the reply! I really like that protection trait but haven’t been using it over the other dps traits since it was nerfed, i’ll have to try it. I typically use Sword and Focus with Staff. This was just a rare occasion I was using scepter for clone generation/ranged. The thief got the jump on me so it wouldn’t have mattered too much either way.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Thief attacks are really obvious, especially burst thieves. They all start in the same way, they all continue in the same way, and they can all be countered in the same way. Dodge the opening with blurred frenzy, pop out a few clones for a mind wrack to hit him, maybe drop a chaos storm for additional aegis. Once the thief comes back out of stealth, burst again.

Yea, I tried dodging away to make some clones and put some distance between us but he closed the gap too quick. Perhaps things would’ve been different with blurred frenzy or if I popped the stun signet. It’s just frustrating that he killed me in the time it takes for me to cast confusing images once >.>

ATourist.8359:

Take Osicat’s advice, this guy has played the mesmer to a huge extent. Now let me add my own experience but first off, can you tell us how you react normally to thieves? What utilities and weapons do you have?

I mainly use sword/focus and staff, but on occasion play with scepter for clone generation. I only really use greatsword when sniping from keep walls, lol. Utilities are the same, but sometimes I’ll swap in feedback. Elite is usually Time Warp but I swapped in Mass Invis to help get across the map unseen. Needless to say it didn’t help lol.

Garr.1823:

But If u see thief before he attack u – u have plenty of things to counter him and kill.

That’s pretty much what happens for me. I try to stay with the group, but in 1v1 situations when running back to a zerg or if I’m a little off to the side it usually comes down to if I see him first or not.

Esplen.3940:

Also, if you wish to continue running Scepter mainhand, you can also use your Scepter block when he invises (wait a second or so) to block his attack and reveal him. It gimps his combo by a long shot.

Yea I’d have probably had better luck with scepter block or the stun signet. It was just too much damage too fast.

I don’t know if I can speak for everyone but I was a little peeved with the Time Warp/Quickness nerf in this past patch, for obvious reasons, but it wasn’t until I reread the wording on the patch notes that I had a real problem:

As we push to improve balance in both PvE and PvP, a few mechanics in the game will be receiving updates to promote fun and balanced play. In the past, quickness has granted double the action speed normally available to players. In PvP, this speed gives most players almost no chance to react to incoming abilities and allows for massive spike damage in extremely short periods of time. In PvE, the increased attack speed can trivialize a lot of content that would otherwise provide a good challenge. Therefore, we are reducing the speed that quickness allows by half of its current potential while slightly increasing the duration on player-activated skills.

Then I came across a thief in WvW today.. (see attachment)

I run a shatter build, 10/20/10/0/30, with half knights and half berserker exotic/ascended gear. While I don’t plan on tanking champs anytime soon, I do have some defense. Fighting the thief I got one dodge off, which he instantly followed with heartseeker, and one mind blast (downed 1).

He was a very good thief, and I’m by no means the best mesmer, but 22,000 damage in 3 seconds.. that seems a lot like “massive spike damage in extremely short periods of time” that “gives most players almost no chance to react to incoming abilities.”

I was going to take my complaint to the Thief/WvW forum, but that’s probably a long wait for a train that won’t come. Instead, how do you guys deal with thief burst, do you have similar issues with them, should I build differently?

Any advice is welcome.

Guild was attempting Half Baked Komali bounty in Mt Maelstrom. We knew how.. technical of a fight is was so we sent people who had done the fight before. Upon the first fire shield I dropped null field and myself and another mesmer would spam temporal curtain/into the void to remove stacks of defiant and our ranger would use his knockback, but the shield would not break. Stability, might and defiant all went back up. Tried this about 3-4 times with ItV and whatever Ranger skills he had, shield never broke.

I wouldn’t expect this, ever. The way I see it with GW2 is what you paid for at release is all the gameplay, dungeons, and pvp currently in game. That said, the best way to create revenue now are:

1.) Lure in more players.
2.) Sell gems for novelty items in the gem store.
3.) Sell gems for players to convert to gold.

I’d imagine quite a few players get tempted to buy a few gems after going broke throwing countless rares/exotics into the mystic forge. So there’s really not a lot of incentive from their perspective to just stop that flow of money, as well as devalue a large portion of the weapons on the Trading Post by making it any easier to get legendaries.

1.) If you’re talking about moving around parts of a zone then yes, mesmer is slow but meh. As for combat, between Phase Retreat, Temporal Curtain, iLeap, Blink, as well as quite a few stuns, dazes and vanishes, we have a lot of mobility and manipulation of combat to get both into and out of harm’s way.

2.) Most of our AoE is from shatters and Chaos storm. If you’re just looking to tag mobs it’s probably easiest to drop Chaos storm and spam staff 1 or using Sword/Focus drop temporal curtain and run through spamming sword 1.

3.) Well there’s only 4 main hand weapons and you basically ruled out all 4 of them lol. I’ll tell you what I used to level and why:

Primary Weapon – Staff > Scepter > Sword > Greatsword
A.) Staff – best at low to mid levels. Decent damage, bounces to multiple targets and can buff you, impressive AoE, decent shield, the phantasm isn’t the best for soloing but it still puts out decent damage. Lots of boons when grouping with other people is always helpful as well.
B.) Scepter – clone generation, scepter 2 blocks an attack, deals dmg AND creates a clone. When paired with the Deception Evasion you’ll be unloading shatters pretty fast. Scepter 3 is pretty effective in solo pulls as well.
C.) Sword – Nice damage, vulnerability debuff, and cleaving AoE damage. It does however make you melee, obviously, so you run the risk of taking more dmg/having to heal more.
D.) Greatsword – I did NOT like greatsword for leveling one bit. Logically when you pull an enemy it aggroes on you and runs towards you to kill you. GSword 1 does less damage the closer you are to your target. The Phantasm is great, even the damage/snare of Gsword 2 is nice, but I didn’t like the rest of the skills enough to find them worth it for leveling. Greatsword shines better in pvp imo.

Offhands – Pistol > Focus > Torch = Sword
Which offhand you use pretty much depends on how you play. Many people pick up a trait that makes your illusions cause bleeding when they crit (The skill name escapes me atm), so for this the phantasms from pistol or focus are best since they can throw up more bleeds than the sword and torch phantasms. I wouldn’t, however, be too picky on phantasm damage while leveling and suggest considering which utility would you prefer to have; stun, temporal curtain, vanish, or block. I do generally prefer focus for movement speed and pulling mechanic of temporal curtain or pistol for the bleeds and that if find ranged illusions die less frequently than melee ones.

5.) My final point – Mesmer is a fairly technical class. It is not a faceroll class, not even at 80. We’re slow, squishy, and lack the burst of other classes. But with practice and proper traiting we can be relatively annoying to fight against. If you want more survivability, maybe necro is your calling but either way find what you like. Who knows maybe your true calling is a Guardian or Ele :P

Hello everyone!
I’m more of less a fresh 80 and getting into running dungeons and gearing up. My build is sort of an adapted build of what I used while leveling. I don’t know if it really falls into a shatter or condition spec as it has a few elements of each as well as some skills I snagged for survivability. Here’s my current trait setup and it’s active skills:

Domination (20)-
Mental Torment (Mind Wrack +20% damage).
Empowered Illusions (Illusions deal +15% more damage).

Dueling (20)-
Phantasmal Fury (Phantasms gain Fury).
Deceptive Evasion (Dodging creates clones).

Chaos (20)-
Debilitating Dissipation (Clones apply a random condition when they die).
Illusionary Defense (+3% Reduced damage per illusion active).

Illusions (10)-
Compounding Power (+3% More damage dealt per active illusion).

I typically use staff and sword/pistol or sword/focus for mobility and am open to suggestions/criticisms. My biggest questions are:
1.) Berserker’s or Rampager’s? I really like having more burst with berserker’s style of gear, especially in fights with a lot of adds and I can dive in cleaving away with my main hand sword or knowing each bounce of my staff bolt is dealing more damage, but I know bleeds from illusions and various conditions from staff benefit from having more condition damage.
2.) My currect gear setup is all weapons have Berserker stats, Amulet/Rings/Accessories are all Knight stats, and clothing I use either all Rampager or Berserker. Similar to my first question but what changes if any would you suggest to my current gear setup based on your answer to question 1?
3.) Are Chaotic Dampening, Blade Training, or Duelist’s Discipline worth subbing in? I don’t really have issues getting enough clones for Mind Wrack, but the -20% cooldown for phantasms does sound appealing.

Well I think that’s about all my concerns. Any and all help is appreciated.