As Kavia points out, you’ve disregarded the cast time in your calculations. This puts iDisenchanter at 0.0465 illusions/sec or 0.0571 w/ Celerity (assuming you’re on land). It’s still slightly more illusions/sec than Mirror Images, but the difference is practically negligible.
I’d say keep the cultural set w/ divinity. It’s probably cheaper to buy a separate set of armor to test whatever rune sets you wanted to play with. I think you’ll probably end up wanting to go back to Divinity afterwards. They’re expensive for a reason.
Glamour skills are effective at zerg-busting even without the traits.
What type of game-play do you normally do? Condition mesmers can do some amazing things in WvW, but it’s kind of lackluster in PvE because the mobs don’t attack fast enough for confusion to do its magic.
Divinity Runes are pretty awesome in any spec. Consider yourself lucky that you got a full set while they were still cheap.
If you want to experiment with another rune set, either do it in sPvP or buy some karma armor from Orr to play around with.
Since no one else has taken a stab at this, I’ll offer some suggestions. I can see what you’re trying to do with this build, but I think there’s some potential problems that you’ll need to address.
First, it’s probably more accurate to call this a “dazer” build than a “stunner” build. Both provide interrupts, but the difference is that enemies can move while dazed but not while stunned. Controlling movement is pretty important in WvW. If you want true AoE “stuns”, you might have to look towards some other professions (i.e. Ele, Eng).
If you’re set on going with Imbued Diversion, you need to (1) create lots of clones to shatter and (2) ensure that those clones reach their targets. I think you’re kind of lacking in both of these areas. For clone generation, it’s hard to pass up Deceptive Evasion in Dueling. IMO you’ll benefit more both offensively and defensively from the frequent shatters than the reduced mantra cooldown (since you’re not going full mantra anyway). The harder part is making sure your clones reach their target. This is going to be tough because of the overwhelming AoE in WvW and because your build lacks a reliable snare.
To address these issues, I’d suggest going Sword+Focus/Greatsword. The focus pull and GS push both count as “interrupts”, which would go nicely with the interruption traits. The focus will also give you a longer range snare and better mobility. These weapons also spawn their phantasms at the target’s location, which might make it easier to get your Diversion off.
The other things to consider is that it might be worth giving up the vulnerability from Rending Shatter for Shattered Concentration. If your build revolves around interruption, then you’ll need a way to remove stability from enemies as necessary.
I’d also recommend taking some preventative measures against conditions, since you don’t have any condition removal. Lemongrass Poultry Soup might be a good food choice in this regard.
Hope this helps. Good luck!
In a few levels you’ll start seeing gear with three stats instead of two. That’s when you’ll start seeing things like the Valkyrie/Zerker prefixes.
PSA: you can set up different playlists for different conditions
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Custom_playlist
I filled out my playlists with a diverse selection of video game music from OCRemix. I think its awesome when I enter combat and it randomly plays the TMNT theme.
http://ocremix.org/
Now that you’re level 40, I’d recommend spending 20pts in Dueling for Deceptive Evasion, which spawns clones when you dodge. This will help make you less squishy (more clones means you’re less likely to get hit) as well as help with your damage output (more clones means more shatter damage). I’d also recommend the next 5 points go into Illusions for the reduced cool-down on summoning skills. Together, these traits allow you to spawn illusions at a fast enough rate to make full use of your F1-F4 skills. You’ve still still got a ways to go before you have a complete build, but this is the first major increase in build flexibility. Use this time to adjust to using these shatter skills more frequently and experiment with different weapons.
Well said Mishi.
IMO, this is a very useful trait in WvW depending on your group composition. Obviously a condition damage spec’d mesmer would get more out of this trait with Blinding Befuddlement, but even power spec’d mesmer can provide some nice damage mitigation by taking this trait and Null Field/Feedback. When using it, I will typically drop Feedback on the enemy’s frontline instead of the backline. This way it blinds the frontline inside the bubble while simultaneously preventing the backline’s ranged attacks from going into the bubble as well. If timed/placed correctly you can prevent a lot of damage this way.
The dilemma is that there are a lot of other good options in the illusion line to choose from, and a lot of other classes have much better options for blinding than us anyway. It’s one of those traits that you’ll probably switch around a lot depending on how many people you’re running with and how they’re spec’d.
Looking at the video, it looks like you may have also hit with the sword auto-attack at the same time as your phantasm hit. I’d chalk this one up to a sigil proc from your auto-attack. The damage pop-ups are kind of unreliable when there’s a lot going on at once.
That fact that this post claims to have tried “EVERY build” leads me to think that he’s trolling. Mesmers can do well in a support role, but it tends to be more focused around preventing damage in the first place than healing it up later. It’s like comparing a prot monk vs heal monk in GW1. Both can be effective in the right hands.
There isn’t a “rotation” per se, but rather you switch weapons as you need to depending on the situation. There’s lots of variables to consider, including spec and gear, that will affect how you play also.
If you’re fighting a stationary boss mob, your best DPS option is probably to get 3 Wardens up on him and go to town. However, the situations where that actually works are pretty rare. More often than not, the “boss” will have an attack that will kill your phantasms anyway, so you need to learn the telegraph animation and shatter before it happens.
I’m sorry I can’t give you a better answer than that, but there aren’t many fights in GW2 that are straight up “tank and spank”s like Patchwerk in WoW. You need to be adaptable.
Here’s Kiltor being killed and ressed repeatedly…. by the friendly enemy servers?
http://youtu.be/kfFE43cWAkk
It has no affect on gameplay at all, it just affects NPC dialog options.
There’s nothing blatantly wrong with your build. There’s some minor tweaks that I’d suggest, but I think the main thing is that you need to be a little more flexible and make adjustments depending on the situation. For example, your weapon sets make perfect sense for “roaming”, but in a siege situation you may want to switch the torch for a focus to pull people off walls and swap the greatsword for a staff so you can AoE arrow carts as necessary. Likewise, Mirror Images in great for small scale fights, but in a zerg-vs-zerg situation you might be better off with Feedback in that slot. Remember that you can always change up your Major Traits as well, adding even further flexibility.
With that being said, here’s some minor tweaks I’d suggest:
Swap Deceptive Decoy for Phantasmal Fury and Compounding Power for Illusionary Invigoration — to keep a balance of offence and defense. Deceptive Decoy can work in sPvP, but in WvW or PvE the odds of you being brought below 25% health and living are way too slim. Since Illusionary Invigoration triggers at 50% health instead, you’ll get much better mileage out if it and the extra Distortion is more likely to save your life than the stealth.
In PvE, you can usually afford to drop some of the survival oriented traits/gear for more DPS. It might be worth it to invest in some additional zerker jewelry for those situations, and you might want to grab a pistol offhand for boss fights. Bosses usually attack too slow for the confusion damage of iMage to be worth it.
It’s a bug with the tooltip, but Illusionist celerity + Blade training do stack.
Does this mean we can no longer portal out allies who are stuck in keep walls after flipping the point? If so, can something be done to prevent them from getting stuck in the first place?
Edit:
On the other hand, Scepter is amazing before level 7.
Lol! Seriously.
It’s true though! Back in beta mesmers started with a sword instead. The problem was that you were way too squishy to be in melee range the whole time and you didn’t get your first clone generator until you unlocked Leap. By changing the starting weapon to a scepter you got access to the class mechanic immediately and its much easier to stay alive with a ranged weapon. Once you get weapon swapping at level 7 then the sword becomes vastly superior because you can weave in and out of melee range.
Scepter is really only useful in situations where you can’t melee but want to still use an off-hand weapon. The situations where this happens are few and far between. Personally, I’d like to see a faster auto-attack that’s independent of the distance to the target and some kind of damaging condition on every third attack (burning would be nice). This would secure the scepter a niche role in condition oriented builds.
One thing to consider is that boon duration does not affect illusions. The buffs from your staff clones will still only have the base duration.
Have you considered Runes of Lyssa? The condition duration doesn’t transfer to clones either, but the 4pc and 6pc bonuses might compliment your build nicely.
I played GW1 off and on since the very beginning and this is my take:
I think I’m echoing a lot of the previous posters when I say that the thing I miss most about GW1 is the meta-game. I probably spent more time theory-crafting new builds than I did actually playing those builds. I loved finding that perfect team composition where all the parts combined in just the right way to counter the latest fad.
With that being said, I don’t think it’s been long enough to see how the GW2 meta is going to play out. GW1’s meta evolved incrementally over the years while GW2 has been out for a few months. Interestingly enough, I think the trading post has introduced a meta-game that’s evolving more rapidly than the game-play. My out-of-game time has shifted from theory-crafting new builds to theory-crafting new ways to play the TP.
What do I like about GW2?
- The sense of community. GW2 encourages you to play with other people. Once they added heroes in GW1, I didn’t PvE with randoms ever again.
- WvW combat. In fact, WvW is probably the primary thing that keeps me playing GW2.
- Quality of life improvements. Depositing collectibles to the bank or selling to the TP on the fly takes away the pain of inventory management from GW1 and other games.
- The emphasis on spatial awareness. GW1 did this well too, but having an awareness of what is going on where on the battlefield is more important than ever. This is probably the most salient quality that both games share in common. A well timed Entangle brings back fond memories of placing Ward Against Foes in a choke point.
If I were to suggest a direction for GW2 to go in the future, I wish it would be easier to store gear/trait/skill configurations. Inventory space is at such a premium in GW2, that carrying around a Power set, Condition set, and Tanky set isn’t really feasible either. I think that being able to store and change builds/gear rapidly would help encourage more build experimentation. This in turn could help the meta evolve a little bit faster.
Just my $0.02.
I haven’t gone back and retested since patch, but my data from before patch suggests that the average damage per hit was about 150. One of the things that I noticed while testing is that the damage for the iBerserker “rolls” not only on the same target, but also between targets. For example, if the iBerserker hits the first target twice and the second target twice, the damage pop-up will read 600 — the cumulative damage for the attack. Sometimes the time between the hits is so short that the early hits don’t even show up on screen. These observations might help explain some of the inconsistencies in your data.
Side note: using the steady weapons has no effect on phantasms.
But can you make a power build with little/no precision?
Can you?
Sure.
Would you want to?
It depends.
One reason for crit oriented builds is that Power/Precision/CritDamage have such great synergy. As your power goes up, Precision/CritDamage looks better. As your Precision/CritDamage goes up, Power looks even better. This makes “Berserker” gear a no-brainer for direct damage.
The other reason you see so much focus on Precision is because there are some arguably overpowered traits in the Dueling line. Deceptive Evasion (clone on dodge) is practically a must-have in any shatter oriented build, so you essentially get Sharper Images (bleed on illusion crits) for free. Sharper Images opens up a variety of different build options, all of which tend to be crit-centric.
If you prefer being being a “tank” over a “glass cannon”, Pow/Tough/Vit is a viable option. It’s just that a lot of people on these forums prefer the play-style of the latter. Don’t let that fool you into thinking that’s the only way to play. It’s up to you how to balance your survivability with DPS and decide where that DPS comes from (Direct damage vs. Condition Damage). There is no definitive “best build”; each build has its strengths and weaknesses.
I used to have a torch.
Back in the day, you could use Retaliation to kill Trebuchets in WvW. Have 5 people stand where it’s hitting, use Temporal Curtain on the Focus, weapon swap to a Torch, use Prestige and the AoE Retaliation Combo would gradually kill the treb! Then they “fixed” it…
The Blast combo from Prestige still has some utility, but carrying around a Torch for those situations is not worth the bag space when other professions have much more reliable Blast finishers. I liked it a lot better in beta when you could use the stealth to get off a quick heal or recharge a mantra.
For a direct damage build (i.e. sword/greatsword) Power is going to give you the best DPS increase per point under most circumstances.
I’ll take a stab at this:
1) Trying to get the mobs to focus on you is a lost cause. You either need to kill faster or make better use of CC. Feedback, Focus Pull, GS Push, and Magic Bullet are your friends here.
2) Many of our illusion summoning skills tend to glitch out on uneven terrain, and I’ve noticed that iLeap in particular fails more often when I’m not already in combat. There is a range indicator under the skill; if it shows a red bar under the icon then you’re too far away. It definitely helps to use iLeap in conjunction with Into the Void, Magic Bullet, or Signet of Domination if you really need it to go off.
3) Aggro doesn’t quite work the same in this game as other MMOs. To make the mob more likely to target your clones it helps to position yourself so that the clone is between you and the mob. They can also protect you from projectiles this way. Don’t expect the clone to last for more than one or two hits. If they aren’t going after your clones, you can always use Distortion to buy you time to get more up. Shattering is an important part of the class, so practice incorporating it into your play early on.
IIRC, the damage numbers stop showing when the illusions die but the conditions continue to deal damage.
Very simply: You are allowed to isolate the power on just sets and say Zerk’s has X% more power than Ramp’s (provided you get the set stats right at least).
You are not allowed to then include said X% into a damage calculation with an isolated crit rate which intrinsically requires character’s full stats to derive how much more direct damage a character does with a set. It’s a plain old boo boo and leads to erroneous results.
All other stats being equal, if you increase your Power by X% then your direct damage will increase by X%. Obviously there are other stats on the gear to consider, but then you have to start looking at the spec as a whole. I mean, OP never even mentioned if he had Sharper Images…
Whoosh. I said very clearly this particular example of hypothetical red gear versus green gear only has a basis in demonstrating a basic mathematical truth, and has no relation to the world of GW2’s 21 prec = 1% crit, and so on so forth. Perhaps had I made the same demonstration saying pile of apples versus pile of peaches it wouldn’t have thrown you off.
Sorry you didn’t read it right but I certainly did explain that. For all the real gear set calculations I certainly did use the expected damage formula as listed by Anet on GW2W.
You can’t just pull a formula out of nowhere and call it a “mathematical truth”. It’s obvious that you made a mistake. Where you have (1.5+.5) as the crit multiplier it should really be (1+.5*.5) instead. It happens. Might as well just acknowledge it and move on.
It’s your total toughness.
I think it’s mostly a question of gear. You need to have high enough toughness/vitality that you can survive the initial burst. Having a stun-breaker equipped helps also.
Most of the time in WvW, staying alive is more important than scoring kills. Right now there’s a lot of glass-cannons running around in WvW, but I think that this will change in the long run. Playing a glass-cannon is too much of a liability when an unlucky death can allow the enemy zerg to rally.
I had no intention of insulting anyone. I just have this pet peeve about mathematical arguments based on flawed assumptions. Duty calls.
I really would like have a discussion about the cost-benefit calculus of Rampager vs Berserker gear. I’ve been modeling this problem in my off time, but got a little sidetracked. If there’s anyone here with a math/programming background that’s interested in collaborating, please send me a PM!
Fundamental mistake #1: You did not include base stats in your maths. Each character has 916 base power at 80. You may ask, why? aren’t we just comparing gear? Don’t base stats cancel each other out on both sides of the equation? NO it doesn’t.
Actually, with regards to power, it kinda does. Damage scales linearly with Power, so you get the same DPS increase per point of Power regardless of where you start. It’s not that they “cancel each other out on both sides of the equation”, but rather the starting value goes away when we take the first derivative of the damage function with respect to Power.
This is because stats like crit rate have a much bigger impact when we are talking about a bigger base power pool, because it is multiplying a bigger number. Proofs by maths at end if you don’t believe me.
Yes, crit rate does look better as your Power goes up. However, you would need to have about 4k Power before Precision starts to look competitive. This value goes down as your Critical Damage goes up, but at the values achievable in game Power is by far the best return on investment for direct damage.
Let’s say red gear has 20 power and 50% crit
and green gear has 50 power and 10% crit
you get red gear expected damage = 20 * (1.5 + 0.5) = 40
green gear expected damage = 50 * (1.5 + 0.1) = 80Now you say well, my character had 1000 base power at level 80 before the gear… then the damage is:
red gear damage = (1000 + 20) * (1.5 + 0.5) = 2040
green gear damage = (1000 +50) * (1.5 + 0.1) = 1680
There’s two problems with your math. First, your damage formula is incorrect. The correct damage formula is damage = C*Power*(1+CritRate*(.5+CritDamage/100)), where C is a constant depending on the target’s armor, the skill you are using, and your weapon damage (if applicable). Second, you’ve ignored the fact that it takes 21 Precision to increase your critical rate by 1%. The difference of a 40% critical rate should be compared with 840 Power, not just 30. Allow me to fix that for you:
“red gear” damage = C(1000+20)(1+.5*.5) = 1275 C
“green gear” damage = C(1000+860)(1+.1*.5) = 1953 C
Yeah, I’ll take Power over Precision, thank you very much.
As I said earlier, there are situations where Rampager’s will beat out Berserker in terms of DPS, but this depends on your spec, choice of weapons, playstyle, and who you’re up against. However, that’s only when you take into account the increase in condition damage that Rampager’s offers. As EasymodeX said, if all you are looking at is direct damage then Berserker is the clear winner.
Better luck in summer school!
Come back after you’ve taken Calculus and I’d love to discuss it further!
(edited by SuburbanLion.8095)
I did some thing similar to andy, but kept my movement on WASD and moved my profession skills to a more accessible location:
q → a (strafe left)
e → d (strafe right)
f → g (interact)
6 → q (heal)
7 → e (util 1)
8 → r (util 2)
9 → f (util 3)
0 → b (elite)
f1 → z (prof skill 1)
f2 → x (prof skill 2)
f3 → c (prof skill 3)
f4 → v (prof skill 4)
“Required Rating: 50” means you need 50 Weaponsmithing to make it.
The orange color means you can make it and are likely to skill up on it.
The “Master” text means that the resulting item will be of Masterwork quality (Green).
I’ve done a lot of research on this and the best answer I can give you is “it depends”. Both are competitive options if you spec appropriately. Berserker set will give you more spike damage while the Rampager set gives you more sustained damage. Rampager performs better against heavy armor opponents, while Berserker performs better against targets with condition removal. The difference in DPS between the two isn’t large, it’s more a matter of what fits your play style better.
Do we really need another thread about this? Just beating a dead horse at this point….
Yes the class is lacking a passive movement speed boost when out of combat, but we have alternative skills that can more than make up for it in the right situation (Portal). You can also largely make up for this weakness by strategically choosing your gear and traits. Overall it’s a fairly balanced system.
Yes, but the tooltip doesn’t update correctly.
It depends on what weapons you are using. The Phantasmal Healing and Illusionary Membrane combo works best with an off-hand Pistol. The reason being is the iDuelist procs the regen more frequently than the other phantasms (likely a bug) and stays at range. The radius on Phantasmal Healing is relatively small which means that it’s difficult to utilize with melee phantasms since they move around so much. I tend to prefer the Focus over the Pistol in WvW, so the IM+PH combo doesn’t really help me much.
Patch in the background prior to the go live would be nice.
There are some other options at lower levels. For example, at level 40 you could combine 4pc Major Rune of the Air with 2pc Major Rune Rune of the Pack and Warden’s Feedback to maximize your swiftness uptime.
I’m also surprised that no one mentioned that the 6pc Superior Rune of Traveler bonus gives you a passive 5% run speed.
Portal doesn’t help you run faster — just get back to where u were faster (and only if u want to do that within 50 seconds). This isn’t about combat, we already know mesmer is mobile in combat. This is trudging accross the wilderness, and portal does beans for that.
I didn’t suggest that it did. I was just pointing out the potential game balance issues that would result from giving a passive run speed boost to the same class with a group-wide teleport.
Point taken, but its still drastically easier to work with a completely deterministic situation than a random one.
This was probably intentional for balance reasons. Portal plus a passive run speed boost would be way overpowered.
iWarlock is probably the worst phantasm to be testing this with. It has a very wide damage range and this damage is randomized with each attack. You’d need to do hundreds (if not thousands) of tests to verify the effects of critical damage statistically.
A much easier way to do this would be to use one of the multi-hit phantasms like iWarden or iDuelist. The “dice roll” only happens once per attack cycle, so you can easily compare the difference between crits and non-crits within that attack. This eliminates the random factor in the testing, and the only thing you’d need to worry about are rounding errors.
THERE AIN’T NO TREB SAFE FROM MAH SPIN2WIN.
“It’s on the kittening vista … you can hit that ?!”
Now if only you could convince people to stop repairing the wall at garrison and back you up…
There are some others, but these are probably the best because I’ve run them.
Love the humility here. ;-)
I think the real reason that these builds tend to work so well is the synergy they have with the Greatsword. I know how much you enjoy killing those hard-to-reach trebs with iBerserker.
I’d say the only real requirements here are the 20 in Domination for GS training and 5 in Illusions so you can spam iB all day long. The other 45 points are pretty flexible.
4. 20/20/0/25/5.
I run that now but I opted to take ten points into the third tree so I could get 3% dmg reduction per illusion out. Thought it would help keep me alive longer, will have to play with the other builds and come back to comment.
Coming from someone that plays a 20/20/0/25/5, I think you’re really missing out by dropping those 10 points in Inspiration. My main reason for going 20+ in Inspiration is for Warden’s Feedback. I’ve found that having the reflection on Temporal Curtain is a real life saver in WvW. Alternate between Curtain, iWarden and Feedback, and you can nullify a group of ranged attackers for an extended period of time.
I’m not a big fan of Illusionary Defense in WvW. In most WvW situations my phantasms tend to die to AoE damage before they get a second attack off anyway. Instead, I treat it like a “throwaway phantasm” build. I usually just let iB or iW do it’s first attack (maybe 2 if I’m lucky) then shatter it.
If you want to go into Chaos anyway, I’d recommend the “Descent into Madness” trait. The 50% falling damage reduction is pretty handy to have in WvW. As a bonus, you can portal your teammates down cliffs that they might not otherwise survive.
I’ve been running Warden in PvE and WvW without the Phantasmal Haste “bug”, and it’s still a very viable skill (especially with Warden’s Feedback). The Warden never survives long enough to get a second attack cycle in anyway, so I do the practical thing and shred him after the first one. It helps to stop thinking of Phantasms as permanent pets and actually learn to use your shatters.
Empowered Illusions vs. Phantasmal Haste (The Math Behind the Myth)
in Mesmer
Posted by: SuburbanLion.8095
I came to the same conclusion back in beta by simulating them with
a spreadsheet. PH is clearly superior to EI if you’re going for bleed damage, while EI is better in a power build with more frequent shattering. Of course, those were based on the assumption that PH worked as described which turned out not to be true.
I’ve spent a good deal of time running 0/20/15/15/20, but what I’ve been doing lately is ditching the 15 points in Inspiration. I’m hardly ever in range of my phantasms’ regeneration in PvP because I’m constantly kiting, and the extra points open up some fun combinations. For example, going 0/20/20/0/30 lets you pick up Imbued Diversion or Illusionary Persona. There’s several other interesting ways to spend those points. Give it a try and see what you think.