Guild Wars 2

I’m not sure if this is a good place but I’ve come up with a “Currently OP” traits list, I would expect some changes to…
Chaotic dampening: 13 second chaos storm, 9 second warlock, easy ~100% chaos armour and protection uptime
Prismatic understanding: 60-70% stealth uptime with veil, MI, prestige and decoy cooldowns reduced, that doesn’t seem very reasonable when you can cast illusions from stealth continually.
Confusing combatants: Clearly ridiculous, expect an ICD or something.
I guess the point is if they aren’t changed, they have a massive impact.

Also, traits that might look different, keep an eye out:
Persistence of memory: 2% is clearly useless, might mean 2s.
Protected phantsms: Cooldown might be leftover from triumphant distortion.
Illusionary Inspiration: Unknown, kitten cooldown could be remnant of signet skill.
Mental torment: In the livestream they mentioned 50% seemed a bit too much in their tests.
Harmonious mantras: Ferocity bonus is not shown. I think it needs to be ~90 per stack to balance out the old trait.

The rest seem reasonably stable.

We’re good enough that our regular fractal 50 groups with 2 of us (not meta) go just fine – but when I play guard or thief at lower levels the damage difference is clear. I think in theory with 3 swordsmen up our damage is still quite good but I’m not an expert there. I think we also tend to remove boons most.

I do see a few interesting points in this patch – specifically:

Quickness is a boon – does it use boon duration? does it stack duration? does signet of inspiration copy it? Does it have a cap? (If the stream addressed this directly, please tell me!)

With a cap of 30 seconds or higher and “Yes” to all the other questions a pair of mesmers can provide quickness… to the entire team… for the entire run. Even if ANet missed this it would be nerfed immediately, but a cap of 5-10s and no duration stacking would still give us room to work.

Mantra trait Mantra of pain with HM is actually a DPS boost of a few percent in a rotation – but the change to ferocity is tricky. The point where it matches the old trait is tricky to calculate but it’s somewhere near 90 ferocity per stack (6% crit damage).

If you loop Charge mantra -> sword AA chain -> sword AA chain continually, you’ll average 4 stacks of the ferocity boost. Obviously it gets trickier in a chain, but menders purity may also provide a stack. Given it may affect phantasms too and just requires one utility… worth watching but not huge unless it’s AOE.

Cooldown traits
The phantasm shatter recharge trait is worth checking out – I suspect it actually means 2s per phantasm shattered. If that’s the case, IP mind wrack could be added to the rotation occasionally. It may require fancy timing to immediately drop another 3 phantasms (IE shatter – cast new phantasm before they pop and reduce CD?)

Unfortunately most traits would be difficult to work in effectively. If sinister dps or interrupts are relevant the staff trait is very interesting.

Interrupts
While they’re fight specific, quickness, damage, power block and free duelists may be worth working in somehow.

In summary: I doubt much will change our position (unless quickness abuse is a thing) but it will be fun to explore options. Most look like a heap of button pressing for small benefits but ANet may be aiming for exactly that!

I suggest assuming the greatsword trait means 2s and see what you think then. More likely to be 1s or so but 2% is probably a display bug.

I still disagree about it being necessary now that everyone can use IP

• distortion works fine with IP
• you need 1 or maybe 2 clones to max out diversion, easy.
• you just got 4 bonus boon rips from IP if you need them
• final burst is quite high with 1 clone and self, extras aren’t that important.

There are also cooldown traits that may allow other fast sources of illusion production. In general the 1-2% numbers are expected to be bugs and potentially even mean seconds.

As my notes earlier showed – it looks very much like only the ranger had condition gear and burning/bleeding had their base damage lowered by 33%. It’s also pretty easy to get runes that increase burn duration + 40% duration food.

Before any duration boosts, dhuumfire will do the equivalent of 15 bleed ticks for a 1.4 second attack, whereas scepter will effectively do 18 bleed ticks for a 3.0 second cycle. It’s a substantial improvement even without relying on lingering curse.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Another thing is that a lot of people are saying that there needs to be some sort of power trait in curses. Why does it have to be curses? Why not some sort of vampiric set of traits in blood magic? Something crazy like Dark Path steals 1,500 health (doubled if from behind). I’ve always wanted to be a vampire necromancer! Think crazy and fun guys.

I feel like curses is specifically more important because the other 2 lines are highly defensive – without any power traits in curses, there is no glass power necro. The minors (fury and + crit chance) also work with such a build, even if they aren’t perfectly directed at it.

There also are some offensive traits for power builds in the other 2 already (wells, power from toughness, minion damage).

That said more awesome fun stuff would be great. I suggest a trait in death to extend the range/radius of all death shroud skills and that the grandmaster minor in blood can triple damage of siphons in death shroud (given they wont heal you).

PS. I noticed your summaries didn’t refer to my post at all which is fine given my ideas are probably not all that good – but if it’s just that they need more specific points (like targeted flaws or suggestions) I can try again

Right, but remember you can still use sword autoattack while spamming charges, so the correct number for mantra of pain is:
327×3/2.75 = 356 dps.
So it’s higher than sword AA.

It is arguably a non-clone non-phantasm illusion. For purposes of unlocking skills (which is the driver of this change), all illusions will be probably be lumped together anyway.

I have a suspicion that theres a display bug on many of these recharge traits and that small numbers like 2% or 1.5% could mean 2 seconds and 1.5 seconds. In which case they’re amazing. So… dunno. We’ll see.

This thread is irrelevant for pve as it stands, as no-one would take DE or Halting strike over just about anything, so I was assuming its a pvp thing.

I think in combat mantra recasts are very useful for a variety of reasons… They are easily powerful to make up for the cast time once they have a trait or two behind them – the trick in pvp is just to avoid hits while doing so. In pve it could hardly be easier and keeping mantra of pain on the bar is perfectly reasonable compared to the previous plan (Multiple mantras you never used). Last I checked traited mantra of pain outdamages sword autoattack and hits more targets.

As a player who uses harmonious mantras in every build for years I’m absolutely okay with the DE overlap! It still allows 3 potential playstyles:

Phantasms + interrupts + mantra/healing. These overlap really easily now and can dish out substantially more damage than they used to. It doesn’t lose shatters completely now that IP is baseline.

Mantras + interrupts: The interrupts are so incredibly nasty that you don’t need big shatters or buffed phantasms to be effective.

Cooldown reduction shenanigans: Using greatsword, staff or pistol traits it seems likely you can pump out clones without DE – obviously nothing to base an entire shatter build on, but with IP as well you will be fine.

Honestly the fact is DE NEEDS to be a grandmaster for anything else to compete. If you still want it inbuilt or minor and not overwriting phantasms that’s okay too – but dropping to adept or master will be worse than the current plan.

As necromancer is my 3rd character after mesmer and engi who got amazing changes, I’m understandably quite happy overall – but necro clearly got less interesting stuff :<

I think there’s actually a lot here and it was simply more subtle – but there is definitely room to shake things up! I’ll leave that to other people and focus on balance-ish changes I think would open up builds.

Spite: Very good, little questions. If addressed, all traits have a purpose

• Signet mastery is interesting – signet builds do have a clear direction, see build summaries (hopefully clearer with signet skill changes!)
• Unholy Feast cooldown is from axe skill. Assuming it is a display bug and there is no ICD this is a worthwhile trait.
• Axe training looks odd – like mesmer CD reduction skills the numbers shown look like a nerf.
• Is 1 might on life blast really worth an entire trait?

Curses: Excellent condition line. All traits have a purpose. Aim even higher.

• Reapers precision looks weak. Not sure if it is – I can imagine it adding up rapidly (hybrid wells, perhaps)
• A glass cannon burst build doesn’t really exist but could – Consider adding some direct damage to an adept/master trait here. I imagine such a build would not be quite as fast as other bursts, but would use control conditions extensively and as such work with the scepter trait or terror.

Death: MEH

• This line lends itself to minions or tank trolling, but not being part of any other build. I would not be entirely suprised if it warranted being nuked like the engineer invention line buuut…
• I would switch Foot in the grave to this line. Find another offensive trait to put in soul reaping. To do significant damage necro can’t afford to lose damage grandmasters as it is, so foot in the grave is in a bad spot. However it fits perfectly into this line for adding some defense to ANY build!

Blood: Okay

• This line is not all that exciting, but does warrant inclusion in well, siphon or heal-support builds. Check the rest of the thread for fun ideas.
• I would consider adding control improvement somewhere here (chill/immobilize/stun/blind/weakness/whatever) or improve non-healing support.

Soul reaping: Good, minor concerns .

• Not sure if unyielding blast is powerful enough. Could make it affect something other than life blast?
• Foot in the grave in a tricky spot, competes against essential damage traits. AS before, move it to death, could try moving unholy sanctuary to MINOR and make the life-force damage boost a hefty major grandmaster (10% instead of 5%). IF doing this, boost damage elsewhere by ~5% (spite minors perhaps)

Potential build summaries I thought about:
Signet build: Spite, Curses, Blood. Power or hybrid siphon – minimal death shroud use. Attrition?
Sinister PvE: Spite, Curses, Soul Reaping. Obviously experimental, all the life blast traits combined could be nasty! HEAPS of vuln applied.
Power Wellomancer: Spite, Blood, Soul Reaping. Many sub-builds in here. PvE/PvP/WvW
Hybrid (celestial?) wells: Curses, Blood, Soul Reaping
Terrormancer: Curses, Soul reaping, No obvious third line. Maybe splashes wells, minions or defense?
Minion master: Death: Something!!! I don’t know minions well.
Spectral build: Spite, Soul reaping, Any
Burst: Spite, Soul reaping, Curses. Uses control conditions extensively, needs more from curses.

Most condis showed extremely low damage in the necro notes – I wouldn’t trust this – I expect they’re testing lowering the damage done with 0 condi damage (by about 33%, from 40 dps to 26 dps per bleed). The ratio of bleed to burn damage still shows 5×.

Ranger notes still show bleeds at ~120 dps, so I would guess only the ranger has condi gear

Other conditions such as poison, torment and confusion all have even stranger numbers but even so – I would expect them to stay around the same effectiveness. Poison might do less damage but stack healing reduction.

Expectation: Cool changes, but my favourite build broken due to trait overlap

Reality: Here have 15 different buffs for your specific build (I counted) we nerfed like 2 things and you don’t use them anyway.

:]

I’m not really sure how it will turn out with changes to other classes too, but looking through them mesmer and engi easily stood out as the most interesting.

Having played a few similar builds I can say they are reasonably effective. If anything it seems like greatsword/staff would work best for this style, allowing plenty of ranged damage and interrupts. Mantras are easiest to charge by outranging and hiding behind walls so it fits there too.

Keep in mind this build is very close to many powerful traits – harmonious mantras, chaotic interruption, phantasm damage minor, shattered concentration… If anything I would say your dueling major traits are not clearly used.

As for skills, blink or decoy is much easier to manage and generally guarantees one mantra charge.

berserker generally works well, but as written you could find many 1v1 matchups tough – lack of mobility and boon removal will hurt against celestial, burst and other builds. Knight + restorative mantras is tough, but in PvP you tend to leave points to recharge against any enemies. Mantra of stability sadly does not help much there.

Can’t argue with the rainbow unicorn shortbow mesmer. It needs to happen.

I’m wondering about a more focused illusionist – imagine recombining clones and phantasms so all illusions look like you and do some actual damage (much less than phantasms, obviously). Then replace shatters with illusion based utility skills. Some ideas being:
Synchronised dodge
Teleport/swap with furthest illusion
Change appearance (To a nearby enemy, for example)
Synchronised cast (whatever ability you use next)

Preferably this would come with some way of scaling illusions to larger fights, such as more/tougher illusions summoned against more enemies, increasing the illusion cap or harsh illusion-death effects.

Inspiration
75s cooldown
Each clone copies all its boons and conditions to allies/enemies respectively within a radius of 360.

Technical notes: There is a slight delay between shatters and other illusions are prioritised as targets. Conditions can also be transferred to other illusions (Though not you, even if you have IP).

I think in general the aoe + improved boons are a good idea but I like a bit stranger ideas. So going in another direction entirely… make it spawn a clone after shattering. Similar to how triumphant distortion was improved by giving it an additional effect.

That would allow it to work instead of or alongside DE, primarily in condition shatter builds? If combined with making the boons AOE/generally better support might become an option too.

Ideally it would have a random weapon because it’s the chaos tree but that could be difficult without weapon models to copy.

I’ll be on this weekend too (though Aussie timezone) and have played similar builds for a while but more inspiration – 26060, 06053 and even 62060 long ago. Inspiration obviously addresses all 3 cons with focus/menders purity/restorative mantras but tends to extend cooldowns.

General observations:
greatsword trait is VERY valuable .
Restorative mantras pays off a lot, but more suitable for wvw. Can heal phantasms too!
Burst vs sustained is a big tradeoff
May be possible to do full melee and use the sword trait.
Pack runes are great for this.

(This is Veranaday btw, was testing 66020 mantra bursts last weekend)

Okay, in my opinion a mantra build goes through 3 stages – fully charged, uncharged, and sustain.

Chaos covered the sustain phase well – I’ll also add that a mantra mesmer rarely breaks stealth early, so waiting and stealthing just before it runs out should give you the best chance to reposition. And of course: stealthing first or outranging them is basically giving them a free recharge.

The fully charged phase is a bit unusual because opening with a stun like traited steal doesn’t really hurt it. I suspect your best bet is try to bait heal/pain charges out while dodging some things, potentially heal, then go and burst. In particular if they run mantra of distraction(power lock), opening with a backstab burst is asking for trouble.

For thief, I think s/D works best against mantras because fewer actually land and you don’t get many free recharges.

I’ll start by admitting I don’t know mesmer condi builds very well… but…
Right now the general consensus seems to be that mesmer condi builds are all based on clone death, or just not very good, right? Glamours were nerfed long ago, phantasm bleed based are uncommon, shatter just not good enough.

So now if they’re bringing some of those up to improve build diversity, with the scepter torment and IE fix, this is the sensible thing to knock down.

It looks like a pretty harsh drop, so maybe they went a little bit too far. Even so, the underlying logic seems sound.

It took a while, but I managed to create a double rainbow.

Why… there’s a list of 30+ other bugs and you choose this? I notice my warden is still quite skilled at standing around.

sigh

Okay, back to engineer… or maybe wildstar.

I like most ideas in this thread – I would suggest the phantasm invuln could be changed to “can’t die” for 5s (ish) like engineers AED. Leaves it vulnerable to interrupts and doesn’t require people to kill it twice if they do hit it.

maxinion.8396:

Water field + blast is a significantly stronger heal than Restorative Mantras, though. Healing can be useful in some situations, sure— but RM is very rarely a good heal.

Restorative mantras starts at 2600, whereas a water blast does 1320, so it’s about 2 blasts. It has downsides like the delay, but isn’t reliant on multiple skills, has a far lower cooldown than any water field and can’t be messed up by light fields or feedback etc. So it’s quite different, but you haven’t convinced me it’s worse overall… except for the aforementioned “no-one can see it” thing.

I wouldn’t suggest the shatter skills miku mentioned, not so great with phantasms and I think it only has decent numbers with illusionary persona, otherwise it’s about 1-1.5k per shatter (not per clone)

If you’re not in a meta group, optimal might be different. Sometimes that even means healing is useful. If you’re in a group that stacks a lot but tends to die too fast, it becomes pretty obvious. Similarly if you enjoy a particular build or are better at playing with it, that’s important too.

Healing is sometimes useful in pve if you aren’t running with “meta” groups, but restorative mantras is hard to support with simply because your team won’t even notice – there’s no effect telling them something is happening. Try not to get angry if they keep running away. On the other hand it can boost your own survivability rather substantially at the cost of a utility slot.

As for forcing you out of DPS, recharging mantra of pain is slightly more single-target DPS than max range greatsword autoattack* and gives you the healing on top. If you take harmonious mantras, it’s slightly more single target DPS than sword autoattack*. That’s not such a bad trade. It’s a good way to get used to a full melee build because you can back briefly out to recharge if you’re taking too much damage.

Your build doesn’t have many mantra traits but I think that’s fine. It does have a few odd issues:

• No stun breaks
• Glamour trait but no glamours, could take phantasm health or menders purity.
• Between signet of the ether, phantasmal disenchanter and IC you’ll be overwriting phantasms. Switching to the healing mantra with menders purity could free up your condition removal utilities for other things.

It’s not a meta build simply because the healing trait pulls points and utilities away from damage, but the most important thing is having fun with it… so does it pass there?

*These numbers were calculated a while ago so I’m not 100% sure they’re right/haven’t changed, if anyone disagrees I can check again.

Yep pyroatheist describes it the way I thought it worked- so if you end up with a team that is less consistent when stacking, or solo with pack runes/staff clone. With some things not targetting yourself (inspiration) or going off all over the place like ele blast finishers… Well I don’t really know the resulting uptime.

If the op means viable as in “accepted meta pve/PvP build”, yeah, it’s not happening. If it’s just about having something that holds up reasonably well, this would work.
1. In some builds/teams you might have aoe fury going off anyway.
2. In PvP with gs/staff and restorative mantras you would have a lot of ranged damage and quite a bit of survivability.
3. In pve with melee weapons it should be within about 10% of 6/2/0/4/2.

6/0/0/5/3 for a mantra/phantasm build would work, but would not have many mantra or weapon traits and loses vigor on crit.

There are also teleports which can get to unexpected places (up some walls for example).

I’d suggest extra bonuses for perfect accuracy/ie radius 60 , maybe increase standard to 180 and slightly weaken it. Might emphasise the stab more than just a radius increase and landing it in PvP would be awesome – yet a straight buff in pve where greatsword in particular could use it. For amusing/overpowered extras, the middle could be unblockable.

Or a blast finisher is nice too but doesn’t really seem to match.

I tried the full melee version in hotjoin to get a feel for it. pu easily makes up for the loss of restorative mantras. On the damage side it didn’t seem great but my DE/stealth/full melee PvP skills are very rusty. I’ll keep trying and test wvw roaming as well… Including with GS and sw/P to compare those options.

Edit: this is comparing damage to a phantasm /mantra berserker build so being a bit lower is expected really.

keenlam.4753:

@Toeofdoom: believe it or not, i did try the build with staff as it has been my long time favourite weapon, but staff attacks are slow and it didn’t feel right for a bursty build when u want to burst people down hard then gtfo. I think staff would be more suitable for a more sustained build like 0/4/6/4/0 where u grab Restorative Mantras.

Fair enough, just wondered with the traits lining up and phase retreat allowing mantra charges (from memory).

For a slightly more ridiculous option… You could go sw/sw and sw/t! I tried a full melee mantra 2/6/0/6/0 and while it was noticeably worse than using greatsword, it also had no stealth. I want to try this variant

I like the idea, it looks interesting. Might be a silly question but…. What about using staff? Warlock seems nicer than berserker for duels and you turn off the aa anyway.

Side note: Mantra heal allows centaur runes for cheap people such as me.

After seeing the requirements for adept trait unlocking… Wow.
Requiring zone completion for a single adept trait seems over the top as it’s far more work than any trait 13. Making it a level 80 zone? That’s a really difficult decision to even comprehend.

If you buy a third of them you’ll be out 14g (okay, fine) and 120 skill points (WHAT???). I don’t even know how you grind that many.

Definitely go knight or knight+berserker for this build regardless of whether you take phantasmal fury – with all that healing the toughness will pay off and it gives better damage than cavalier.

I’d probably drop deceptive evasion and shattered conditions and try either:
0/30/0/25/15 for IC + phantasmal fury + compounding power
10/20/0/25/15 for IC +15% damage + compounding power
But it’s really up to you, as you can see by now there are heaps of ways to vary this build.

I run a 30/10/0/30/0 build and find in wvw you usually have plenty of room to move, so protected mantras/deceptive evasion isn’t as important as in spvp. Also portal is really handy if you feel like dropping decoy for it, you can get away from zergs while roaming, split up small groups to make them manageable or just recharge mantras by teleporting back and forth so they can’t hit you.

Every mesmer utility is useful somewhere and they can be extremely powerful. It’s the nature of the class that many effects can be subtle or tricky, just as it’s the nature of the warrior to be very explicit about what everything does.

I think you’ll have no problem learning them later on and many aren’t so important at level 30 anyway. I’d recommend trying out things like feedback, blink and decoy for now, but experiment!

With harmonious mantras, recharging mantra of pain in combat is higher dps than greatsword AA and it heals or increases damage depending on traits. Others give similarly powerful effects, it’s no waste.

In general it’s a safe bet to mix berserker and soldier based on how much you need survivability. Plus it’s easier to tweak later as swapping 6 soldier bits to berserker is much easier than swapping 12 valkyrie bits.

As for runes, opal orbs or beryl orbs are a very cheap yet effective option but I don’t really know what’s best.

I run a very similar build (30/10/0/30/0, focus traited instead of pistol, portal/MoP over blink/decoy) in all game modes and really like it.
I find similar things to messiah in spvp, hard to position well, but it allows some other fancy tricks:
Drop a portal and bounce between ends while recharging.
Drop a curtain, start recharge and only pull when needed.
Run faster, you have swiftness now.

In wvw roaming it thrives as you can easily outrange an enemy while recharging.

Evidence for recharging the attacks, not the summons: After the warden change, phantasms in general appear to move to attack range before cooling down. That makes this ability much more effective.

Or maybe I imagined that change, dunno.

At 31 Mai trin lost stacks one by one so it does appear to scale.
Urban seemed unchanged apart from the charr morph actually working on the entire team.

Snowblind appeared to have more patrols after the elemental section, but it might just have been luck that a few grouped up. Hard to compare objectively so I’m curious what others think.

As a general rule, adding some celestial to berserker for a tougher build can be useful IF you have significant conditions and/or healing power. Otherwise soldier is probably better.

As others said in pve pure berserker is fairly common anyway

You could try portal in wvw for survival, it can get you away from quite a lot. I find it works well with mantra builds because popping between both ends on the portal while recharging is quite effective.

Interesting… I’d go with an 8/10, all the pieces fit really well, but it feels more like a hunter-of-magical-things outfit. If it seemed more like all these dead but possibly living bones and and tentacles and so on were used in channeling magic, that would be excellent.

My necromancer is the bridge between life and death.

Some really cool ideas in this thread – the rocket twirl came to mind for me as well, awesome.
I have to say that something about chasing people down with a hammer is a little odd for an engineer. So here you could be using the hammer almost defensively, backing away against other melee classes. Additionally the hammer is traditionally a control weapon, but the engineer has plenty of hard CC already – so it goes for a bit of experimentation with conditions.

Chain: Frost strike
Decent power damage, 3rd strike chills for about 2s in a small AOE. (Remember the hammer 3rd strike is quite slow)

Skill 2: Laser hammer
Fires a blinding laser beam – 900 range, blinds. full cast or channel is ~2s.
It might be nice to have a really tiny cripple or knockback to make this feel weighty and hammerlike.
10s cooldown

Skill 3: Spring hammer
Smash the ground and jump a short distance back (~200) and hits in an AoE. Ideally all enemies bounce vertically too. Blast finisher.
A second ability springs forwards a fixed distance (800?) as a decent gap closer – but it’s not locked onto an enemy, so you won’t drop right on top of them without a good aim.

Skill 4: Counterweight
Block an attack and counter with a daze:
You can cancel the block early to hit and interrupt with less damage – this is unblockable.

Skill 5: Rocket twirl!
Knocks everyone in melee range back and sets them on fire. Whirl finisher. I totally came up with this independently.

EDIT: Revised spring hammer not to immobilize, control on every single ability is a bit too far. Each control effect is meant to be slightly weaker compared to those seen on other hammer classes but you get 4 instead of 3.