Guild Wars 2

I’ve been putting a program together that figures out the most effective gear for specific stats and levels of defense, for ele builds I think it tends to recommend a combination of berserker and celestial or berserker and soldier. Unless you massively boost crit rate somehow (like permanent fury plus a couple of +10 crit traits) Valkyrie doesn’t really show up.

I run a very similar build in pve/wvw (30/10/0/30/0, GS, Sword/focus) and really like it – MoP/restoration + blink stick around but otherwise everything’s flexible. It would be nice if restorative mantras had a graphical effect as I suspect a few of my teammates don’t understand why I start chasing them at low health.

In sPvP it felt a bit slow paced – much harder to get a mantra charged if you’re forced onto a point, it really thrives when you have tonnes of space. I’ll have to try again with mantra toughness, in other areas it’s no use anyway because I just avoid getting hit when recharging.

skcamow is right about 30 inspiration opening up a lot of support though being phantasm focused I don’t go for the shatter traits – just glamours/focus reflects/mantra heals for the most part.

One final thing – I checked it some time ago now, recharging MoP does more single target DPS than greatsword auto at max range. Really helps with effective damage as you can time it around dodges/blocks/invuln while healing at the same time.

At the moment retaliation is mostly arbitrary – I like the internal cooldown idea, it clearly punishes sustained damage over burst, but doesn’t randomly turn individual skills/classes into the cat.

Confusion used to do something similar to static discharge builds, but it’s been nerfed enough that it doesn’t matter now. I think that has a better chance of being normalised based on casting time given confusion is actually best countered by cleansing/waiting it out.

Not exactly convinced by the sudden non-viability of phantasm builds – there are a couple of things you seem to be overlooking.

→ Phantasms have more health – signet of illusions even applies immediately, great. This is also likely why vengeful images was nerfed.
→ A whole bunch of other things got buffed and can easily be relevant to your build.
→ You can just not take illusionists celerity. You get a different trait and it even comes with useful stats for your build such as crits or power.

Honestly I just worked around it… I run a mantra/phantasm build where I didn’t have room for all the traits I wanted anyway. Now my phantasms stick around for long enough to do more damage or even get healed, mind stab doesn’t immobilize me, berserker works properly again and I even have phantasmal fury.

Try something new… interrupt builds are pretty obvious, mantras have been coming up, stealth builds should be near invulnerable now, inspiration line shatters can do interesting support, scepter block looks seriously painful and 3 signet builds can really exist and work together. Combine some of the above… see what happens.

I’ve just started with a 30/5/0/30/5 mantra/phantasm build – it’s a bit disconcerting having so little in dueling…

It has nice support with 2.6k heals and focus reflects, yet still maintains the phantasm damage quite well. Very survivable even with berserker gear as you can heal whenever you like and aren’t using your perma-vigor dodges for clones. It also effectively has 2 free utilities as condi removal is covered by 3 power returns and mantra of pain’s 1s cooldown keeps healing ready at all times.

EDIT: As for the “Why” part… we had a couple of people in guild chat insisting that mesmers had more useful things to do than healing and while arguing I realised this kind of build did everything they were saying and heals too.

At the moment I’m playing a 10/30/0/0/30 rampager static discharge engi and it’s quite versatile – essentially I can switch out any weapon and any kit except grenades without resetting traits, yet still be very effective. My only gripes are having to press heaps of buttons for burst and having my head explode with 2 stacks of confusion. Just seems relevant when you like switching everything

I’m starting to feel the same way as you about Mesmer, getting a bit too straight forward. A powerful build that has lots of tricks would be very nice.

As for necromancer, there are lots of interesting and powerful builds. Conditions with epidemic are very good, though in group PvE they suffer due to caps and everything dying too fast. Power builds hit very hard too. Some minions are not so hampered by AI issues and turn out to be good, even in condition builds they just need one trait for full damage as they ignore stats.

I think when the fight is easy, playing necro is pretty straight forward and being a super wizard of button pressing doesn’t change much – not always the case with engi. When the fight is hard, the bag of tricks is huge.

Those are my 3 80s, about all I can really say

The test golems have very high armour. Test it on some glass cannon casters too.

It’s pretty easy to tweak power levels. The scope idea is not even remotely situational because it adds damage to every fight you’re in. Does require a bit of effort to use well.

Gadgets vs kits is tricky, but there are things gadgets should be able to do better – control effects, break stuns and compressing effects into a single ability being the main ones. They can still do that while being relatively specialised.

With the healing turret changes and no healing gadget, there’s a pretty obvious solution for general condition removal. I’d be up for other specific removals too, but can’t think of any that fit.

I wonder if PBR should give you stability… Hmmm.

Hmmm, I enjoy overcharged shot vs leaping warriors and guardians, should work on a Mesmer clone too? I admit it’s unclear what weapon you’re even using, though.

What if scope gave you a guaranteed crit for standing still with a 15 second cooldown? Might need to require you to stand still for a second or 2 if that turns out extra powerful (pry bar, blunderbuss, grenades seem like good candidates)

I think gadgets have just one trait because they’re all meant to be situational. Nearly any trait beyond cooldown time works against that. In the right situation you can chuck a gadget in traited or not. A full gadget build is hoping for 3 specific situations at once.

Utility goggles could also block confusion and retaliation, extra useful while at range and engi tends to be one of the weakest classes vs. those.

The mine doesn’t really go well with the untraited plan – without explosive traits the radius is rather poor. Given those traits are primarily used for other things. I’d just unlink it.

It’s not really diminishing returns if you look at it as 30% more toolbelt activations/shatters/steals/whatever. If the first 10% was worthwhile, so is the next 10% and so on.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get an interesting video with 7 necros. In my mind it goes something like…

Start fight
Apply conditions
Coordinated single target + staff fear with total duration of about 20s
Epidemic fear forever everyone dies with 25 bleed stacks.

Necromancer stun breaks are already spread between minions, signets and spectral. Only wells and corruptions are missing it and I can’t think of any stun breaks with remotely well-like effects in the game. Corruptions are all too powerful if made instant cast anyway.
About all I’d even hope for here is shorter cooldowns as they’re pretty ridiculous. Obviously intentional as death shroud/fear can hold off a lot by itself.

Still, what if the stun break on spectral armour was moved elsewhere? They clearly regard it as very powerful if it tries to do everything at once.

Raestloz.7134:

Wearing a goggle instantly breaks you free from stun, which logically would’ve prevented you from trying to equip the goggle in the first place. Truly, gadgets are fascinating bunch that can leap onto your face by itself, and as such your argument has been destroyed by Rocket Boots

Wearing goggles is no different from any other break stun – kinda breaks the whole “stun” concept. In this case they take the dubiously useful form that comes with nearly zero further defensive value and so frequently fail to do more than embarrass you. Smooth.

Outside the “flavour” bits, I see rocket boots as more useful vs melee while the goggles are better vs long ranged attackers who probably won’t stun you again yet have many sources of blindness.

For incendiary powder, it’s not necessarily bad (at least, not for all builds). It’s targeted at grenade builds because they obviously proc in constantly, but might hurt flamethrower.

The breakdown is:
- More burst (hits for 4 seconds right at the start)
- Extra ticks at 25% and 75% condition duration help a bit.
- More predictable, easy to know when flamethrower will be guaranteed full damage.
- More sustained damage for builds with less than 1 crit every 1.2 seconds

Yes, if you crit more than once every 1.2 seconds consistently, you’ll do less sustained damage. Only really applicable for veterans and above, given the new version guarantees the damage up front. So if you still consider it a nerf remember you do get something in return

Trying to make gadgets “smooth” is missing the point. These aren’t your super spy gadgets of magically doing exactly what you wanted.

The rocket boots were cobbled together in a basement out of whatever was at hand which would burn in some sort of vaguely controlled runaway explosion. The fact that it works at all baffles pretty much everyone but on the other hand no sane person would put that much BOOM in one spot.

So what does it need? A giant trail of thick smoke^ and a bunch of fragments^^ – most likely of the boots themselves – flying out to punish whoever got right up in your face. For the next couple of seconds they’ll be swinging wildly… before coming back to find that genius who thought up “A volcano in a can”.

^Possible combo field, but not giving instant stealth. The field wouldn’t significantly increase overall blindness/stealth abilities from what I can tell.
^^Not intended to be used like 100 nades, but punishing closer players fits the ability.

loseridoit.2756:

the fact is that the dependance of illusion 5 and DE is actually limiting the mesmer build choices.

This is absolutely true – I’d be pretty interested to see new build choices and these are some pretty obvious targets. Overall the mesmer is not really overpowered (though certainly confusing to less experienced PVPers) so if there are changes here other traits or abilities should be brought up to balance.

As mentioned we do like being the class of misdirection so ideally we’d not lose options there – anyone else want illusionary persona to play the shatter animation? :P

Looking at the patch notes the changes actually looked interesting – obviously for many kit builds the global cooldown is awful but it also means the trait is at about the same power level with 1-4 kits so it has advantages.

Of course, magnetic aura or fire aura for 2 seconds is plain bad.

The super speed buff lasts 2 seconds and definitely does NOT give double speed as it claims. Also the buff is named “Haste” so I assume someone managed to catch it in the quickness nerf. In practice, this means you get 2 seconds of swiftness.

I was looking forward to finding a build I like for engineer

Lafiel.9372:

I’m sure anyone who does it thousands of times and is earning significant amount of money in a short time on a “new recipe” knows this is an exploit… anyone in the right mind in the first place would sense that something is not right.

Okay, I should try to clear something up here: This does not raise red flags for pretty much anyone who pays attention to the market. This is standard procedure. A new thing is just about ALWAYS most profitable immediately after it is introduced and the first ones in capitalise on it, whether it’s new recipes, speculation due to announced changes or whatever. In things like EVE Online, a dev can make a forum post and whoever buys up every bit of stock in the first 5 minutes has doubled their money an hour later and probably doubled again over the following week.

Of course EVE now quite sensibly announces the intended behaviour of manufacturing in advance – so when opportunities like this are found, you can refer to the dev blog… right, not intended behaviour, report it and back away. But here, everything is based on discovery. As we see here, that did not turn out so well because it misled people into believing it was intended.

Based on the recipe being similar to existing ones used for exactly the same purpose, the lack of communication about whether it was actually an exploit and it actually accomplishing a goal that the GW2 team had expressed intent to do (ie. lower difficulty of getting ectos for gear) I think A.Net handled this rather badly overall.

Margins being higher at first is not much of an argument – they’re always much higher when a new recipe is introduced, whether an exploit or not. High volume is standard for people using legitimate recipes for profitable trading. I can see where you are drawing the line – i.e. something of more value (jewels or insignias, not t5 mats. Apparently you don’t include black lion salvage kits, for some silly reason) was intended to be lost more consistently. However given the aforementioned point of making gear more accessible and the time limited nature of this recipe that could easily have been regarded as an intentional change.

Please try communicating better in future. Improved testing such as a public test server would also help.