Guild Wars 2

I run it in my power PU build, and just charge in stealth when I can. Aegis and invisibility helps block any potential interruptions.

Mantra + Mender’s by itself is amazing without any mantra traits. Throw in Harmonious or Restorative or Mastery and it just gets better and better. I’ve been using it a lot in wvw lately and I really love it now.

Offhand sword and torch both don’t help with chasing / CC. I play something very similar but with S/P and GS or sometimes S/P and Scept/Sword. Also Bountiful Interruption instead of iDefense since pistol and GS both have nice interrupt potential.

I find torch stealth is overkill, and reduces my damage too much compared to a more useful offhand — instead of traiting it, I have 10 in Inspiration for Mender’s Purity and use the mantra heal. Four conditions removed every ~12 seconds is pretty amazing.

I run condi duration increase food unless I’m facing heavy condi enemies, at which point I switch to condi reduction —dur increase works great with all the cripples you can put out, and blink + Magic Bullet is always a great way to stop a runner too.

I just want to throw in my support for stat-swappable ascended gear.
No quibbles about the raw stat bump, that ship has sailed.

I just want to run multiple builds on multiple characters with different stat setups, and it’s FAR too much work trying to gear them all up. Getting about eight sets of gear for my three current level 80s, and then potentially many more as I get a couple more alts there is hugely daunting. I haven’t even crafted a single piece for my main yet, though I’m working towards it. (kitten damask!)

Comparatively, if ascended gear could swap stats freely, just getting them fully ascended once would be a worthy goal — something I could do and be assured that I was set for stats. It’d also let me experiment FAR more freely with different off-the-wall build ideas that I’d either never try or be forced to evaluate at a sub-optimal level (probably with rares).

Account-bound ascended works too, but feels weirder to me. I think having each item be owned by one character only, but that ownership not being restrictive makes a lot more sense.

To the pair of DR thieves from [GoT] I was just dueling at Victor’s — nice fight! Pity that warrior had to show up and ruin the fun.

That’s looking a lot nicer!

The Demonic Spirit.3157:

As for Mirror Images , I use them at the start of the fight ( + clone from weapons ) to shatter them before summoning my phantasms

Even a full three-clone shatter isn’t going to do much damage without Mental Torment and Illusionary Persona — and what about after the fight is going on for a while? If you have more than one phantasm out you’d replace it with a clone… there’s far better things you could put there. I’d go with Decoy instead, it’s a shorter-cd stunbreak with a target-drop included. Or Blink – amazing for mobility.

At the very least, go for Knight’s instead of Sentinel. You’ll have plenty of HP from guard stacks, as you said. You’ll be trading vitality for precision, which gets you a lot more crit, while still having good power and toughness.
As far as specific items go, zerk is generally better on hands/feet/shoulders, and other stats on head/chest/legs (you get relatively less crit per stat on those).

EDIT: haven’t checked the numbers on Ascended stuff, so that may have changed.

If you’re going phantasm based, I’d take almost anything else over Mirror Images – that skill is actively counterproductive to keeping phants out. Also, I’d cut 10 points from Illusions (pHaste and Shattered Strength both don’t help you all that much) and put them somewhere else. Inspiration, Chaos, Dueling all have good options you can grab instead.

As far as what’s better goes, it really depends on your situation, but I could see Signet actually being viable in this build.

EDIT: just noticed your gear, full soldier everything is far faaar too tanky, you won’t kill anything like that. Go for some mix of knight/berserker/cavalier, you can retain toughness while still doing good damage.

It only takes a couple seconds and 3.5s to re-trait, so I usually do a full switch every time I go. It’s annoying, but better than running sub-par builds in both places.

If I were to go hybrid, maybe something like 10/20/10/30/0. It’s not too far off from optimal dungeon phantasm builds, but 10 in Chaos gives you some more toughness, regen, and the capability to trait Illusionary Defense, Manipulation cooldowns, Debilitating Dissipation (for clone-death shenanigans), or fall-damage reduction, all of which are amazingly useful in WvW.

30 Inspiration is just awesome; you get a nice chunk of HP, and options of Glamor traits, Focus trait, Mantra healing, condi removal / healing / vigor options from shatter, the newly-buffed (and _awesome) Mender’s Purity, and regen/retal/damage for your phantasms.

Sample builds you could use for dungeons and for wvw roaming (swap some damage for more defense/kiting/healing/condi-clear).

XeRauS.1073:

So you are swapping from sword/focus to sword/pistol? Don’t the swords share the same cd?

Yes, but –
1. the primary use of your main-hand weapon is the autoattack, which has no cd.
2. having Blurred Frenzy available when you need it is pretty useful.

Nothing you could swap to would really be of more benefit, since you want to be melee in most of your fights and sword auto is the best damage you can put out.

CrazyAce.3842:

I haven’t done a lot of testing in terms of raw numbers. I can tell you my character’s relevant stats: Condition 1035, crit chance 57%, power 1380, toughness 1480, health ~17.8k.

What kind of gear are you using? Assuming a carrion/rabid gear mix (my best guess given what I can see) you can have 1800+ condmg with your traits… am I missing something? sample build

mikeew.8607:

crazy nike posted these same builds the other day on twitch. http://www.twitch.tv/nike_dnt/c/3380103
It’s almost like you took em and called them yours. Interesting.

Easy on the accusations there, buddy. 10/20/0/25/15 and 0/30/0/25/15 are blatantly obvious builds that every mesmer worth their salt already knew were going to be the new meta way back when the Dec. 10th patch preview was announced.

yanniell.1236:

I’d like to know that as well. Almost every build for PVE is for DG only, with a lot of reflections and stuff.

I’m currently opening the map, and a good DPS PVE build would be awesome.

The dungeon phantasm build works great open-world too; reflections are amazing against a lot of mobs. Only thing I’d change is run S/F + GS instead of full-melee.

10/20/0/25/15. Empowered Illusions, Phantasmal Fury, Blade Training, Glamor cooldowns, Warden’s Feedback, Compounding Power.
Sword/Sword+Focus, Feedback, Time Warp. Signet of Inspiration for boon-doubling is great. Pick a stun-break of your choice — Blink is great for mobility; Decoy has stealth; Mantra of Concentration has AOE stability.
Swap the focus for a pistol if you don’t need reflection from Warden; switch the Warden trait for Medic’s Feedback or phantasm HP or Restorative Mantras w/ Mantra of Pain spam if your team needs more healing.
Berserker gear, Ruby orbs. Scholar gives a little more personal DPS but the 10% bonus doesn’t work on phantasms so it’s kind of a wash. Ruby is cheap and good.

Yeah, the trouble is signet is best at keeping you ‘topped up’ over time while you wear the enemy down. If you start the fight by using the active, sure you get extra burst but all the passive regen you would be benefiting from is lost. By the time it comes back, you’d likely have lost enough HP to chip damage that you’d just need to activate it again.

I feel like I’d be better off starting by keeping the passive, and saving the active heal for panic moments. Imagine being near death, then suddenly healing up, and being able to drop an iDefender + two damage phantasms immediately, regardless of cd. That should be a tide-turner, and hopefully enough to win you the fight. (If not, you’re boned. :p)

I feel like the cooldown is far too high though. Warrior healing signet has a 20 second untraited cd (16 with trait!), and passively heals for more than ours does with 3 illusions up (which is really very hard to maintain!) … even 25 seconds (20 traited) would be acceptable, 35 is just way too much.

blutstein.2468:

On top of that blade training and Duelists is kind of meh to with IC because the cd Reduction for the illusions don’t stack.

Unless something has changed, the cd reduction does actually stack – only the tooltip is bugged. Try it, you should be getting 12 second Swordsmen with Blade Training + IC.

Jeremlloyd.6837:

I’ll still use the “meta” build for organised group 10/30/0/20/10,

That ‘meta’ build is almost certainly inferior to 0/30/0/25/15 now. Trading Empowered Illusions for both Phantasmal Strength and Illusionist’s Celerity is a no-brainer. You still get 15% damage for your phantasms, and now you get cd reduction for them as well.

@blutstein – if you’re using the /20 for phantasmal haste, I wouldn’t bother – it’s bugged on the vast majority of our phantasms now..

rather get Blade Training or Duelist’s Discipline.

10/20/0/25/15 or 0/30/0/25/15 depending on whether you want the extra damage from mantras.

d’oh, I completely forgot about the IP + RI interaction – that does make it worthwhile. I’d still go with mantra healing and the newly buffed Mender’s Purity over healing signet and Persisting Images, but that makes the 0/10/0/30/30 variant very appealing.

Yes. He has 200 more power, 150 more precision, 15% more crit chance, 12% more damage from mantras, and maybe ~10% more damage due to vulnerability stacks.
All of that adds up to a pretty huge difference.

This is basically why the hardcore dungeon runners are so obsessed with optimal builds and berserker gear. Consider that just a build change made you kill 40% slower, even though your gear is as good; now think about someone who’s gone for tankier gear and a more ‘supportive’ build, you can easily end up taking three times longer to kill things than the ‘optimized’ player.

Only problem is the new heal and the Mender’s buff are directly counter to each other. You’ll never take both of them, just one or the other.

Thieves can be fought by timing your own stealths, dodges, and blurred frenzy to avoid their backstabs. Also, if you have phantasm cooldowns available, feel free to shatter the existing ones so they don’t have easy CnD targets.

Another thing I do is run Debilitating + Crippling Dissipation, which makes them pay every time they stealth off a clone.

Of course, the definitive anti-thief measure is to trade the GS for a Scepter/Sword, which gives you two blocks that will make them hurt themselves more than you every time they try to backstab. >:D

I like your first idea, but I’d just stick to MoR with Mender’s Purity over the healsig. You could save the MoC casts for charging MoH. I worry about being pressured from off-point by a grenade engie (or just up-front by a hammer warrior) who could down all your illusions pretty fast and make the healing signet worthless.

Alternatively, between the two GM Inspiration traits I’d go with Shattered Conditions over Restorative Illusions, since you’re weak to conditions and already have plenty of healing.

Either way, I’m not sure whether going up to iPersona is that valuable – you’re not going for shatter damage, and you can’t hold points during Distortion. Comparatively, sticking them into Chaos provides a lot more defense — 100 toughness, iDefense for 9% more DR. It’s probably a tossup whether that’s better than the 600 from Protected Mantras (PM is more reduction probably, but only while charging). You could even steal 5 more from Illusions and trade pHaste for iMembrane to get some Protection uptime. So final build – 0/20/15/20/15.

Another thought would be to scrap Illusions entirely, and just go 0/20/30/20/0, grabbing the staff trait and Chaotic Interruption, which could be neat: pull someone off the point with Curtain, and they’re immobilized for free! Then drop a Chaos Storm on top of them for even more fun.

This would pretty clearly be overpowered, and it’d reduce the skill involved in my opinion. Right now shattering is a judgement call in terms of when to do it based on what you have out and what your cooldowns are. Allowing for “clone-only” shatters just trivializes that.

If the mesmer has Deceptive Evasion on and dodges when you come for a backstab, you’ll hit the clone since the original target is evading (and you wouldn’t have hit it anyway). Same deal with the Staff blink move. This just follows from the basic game mechanics, nothing really “special” going on, and nothing you can really do about it.

Attacks will hit what’s there — if the original target isn’t anymore, and there’s a clone in its place, the clone eats it.

Qaelyn – interrupts come from Magic Bullet, Illusionary Wave, and Diversion. That’s generally been enough for me to keep 10+ might going in a fight, as long as you time them well.

If I were to play this in sPvP, I’d probably go with Sword/Torch and Scepter/Pistol for the additional defense – GS isn’t needed since chasing is never a concern — and use 20/20/30 instead to get the torch trait. Torch adds tons of stealth, condi-removal, and burning, and Scepter adds Torment and another block which is great against thieves. Use Battle Sigils for more damage or Doom sigils to add yet another condition (also great vs. warriors).

With plenty of extra stealth coming from the torch, I would probably replace Veil with something more useful like Arcane Thievery (more condi-defense and boon-stealing), Null Field (for team support / boon stripping) or Portal (for mobility / backpoint protection / etc.). I’d also use Debilitating Dissipation (or maybe iDefense) instead of BI since there’s less interrupt-potential.

Didn’t they add a Bloodstone Dust variant of the ascended backpiece recipe? You shouldn’t need to fractal at all for that.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

• Why did you choose to go this route rather than a pure power or pure condition?

As far as “why” goes, this is a really interesting article by Sean “Day[⁹]” Plott who some may know from the Starcraft world.

I’d highly recommend reading it entirely, but the main thrust is that the most successful strategies (or builds) aren’t those that maximize their advantage in one area, but rather eke out victories in every possible situation. Applied to gw2, one could say a hybrid build trades some strength in places it’s already effective, in order to shore up capabilities against opponents the “pure” build would be weak to.

Of course, you can always give up too much and end up not being very effective against anything at all, but that’s where the build-crafting gets fun!

The smaller fixes would go a long way towards making commanders more useful.

For guild stuff, how about a guild unlock instead? i.e. don’t restrict commander to being a guild thing, but instead make the “Guild-Only” commander tag be a permission (probably requiring max-rank Politics and Art of War) that guilds can research and then enable for officers of a certain rank? That way guilds can have commanders with guild-only visible tags and guild-relevant features (e.g. all nearby guild-members automatically considered “in your squad”, etc.), without needing to buy the 100g “general” commander pin.

Blink – ALWAYS.
Decoy, Veil, Null Field, Feedback, Portal – situational.

Experienced players, as already mentioned, will know as soon as you move sideways, dodge, start/stop moving, or do anything really except a) stand still, or b) run directly towards them. A glance at your buff bar works too.

Anyone with mesmer play time won’t fall for your clones. That said, there’s a lot of fun little tricks you can use to make it harder to tell, for example – stealth, blink behind them, stand still when you decloak. As long as they don’t spot you coming out of stealth (with the telltale smoky effect) you’re a bit harder to distinguish.

Clones by themselves aren’t very confusing, stealth target-drop alone doesn’t do much either, but if you combine the two in creative ways you can increase your ‘confuse duration’, so to speak.

Decoy is its own entirely separate brand of stealth – it works despite your Revealed status, and has its own timer – it’ll run concurrently with other stealth instead of adding time. All the others are regular stealth.

I’ve been use Sensotix’ stealth shatter in Solo Queue, with a few modifications — I often run Blink+Decoy+MirIm instead of Null Field, and I use Focus+GS for Skyhammer, but otherwise identical, and it’s been working great for me.

Yeah, OH dagger for mesmer is really simple: 4 = Phantasmal Rogue, 5 = Cloak & Dagger type skill that stealths and leaves a clone behind.

Not the rogue! We need that for when we get offhand daggers.

Hey all, just wanted to pop in and say thanks for all the fights, duels, and fun this week!

And /salute to the [HLR] kitten I was running around with in the Sanctum the other night.
http://imgur.com/WM6uXNB

You could already trap enemies in the warden: Cast curtain, cast warden, pull curtain, leap, swap.

And I agree with Jorjeis, the immediate fix is for it to start its first attack cycle instantly, and only move after the first one is done.

For PvE/dungeons/fractals, berserker all the way. Celestial, you give up way too much power and precision, and the extra survival stats / condition damage etc. aren’t worth anything.

In WvW I could see a case for taking SOME celestial parts in a hybrid build, particularly head/chest/legs on armor since those somewhat make up for the damage loss by actually having better crit dmg than zerker, and the added tankiness is actually valuable.

Here’s a hybrid gear setup I made based off of BlackDevil’s thread, which swaps around some of his equipment for Celestial and achieves almost strictly better stats across the board.

If you have an nVidia graphics card their new ShadowPlay thing could be the best option for the recording itself — almost zero performance hit and high-quality compressed video output.

I’m not sure about editing, haven’t done much of that.

Xavi.6591:

You can use an Eternal Cold Potion + Centaur Runes = Perma-Swiftness without wasting your heal.

Does that work mid-combat?

At level 1 they seem pretty useless, yeah. Once you get to 40+ and unlock some traits you’ll start seeing how awesome they are!

Alternatively – watch some youtube videos. Or hop in to PvP / WvW and try fighting a mesmer. You’ll learn.

Hygric – BlackDevil’s build can use a healthy dose of celestial stats; it uses everything except the healing power, and the bonus crit/vit etc. you get compared to his default choices are useful. I posted a sample build somewhere in his thread that uses celestial to boost survival stats a lot while keeping everything else the same, take a look.

Decoy + Blink + Feedback have always been my go-to skills for running around the world.
Mirror Images is more for shatter bursting, and the SoI bonus isn’t really necessary, specially since they buffed base HP for illusions.

Torch instead of pistol gets you more stealth but you give up a TON of damage pressure, which is what you need to secure kills. Losing my Duelist or Swordsman (I run less condi damage, so offhand sword works just as well for me) for the silly iMage would hurt, a lot.

Sure, torch helps a lot in staying alive (although I never have trouble until 3+ show up even without it), but with only one damage phantasm I won’t be killing much either. I find torch a lot more useful for a shatter build — the stealth makes your burst much harder to predict, and the torch explosion adds some nice damage to it as well. Shatter is squishier too, so the extra survivability is definitely useful.

If you’re losing target a lot, you may want to make sure the “Right-click to attack/interact” option is turned OFF. Otherwise right-clicking to move your camera around tends to decide to drop your target half the time.

Also, in general, I find the easiest way to get a rally in the open world is not to mash buttons at all:
1. Spot lowest-hp target
2. Start attacking it
3. When it gets too close, use #2 to stealth away
4. In stealth – DON’T attack, instead channel your heal (if you attack you’ll get revealed)
5. By now your Illusionary Rogue should be ready – Backstab the lowest-hp dude, get a rally.

Finally – you’re a mesmer, what are you doing getting downed by a ranged npc in the first place? Feedback + Focus, and you’re golden.

Alissah.9281:

Just as I said, they’re banned.

• Both phantasm damage traits are banned… You cant make a phantasm build without them.
• Chaotic interruption and comfounding suggestions are banned.
• prismatic undertanding is banned.
• Rabid amulet is banned for Mesmers.
• mass invis is banned.
• torch is banned.
• you cant have both decoy and blink.
• mirror images is banned.
• all elites with higher cd than 90. So basically, Mesmer cant use elites at all.
• and more stuff I cant remember.

This is … astoundingly ridiculous, to say the least. Are any of the other classes burdened with such banlists? No stealth, no damage, no conditions, no elites, no clone-generation — even shatter is crippled without Mirror Images, that’s where our burst comes from! May as well ban mesmers altogether. How sad.

The plight of a might-light mesmer in a tight fight is quite a fright, in spite of delight at the sight of an Arcane respite.

- Why did the Moa cross the road?

Chaos Archangel.5071:

You know what.. thats a good question. Usually when Moa’d I just bail around the nearest corner and use my dodges… but this gives me an idea, we should use the OMFG custom arena and do some moa testing

I think all of our builds could use some moa testing. (Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week, folks.)

More on topic, offensive Moas do a surprising amount of damage and can actually contribute in teamfights if they’re not focused down right away.

Also, I have to share the story of my last fractal run – I morphed a tentacle so as to kill it more easily (yes, this works, and it’s hilarious — I call them Veteran Jade Moa Tentacles) … next thing I know, I’m downed, combat log shows an 8k Peck. :/

That would be kinda neat, and it’d actually make the “Temporal Curtain swiftness doesn’t stack with anything else ever” problem actually justified.

Still, CC is useful as-is in combat; and it doesn’t lock you into a focus like this would. I’d prefer this to just be a straight up rework of Temporal Curtain without needing to trait for it. They could decrease the duration to 8s to compensate, or something.

EDIT: Why game-breaking? Thieves have 50% swift in stealth, engineers get +100% from a utility, elementalists can get it from Air attunement .. there’s nothing inherently game-breaking about faster movement, it just needs to be balanced appropriately.

What I’d love for “alternative” swiftness would be something like “Signet of Inspiration only provides Swiftness or Aegis outside of combat” – since those are the only ones you need when running around. Swiftness to go faster, and Aegis to block hits that would put you in combat. Better option than a new 25% signet imo; you’d get 50% swiftness uptime on average, which can easily be augmented with boon duration / etc.

The other thing they need to do is fix Temporal Curtain… they fixed the Guardian symbol, so clearly it’s not impossible.

Good lord, no. PU is for defense, and Aegis/Prot/Regen are perfect for it. I would hate to lose uptime on those for some swiftness I don’t even want.

themenaceofseventhdimension.2075:

Unless you can burst an opponent Super Fast in the beginning, at the cost of Armor, you are not able to take away their ability to run away.

You need to be more creative. I run a PU power phantasm build, and I have no trouble catching people – GS cripple, pistol stun, blink, illusionary leap/immobilize, traveller runes. Trust me, it’s really hard to escape from that.

If you play a build with weak direct damage, no speed buffs, no iZerker or Magic Bullet or Temporal Curtain, and then expect people to die to your condition pressure, of course they’re going to run away.