Guild Wars 2

Funny thing, I’m trying out that set right now in a hybrid PU build (non Chrono ZOMG!) using Destroyer’s Amulet.

So far it’s been pretty fun. It’s way too early to judge it, but it’s doing surprisingly well for being so far from the meta! (Dueling, Chaos, and Insp.)

Pistol Phantasm + Pistol #5 plus Scepter #3 is a very nice burst, and puts a boat load of Confusion and Bleeds on the target to boot. (With >1000 Condition Damage)

Very glassy, but much like in the old days, you rely on PU/Stealth as your defense.

I’m just not happy with anything I’ve tried that doesn’t involve the Merc Amulet. That is why I’m trying out some oddball specs…as per usual. ;-)

The one Stat that Mesmers can pump up “artificially” (not counting Amulet) in sPvP is Condition Damage, due to Chaotic Transference and SoD.

So this build (Zerker Runes) ends up with:

- 2150 Power (+5% damage from Runes)
- 54% Crit Chance (plus frequent Fury thanks to Dueling!)
- 187% Crit Damage
- 1066 Condition Damage

So as far as damage goes you’re good to go for both Power and Condition damage.

I’m still playing around with whether to get Chrono or Illusions in there instead of Inspiration, but the trade-offs are plentiful and are kinda driving me nuts. (Always hitting a bit of a road-block any choice you make.)

Anyway you slice it, you’re squishy as hell, but thanks to PU you’re also very hard to pin down. That said, average and below Thieves are no problem at all, they melt amazingly fast to this build. (I had forgotten how nice Pistol Phant is against them! Especially one that applies 8-10 stacks of bleeding per attack cycle and does 3.5 – 4.5k damage at the same time!)

Have fun playing what you want! Many build & weapon combinations —while not meta viable-- are quite viable in PuG unranked PvP.

Fay.2357:

Imagine how dull league of legends would be if it only had 10 champions and one single optimal way to build each one. There would be little to no variety in each match, just variations and repetitions of the same tired strategies, the same rotations; nothing interesting, new, or entertaining. That’s GW2 pvp right now.

Hell will freeze over before they successfully make an eSport out of this game as long as the diversity and complexity of pvp builds and fights stays at the bare minimum level. I appreciate the difficulty involved with balancing for multiple viable builds, but if they want their precious esports to succeed, they need to step up their balancing game enormously.

+1 and a resounding Amen to that!

So much potential, but dumbing down the game and killing off build diversity only makes for a dull semi-balanced game in the end.

A fully balanced PvP game is an ideal that simply doesn’t exist, but certainly should be a goal to aspire to. However, never at the cost of fun and diversity in your game!

Especially when the casual riff-raff is likely to be 95% of your revenue stream, and boring them to death simply to make the game more balanced for the top 5%, is plain lunacy from a business point of view!

Balance? Yes!
At the cost of of build diversity! NO!

Paladin is not a bad amulet at all, but it’s simply outclassed by Merc on a Condie build, since Condie doesn’t require Crit Chance. Yes, the damage output is a trade-off for the increased survivability it gives you, but that’s the point of the amulet.

It’s also outclassed by Marauders on glassy DPS builds, obviously, but as messiah said, in the current meta it’s pretty hard to stand on a point without armor. (Especially in PuGs where you can’t rely on your team-mates to save your bacon, in exchange for bringing significantly higher spike damage then Paladins.)

However, there is nothing wasted on the Paladin Amulet for us, and it’s a 4 stat amulet and all the stats are significant, so it’s actually pretty decent if you don’t have unrealistic expectations. It’s not a pure damage amulet, obviously.

You can be Thief bait and do decent spike damage in Marauders, or you can do significantly less spike damage, but gain significant amounts of survivability. It’s simple math and not hard to see that it serves the purpose for which it was designed; a solid trade-off between damage and survivability.

Definitely more support and less damage on that one. ;-)

As usual, you make good comments, but they are also very much focused on being 100% support with little to no damage output. While that certainly may turn out to be more effective overall, I don’t find that playstyle to be appealing to me.

Since I mostly PuG I like to be self-reliant and able to at least hold my own in 1v1s, if not against great players, then at least against the band-wagon riff-raff of any particular profession. (cough Thieves cough)

I want to be both a significant factor in team fights, and be dangerous solo. All my builds aim to find that balance, rather than focusing on one thing entirely at the cost of another.

I believe this build does that quite well. The team support I give between boons, resses, control, and damage output is definitely significant, but I also don’t just draw-out 1v1s or even 2v1s until help arrives.

Thanks for the input though, I will try out some of your suggestions to see if I can find an even better balance.

This is nothing amazing or even new, but in light of the removal of Merc I played around with this for a while and I have to say I like it a lot. I do think it has some interesting choices that give this build a good trade-off between Power damage output, team support (Boon Share), and solid sustain.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAseWnsnBtfiFoBmpBEgiFijq+S70S1MASgF6sBugOD-TJBBQBe4UAAgnAwDLDcw9HAA

At first I tried it with a focus on Wells and thus Well traits, which kinda gives you more team support, but for our Wells to work you really need good team coordination. (Preferably voice communication) In PuGs I still see most people seemingly deliberately jumping out off my Wells more than into them. I also don’t like the long CD on my personal Heal, again not PuG friendly.

Pros:
- Very good sustain (for a Mesmer)
- Solid boon sharing
- Medium Power damage output (considering it’s a tanky support build)
- Solid control (3x AE Interrupts & Slow on Interrupt )
- Fast Rezzing
- good mobility/juking
- Instant on demand Stability & Quickness

Cons:
- medium damage output
- no Portal (easily changed out for WoC though if not PuGing)
- low illusion production, not terribly important, but must be mentioned

Some explanations for the somewhat unique parts of the build:
- Since this build has a lot of AoE Interrupts, I added the Slow-on-interrupt trait and I’m liking it.
- Scraper Runes with Paladin Amulet is quite tanky, especially if you add a bunch of Toughness from Chaos/CA plus of course Inspiration.
- Sigil choice is admittedly odd, probably not optimal, but I like the >60% chance to crit on my own attacks, since this build is largely about damage I do, as opposed to my crappy Phants. The Battle Sigils are just in there for more Might sharing really.
- Well of Calamity just cuz! :P Yeah Portal would be a better team option, but since Paladin Amulet means your damage output is somewhat less than stellar, this can add a bit. (And I like having it for the extra Etheral field for more Protection.) I actually like the damage that WoC and GW add to this tanky build. Again this is probably a PuG thing.
- Master of Manipulation is another arguable point. I like the 12s CD on Mirror and the 4s of Reflection is occasionally very useful and quite funny.
- Illusionary Reversion I kept in there for a little more illusion generation over more self Alacrity. Seize the Moment is also mainly for sharing out viz SoI.
- Medics Feedback is a must for any support oriented build. The amount of rezzes I’m getting off under pressure in this build is very impressive. (Really a combination of good sustain, stability, lots of AE interrupts, the slow on interrupt, and of course MF.)

It’s definitely also just fun to play something other than the meta Condie Shatter build, and I figured I may as well adapt to the Merc Amulet removal now.

Fay.2357:

The stun break occurs instantly. This is why an interrupt will put it on the full cooldown. It works just fine as a stun break, it’s the rest of the skill that’s awful.

Doh! Has it always been like that? I seem to remember when it was first nerfed to 3/4s cast time, prior to the change to Aegis, that I tested it and the Stun didn’t occur until after.

Oh well, sorry for the misinfo then, but you’re right…the rest of the ability is still trash, but good to know that stun-break and stability are instant.

So here goes the next Target of Opportunity for the biggest stealth nerf bomb the Mesmer class has ever endured: Continuum Split

The list of casualties is ever growing, and it won’t do a thing to stop the CS whining. The next target is of course Shatters due to Condition Mesmer, which of course already has MtD nerfed by 50% due to CS.

CS itself has been repeatedly nerfed, to the point where it’s but a shadow of it’s originally hyped design, but maybe that will come after everything else has been nerfed into the ground due to CS. (And in typical Anet fashion without any compensation on prior, misguided nerfs.)

Very sad. Not because of Moa itself mind you, I don’t care a lick about it TBH, but it was one of the few abilities that allows us to compete with some of the ludicrous crap other professions bring that seems to avoid the nerf bat again and again.

You might as well call this a major boost to Necros, Revenants, and Elementalists, because they will see a lot less of one of the only abilities in this game that they actually fear.

Core professions are dead and gone anyway, we all know it was a lie to claim they would remain competitive. It’s counterintuitive to business, so I don’t even blame them for that. The issue for this Moa nerf is really much more that it likely has a very minimal effect on high level team play, but completely kills yet another elite for everyone else.

Once again, a major nerf misses it’s mark..

Yeah but a stun break with a 3/4 second cast time is plainly absurd. Never mind that the rest of the ability is meh anyway you slice it, but that cast time just kills it dead.

It simply can’t compete as a stun break utility with other ones we have, and brings very little otherwise.

By definition of what a stun break is, it has to be short casting or instant…otherwise it simply won’t work when you need it the most.

All of this QQing about Condie Shatter seems to forget that the reason we are here is:

1) Power Shatter was nerfed out of the meta

2) Bunker was nerfed out of the meta

So obviously the correct thing to do now is also nerf Condi Shatter out of the meta too! lol! So next season Mesmers get to do nothing but Moa & Portal…oh wait! No! The cry babies want to nerf those too!

Tell you what, I think we should just delete Mesmers and let y’all get on with your skillful selves playing this game like the pros you know you are.

Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at my fellow gamers on these forums. Last season it was all that QQing about Bunker Mesmers, how it was cancer, how it was ruining the game, “wah, cry, mommy help!”

So mommy helped. And no she didn’t fix broken parts of the class to make another build type more viable, she just destroyed yet another build option entirely. So why do we even have trait lines in this game, if clearly the games’ players can’t handle having more than 1 viable build per profession?

Now it’s “WAH! WAH! MOMMY!” again… sigh

“No mommy I don’t want to change my preferred professions build to counter Condie Mesmers, I would just rather cry about it and have mommy fix the world for me so I can feel warm and cozy pressing 111111 for teh winz on muh tief!”

/vomit

Excellent video and game play. GG!

It’s single target, long CD, and it’s numerous counters make it very unreliable.

In 1v1 it is slightly OPd, but it’s far from the only Elite in the game that is. As someone else alluded to, this game is not balanced on duels and 1v1. Even in 1v1 a skilled opponent can usually wear down the Moa with kiting/LoSing, and simply resetting the fight with their own Elite or other abilities.

In a group setting it can also be deadly for sure, and yes it often is a fight changer, but a properly cooperating team can counter it very often. In turn, even if you manage to land it, the ability itself provides a pretty powerful escape tool. You know, we Mesmers get Moa’d too, but I never seem to hear Mesmers complain about it. I easily live through 50-60% of my Moas and manage to escape unscathed to return a few seconds later. (That on top of an easily 33% or higher failure rate, and it’s long CD, gives you an accurate picture of how balanced Moa really is.)

Short version:

“QQ more, L2P, whambualance, etc. "

It’s been around since the beginning, and it’s likely here to stay. (Though you won’t see me leading the QQ train if they adjust it…as long as they they also make Mesmers more viable in other matters, as Moa is no small part of what keeps us in the meta right now.)

Chorazin.4107:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Viability isn’t a crime, despite popular belief XD.

But necessity is, how many pro teams played a chrono? If the answer is a few teams slotted them in as an option you have nothing to worry about.

If the answer is every team had a chronophantasma then you have problems. This goes for all classes, not just mesmer.

There needs to be class and build diversity within the format no? Who wants to watch the same classes with the exact same spec/amulet every match on each side?

The problem with this is that it has absolutely ZERO to do with the current Condie meta, but rather it’s Portal & Moa that gets them that slot.

Aside from that, your logic is completely silly. It means we should nerf every other class in the meta, simply for being in the meta, and quite frankly they’re ALL in line before Mesmers, because we just ate a round of nerfs that destroyed our last two meta builds. One for each season. I guess that makes sense to a Mesmer hater, to obliterate one viable Mesmer build every season?

This whole thread is silly. The condition output of Mesmer is not really any better now than it has been for many months, even post HoT. I quite venture to say before the MtD nerf it was actually stronger even pre-HoT, and of course since HoT no one complained about basically the exact same Condition pressure potential until both Power Shatter and Bunker were nerfed out of existence.

Now that you tools have run out of things to complain about, and your usual pleas for nerfing Moa and Portal continue to fall on deaf ears, you pick a new target: Condition Shatter! lol!

Let’s just delete Mesmers so you can enjoy the game more!

Lamers…

Agreed. Staff is and has been rather lackluster lately, especially w/o Chaos. The mobility/tricks/juking will always be one of it’s strengths, no doubt, but aside from that the rest is pretty meh or on too long of a CD for what it does. (#4 & #5)

I played a fair bit of Sc/Sw & Sw/Sh in S2 as well, ever since the Merc amulet was available the OH Sword has been tempting to make more use of that Power.

Now with the reduced CD on the block, and especially the aftercast improvements making it easier to land the counter, it’s another small but welcome step to make the OH Sword a bit more competitive.

I personally couldn’t see me playing this with Viper though, it’s just too darn squishy. In roaming this would be awesome, as in 1v1 or maybe even 2v1 at times, I can see that all the blocks and BF are actually a significant amount of defense, but in point-based PvP you just have to get into the thick of things where especially the single blocks do virtually nothing to keep you alive (on the contrary!), and I always melt way too fast with the 16k HPs and no added Toughness. (As even BF and the channeled blocks often completely fail to keep you alive vs. all the unblockables, Retaliation, etc.)

Just my 2 cents, but I’m not half the player you are, so that’s why it probably will work better for you than me! (The damage is insane though. I could see a similar setup being very effective in WvW roaming.)

Xyonon.3987:

I’d rather see a lower cd and a nice cast time so one can react like you can against gravity well.

Only if they then cut the CD in half or more. If you make it too easy to avoid, then clearly the CD is ridiculously long. It’s already an unreliable tool in most cases, as in 1v1 it’s already pretty easy to see it coming, and in group fights you have so much random stuff denying it that it’s barely…ever so barely…viable in the current meta.

How can I say that? Almost no one was using it even post HoT/CS before Mesmers were nerfed so hard they were basically forced to start using it regardless of its unreliability and long CD. It’s always been a potential fight changer, and has had the CS synergy for many months now, but was only recently “re-discovered” for the current meta.

I’m no negative Nancy when saying that even a relatively minor nerf to Moa will most likely result in it going back to being underused just as it was for years before the current meta. (If for no other reason than the fact that both GW and TW are also pretty strong Elites, but are far more reliable than Moa.) The main reason why Mesmers are now running Moa is that it provides us —and our teams-- a strong (albeit unreliable) counter to various clearly OPd post HoT Elite professions that for some unknown reason Anet won’t nerf down to earth.

Also, it is CS that makes Moa viable in the first place! The CD is otherwise way too long for it’s lacking reliability, which is proven by the fact that prior to CS/HoT it was a very underused Elite compared to even MI. (Does anyone even use that anymore? Oh how times a change!)

Look we were already hit harder by a post HoT/Elites nerf-bat then anyone else, and with both Alacrity and Wells being pretty much a non-factor in PvP anymore, the really only nice thing left in our “Elite” Chronomancy is CS, passive speed, and Chronophants.

When Chronomancy was first revealed and later patched in, I was the first to say that CS needed to exclude our Elites. It’s clearly a balance issue. The problem is, that in good ole Anet fashion they have nerfed literally everything else in Chronomancy that was meaningful, so if they now nerf CS the Chrono line is for all practical purposes a dead trait line.

Unlike almost everyone else’s Elites, ours provides no DPS boosts (aka power creep), aside from using CS to double-up on shatters. Which as the current meta proves, mostly is useful for Condition builds. (Which promptly resulted in the MtD gutting, that was again a misguided/misplaced nerf, because if CS hadn’t existed, the MtD nerf would never have happened. Ring around the rosey, pocket full of bad traits/utilities.)

Bah, nvm….

Still a bad suggestion. That would merely add Moa to the long list of useless Mesmer utilities. It would be badly outperformed by both TW and GW.

Moa has been a signature ability of the Mesmer from day 1, and almost no one was using it even post HoT & CS for many weeks, until Power Mesmer was nerfed literally into near extinction. Suddenly everyone is using Moa again for the simple reason that —-even though it is hugely unreliable and on a very long CD-- it does bring something meaningful to a team fight when it does land.

Personally, I think if we would have seen a Moa nerf it would have been done with the recent patch. It would require huge improvements to other Mesmer builds to ensure you’re not nerfing Mesmers out of the meta entirely. We have one viable team build at the moment, and Moa is no small part of what makes it viable. By the looks of that patch, they’re not really out to destroy builds or make new ones viable, and thus I think they will not nerf Moa. (At least not significantly.)

So as Mesmers have said since the very beginning, get over it, that’s Moa…always been there and it’s always been strong when it does land. QQ more, L2P, tyvm, kk thx bai!

Sounds very nice for the current Mesmer meta builds, but sadly appears to completely ignore all other build types that were nerfed almost entirely out of existence. Build diversity is a huge problem for us ATM, but it looks like Anet is OK with that.

I do think Scepter finally got the “overhaul” we were promised last season, this is really meaty stuff that completely changes how the Scepter feels and performs. I’m very excited to see it in action. The fact that the final attack is no longer a projectile is a huge boon, not to mention all the reductions to those annoying after casts.

While it looks to be primarily a “nice little boost” to the existing meta Merc condie shatter build, who knows maybe a Power —or more Power-heavy at least-- variant will emerge. Unlikely, but you never know, as it really does look like some pretty big changes.

As for nerfs to Moa and/or Portal, clearly that would require Anet to completely overhaul the entire profession; not gonna happen anytime soon IMO. Even if it did, it will come at the same time as huge buffs to Power Shatter that will likely leave the Mesmer-haters crying rivers of tears. So be careful what you ask for…

Bah you young’uns talking about nostalgia!

Back in UO beta we had to walk uphill, in the snow, BOTH ways!

Corp Por!
Corp Por!
Corp Por!

Now that’s nostalgia for ya! UO Dreadlord days, 7x Tank Mage vs. 7x DEXer!

Pling! Pling! Pling!

26ms ping to Great Lakes on a Cable Modem at a time when the vast majority of victi…—err, I mean other players— were on like 28.8k modems at best.

All this balance talk! bah!

Balance is for the weak! ;-)

Natural selection all the way baby!

Lost Times CD is only half the issue, it was double-nerfed into uselessness by requiring 5 crits instead of 3. The person behind that nerf clearly didn’t have a strong grasp of basic math, nor an iota of a clue for what a GM in an Elite line should be like, especially considering what LT has to compete with.

The only reason to make it take 5 crits instead of 3 would be fast attacks, which of course are already nerfed by the CD. It’s a typical double-whammy Anet nerf taking an ability from decent to completely unused. I mean, it’s a Slow…a 2s single-target Slow….really Anet?

It’s terrible. Stay away from it IMO. Chronophantasm is hugely powerful, and so is StM.

^ I hear ya, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that LB was playing off the completely irrational nostalgia we have for UO.

They’re trying to sell you on the idea that they can create a perfect sandbox game for both safe play (RPing), and hardcore PvP (and PKing), but after so many years and so many titles later, I’m just too jaded to believe you can combine the two.

You can create a sandbox for the wolves and one for the sheep, but mixing the two inevitably leads to the wolves killing off the sheep and being left with a game full of wolves again. That is what UO was, and it was amazing, but these days you’ll never lure the sheep into a game that isn’t 100% consensual. The market just offers them so many other safe places.

I always found it a bit ironic that people always say they want epic PvP battles in an MMO, but there was nothing more epic than being an anti-PK in a 100% open sandbox game overrun by PKs, thieves, cheats, liars, and scammers. It was beautiful! God I miss those days. Real struggle, real emotions, tangible good and evil all around you.

Sorry, I digress….

I agree. Condie meta is overstating it a bit. It is fairly balanced, although Necros are easily averaging 3-4 per game, closer to 4 IMO. I too have been in games with 6 Necros more then once, and I can’t recall having had that with any other profession in the last several weeks. (Most I’ve seen aside from Necros is one game with 5 Thieves, and another with 5 DHs…but 5 Necros is almost common, 4 is like the new normal.)

I do think we might see a Condie meta evolve if Anet does to other “OPd” elites what they did to Chrono. Burn Guardian, Zerker, and Engie are very powerful, but they’re simply outclassed by Power/hybrid variants in the case of DH & Scrapper.

^ That is a point that I hope Anet is aware of. This is also a significant difference from previous metas where arguably Condie Shatter was actually stronger (pre-MtD nerf), and was still not considered OPd. (Probably in part because the meta was Power at the time.)

I too have noticed that in matches with other Condie damage dealers, we synergize very well. We can simply keep the Condies coming, making Cleansing difficult for all but organized teams. This makes both our and others conditions more effective, because we provide a lot of cover conditions for classes that can Condie-burst far better then we can.

For example, compared to playing a “Burn <insert profession>” I hardly ever see Confusion or Torment hitting for over 1k, much less the 2-3k (or more!) that you often see coming from Burn-oriented builds. (Whom in turn often lack access to multiple damaging conditions.)

BrotherBelial.3094:

That’s a spot of bad luck, quite a few close games there.

Agreed. When you have that many really close matches, you can most likely simply analyze a couple of things in your own game-play and easily turn half of those close calls into victories.

You can not with a straight face call poor matchmaking when half the games in a 10 game losing streak are literally very close. Losing by <100pts means you could have won…nay, should have won.

Don’t blame anyone else but yourself. A <100pt loss means that in at least half of such games there are things you could have done better to win the game for your team. (aka. carry!)

But why was average wait time removed?

For a few days it really was a lot faster, but I have to agree with OP, it seems about the same as always now.

Oh I agree with you on that. Fundamentally, it is always considered better practice to avoid power creep as much as possible in an MMO, and thus it’s better to make a dozen needed nerfs to stuff that obviously has experienced massive power creep, then to bring up the stuff that didn’t get the creep.

However, there comes the ugly truth of a for-profit business. Peeing off a bunch of customers with a bunch of nerfs is politically harder to pull off without major losses, then making even more people happy by boosting stuff to bring it up. (Creating more power creep)

^ Or L2P your part!? It’s really tomatos tomahtoes.

The truth lies probably somewhere in between the extremes, so I’d say we’re pretty balanced with each other and that’s what my experiences have been as well. The riff-raff gets taken out like the trash with Condie Shatter. If all they do is mindlessly spam, and get caught off guard just when you lay a shatter combo on them, they melt before your eyes so fast that I know why they’re here to whine about Mesmers.

However, you run into a thief player who has as much time on his thief as I do on my Mesmer, and it’s a totally different story. I lose plenty to good Thieves, often embarrassing defeats too where it seemed like I couldn’t get them below 75% health. Some can also kill you so fast that anything short of an F4 will 100-0 you in the blink of an eye. The Merc Condie/Shatter is simply not bunker, if you think it is, a good Thief will show you why it isn’t.

Some days you get the Bear, and some days the Bear gets you. Seems quite balanced to me. It’s sadly typical though of FoTM Thieves to assume that any class that can beat them is OPd, and cry for nerfs on a MB rather than L2P.

Don’t feed the trolls.

I disagree about CS/F5 not being able to be balanced. I said from the start that it should not affect Elites. I couldn’t believe they ever let it go live with affecting Elites. It makes very little sense.

Look at Moa, the whine parade has started over a skill that has been the same for a very long time. Hardly anyone cared about this Elite before! Yeah some newbs whined but the long CD on a high failure rate seemed to keep most of the QQing to a minimum. Now with F5, Moa is bound to get nerfed, then people will whine about TW and/or GW, both of which area nearly as strong as Moa overall. (Far more reliable, and very impactful in team fights.) So what then, these get nerfed too before Anet finally gets it right and nerfs CS, and then leaves the now neutered Elites as they are?

That’s how it usually goes with Anet. Very sad to watch this happen over and over again.

Without Elites in the picture, F5 should also get a longer base duration, and longer added duration from illusions. It should not only be something to double-up a few skills on, but a means of juking, causing confusion, misdirection, etc. This is how it was initially intended and sold to us, before it got gutted down to a “double up on Elites and some change” kinda skill.

Without Elites in the picture, you can work on it in other ways to promote skillful play, and not “Shatter n’ Spam!” The Rift needs to be strong enough to withstand some pressure though, especially incidental/splash damage in group fights.

It could be a really cool Mesmerish skill, if they just got back to the roots of it.

And to top it off, now that they’ve nerfed Alacrity into irrelevance in PvP, killed off the Power Shatter Mesmer (not to mention Bunker), they need to probably think of ways to make Chrono competitive to other Elites in the damage creep department. ( Or preferably nerf the others down, but that’s a lotta nerfs, QQing, etc. Might be easier to bring the 2-3 lacking Elites up to par.)

Messiah, I have to ask for some advice on dealing with Trap DH. I always see people say they’re no big deal, but for me personally I have to say it’s one of the most annoying classes to me ATM. If they +1 it’s just instant death for me, and I have found very little effective counters. It seems that even combining all of the following: Dodges, F4, BF (when Sword), and Shield #5 and Chaos Armor up, it doesn’t seem to matter I just melt. I try to blink out, I take damage and get pulled back in for more damage. I often seem to take damage right through BF and even F4!? (Maybe it’s lag I dunno.)

Yeah OK sometimes I can avoid some of that of course, but I’ve seen so many people claim you can just dodge out of the traps and that they’re easy to avoid, but the CD is so low that it doesn’t matter if I manage to barely limp through 1 set of traps, a few seconds later I eat the next round. (And it’s not like the damage output and sustain of the DH is poor in between traps!) That just doesn’t seem to work for me. Worst is if I do manage to get out after losing 75% of my HPs almost instantly, I get shot in the back for 6k with TS.

I do kill them 1v1 most of the time, but it takes absolutely perfect play on my part. One single mistake and I’m dead. In turn the DH seems like he can make mistake after mistake, and not really get punished for it. It usually takes a fairly long time to kill them, and that means having to survive at least 2-3 Trap dumps.

A bit of a QQ here, but DH is pretty annoying right now for soloQ, especially as I said in a +1 scenario. It’s usually instant death before I can do much more than press a single button, which is ofc F4 or Blink, but even that never seems to buy me enough of a breather to survive more than 2-3 seconds blowing all me defensives.

Any tips/tricks?

messiah.1908:

. in the past no one beside me (probably) play condi shatter as power shatter just was better choise and vitality amulet which gave more sustain versus condition.

Not true! I’ve been playing Condie Shatter for a long time, but I swapped between builds a lot as I was never really satisfied with any of them. I just didn’t play it nearly as well as you did…nor do I now for that matter. ;-)

I never liked glassy Power Shatter, I’m too old/slow/whatever to enjoy it…well and without support from a team, it was always a pretty hard spec to play successfully. So I always tried odd variants of power and condition builds, and ever since MtD gave 2x Torment, I loved Condie Shatter…even if it wasn’t meta.

Yeah I tried Sword for a few rounds and quickly returned to Scepter. In order to keep that Condie pressure coming between shatter vs. professions that can cleans a lot. In 1v1 this is what allows me to put some hurt on Eles, Revs, and Scrappers. The damage output in especially 1v1 drops substantially with Sword.

Also the Illusions GM major becomes a bit iffy with Sword. You don’t have enough Blind to really make Ineptitude perform well, and MoF is just plain weak. The only decent part of MoF is the Cripple on F2 adding a cover condition, and the fact that making F3 AoE also makes the Confusion & Torment hit AoE. The long CD unfortunately makes this a very minor boon.

lol, I can die a happy man now, cuz I’ve definitely seen it all! More Mesmer nerf cries! Hilarious.

Hm, lemme see, currently we have a team make up consisting of nearly 50% Necros. I’m sure that’s because they’re worse than Mesmers, and because Mesmers are obviously easier to play too! Sound logic!

So after Necro, Rambo Revenant, and the surely perfectly balanced DH & Scrapper, we still tend to see at least as many Thieves, Eles, and even Rangers as Mesmers, quite probably more actually.

So yeah that Condie Shatter Mesmer is squarely in the bottom 50% of most popular classes, but surely that’s because it’s simply too easy to play and grossly OPd on top! No one would want to play that combination in competitive PvP, now would they?

You guys are almost kinda cute when you get in a sewing circle, and share your creative and highly unbiased balance ideas amongst each other like this. What’s next up, Warrior nerfs? Ranger nerfs? lol!

Cry me a river about Moa. The only reason Mesmers are using it now is because their offense has literally been nerfed into the ground. It was hardly even used for the years that it’s stayed exactly the same as it is now, even post HoT/CS prior to the last round of crippling Mesmer nerfs. With Alacrity having literally been nerfed completely out of PvP, you kinda have to laugh at the notion of nerfing CS/F5!

What exactly is left of Mesmers Elite spec after that? So everyone else gets massive power-creep, and Mesmers got zilch! Zero! A Chrono Power Shatter Mesmer does actually less damage than a core Shatter Mesmer! Now who else can say that about their Elite spec? (Then there was that bit about “compensation” for getting an OH weapon…wow, be still my beating heart! Some compensation…NERFED!)

Never mind the numerous hard CC abilities on classes that can actually deliver huge spike damage on top, no we should nerf Mesmers Moa that allows you to move, dodge, gives you an escape ability, and actually allows you to attack doing quite significant damage. Again, amazing balancing logic in that…

You guys are a hoot. Play it, record it, and show us how good that Mesmer is working out for you. No! No! I know you’re going to keep playing your Necros, and that’s why we gonna keep bringing Moa…because it’s the only effective counter we have. I’m sure it’s frustrating being the #1 Moa target, but you know, that’s what you get for being cancer to the current meta. You are the priority target, so it’s no surprise that you hate Moa. :P

Can confirm same bug last night. After I had 4 losses in a row in soloQ, we finally turned around a Conquest game we were losing badly most of the match. To tell you how bad it was, my computer hard froze and it took easily 3 minutes to get back into the game after a reboot. When I came back I was still 2nd highest score on my team! (Other team was way ahead of us.)

While my team was defending Lord, I killed a Thief over a champion spawn, spawned champion & doorbreakers, ran to enemy inner which was undefended, and took down their door. At this point, the one other highest score player (Necro) realized our chance, and came to help me after wiping their team at our Lord.

Us two plus Champ took their lord and won the game with only seconds left on the timer, and their team beating on our Lord again as well. It was one of the coolest games I’ve had, period.

So what do I get for this amazing win against all the odds!? Nothing. No pip. I too figured it might be lag and logged out for the night. Logged in today, and still no pip and the game is still not showing in my history.

Bugs like this are especially frustrating when you’re already trying to get out of that amber rank soloQ, constantly getting teamed with scrubs facing far superior enemies. Easily means 3-4 more games I have to play to re-earn that bugged pip.

Yeah mostly just +1 to Pyro & Messiahs remarks, but I think OP doesn’t realize just how much continuous Condie pressure the build puts out. Yeah it’s not as burst-condition as other Condition professions, but it just keeps on coming. You can cleanse, cleanse, cleanse, all you want, it won’t matter…more is coming.

I am averaging 350-450k damage per match, sometimes over 600k. That is no damage slouch! (And it’s usually about 2:1 Condie to Direct damage, which is also quite a different story than the older pure Condie Shatter builds that were closer to 4:1.)

I have to make an admission that isn’t easy to make, as I’m not a rabid Helseth fanboi, but since watching his remarks on “carrying” your teams I realized how important Portal actually is even in PuG matches with a crappy team. Portal is one of the ways that you are able to carry a team, it is a gigantic part of our mobility! (Moa is another hugely impactful ability, allowing us to sometimes carry bad teams!)

I have shunned both Moa and Portal for YEARS. I always relegated especially Portal as something that only works for an organized team, and I always soloQ.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Just playing a few days now with Portal I’m starting to learn it’s ins and outs, and finally accept that it’s not only a game-changing utility, but also a great personal mobility/escape/reset tool. (Popping in/out of fights to heal up in between and get back in is pretty priceless.)

Moa is similar. I hated it’s failure rate and long CD, but really since HoT it’s become much more bearable. Being a Signet it now has a decent passive, and using F5 you can avoid much of the long CD and slightly diminish the impact of a failed Moa.

Besides, there is little that is more satisfying them dropping Moa on these new EZ mode FoTM professions/builds, and watching them squirm…and die…cuz when they squirm with 14 stacks of Torment on them, unable to cleanse, they die! (Or even funnier are the ones that remember the “just Peck the Mesmer!” from previous Power Mesmer metas, and fail to realize they have 10+ stacks of Confusion on them on top of that Torment. ;-) )

Unless you’re talking top-tier competitive team PvP, Mesmers are not “hardly playable” IMO. Yeah we’re not among the top 3-4 professions, but we’re no slouches either. The main problem is we’ve been reduced to pretty much 1 strong build (Condie Shatter), and maybe 1-2 somewhat functional power builds, and of course our Utilities continue to carry us (Portal & Moa/GW).

They overnerfed Bunker for sure, and didn’t give compensation to Power Shatter, which is now woefully inadequate post-HoT as compared to the power-creep most other professions have enjoyed.

They then also overnerfed Alacrity and made boon-sharing a dangerous proposition by over-buffing Necros.

The focus on boosting the interrupt playstyle for Mesmers has not paid off at all, as the rewards still don’t make up for the rare and totally random occurrences, not to mention handing out Stability like Candy, killing the whole idea anyway. (Even with 4x Confusion, Mistrust is still terrible for a GM. In fact, it might be almost “OK” if it wasn’t stuck in the Dueling line. You can’t make a competitive Condie build w/o Illusions, and thus there is no room for Dueling unless you leave giant loopholes in your build.)

It’s all of these (and more) combined that have killed off various semi-decent builds we had before HoT.

I am frustrated about all of that too, but I can not claim -with a straight face- that my Condie Shatter Mesmer is weak or unable to compete. High mobility, medium defense, medium-high offense (depending on opponent), and the “old faithful” killer game-changer utilities with Moa and Portal.

Aereniel.7356:

Please stop making sense immediately. I’m 97.8% sure the forum rules stipulate that any and all discussion on the PvP seasons should only include passive-aggressive victim mentality or tin foil hat match making algorithm diatribes. You’ll get infracted if you start bringing common sense in here.

lol! +1

So true…

Your image is definitely funny and got a laugh out of me. However, you should thank him for making it viewed by far more people then without his comments about it! (No such thing as bad publicity!) Don’t take it personal, I think he is just sick of all the whining and saw your image as a culmination of all that he disagrees with on the subject.

Secondly, on carrying. Of course there are limits! He admits as much, but those limits are not nearly as obvious as poor/average players like to make them out to be. The point of his post is to show that we all have to deal with poor match-ups, and that you can drastically improve both your experience and your ranking by keeping a positive and constructive mindset and improving on your own skill, rather then giving up and blaming the system. (The same system everyone else is playing in too!)

For now at least, AI will never produce accurate match-ups! Even when/if it did, many people are way too subjective to ever agree with it, and would still always pee and moan about all other factors except for the one closest to home. It gets worse when these players then get together on a public forum and spread their negativity, ending in a feedback loop of a defeatist attitude. These empowers the whiner to demand fixes to the system, despite having very little evidence and experience to base their claims on. (Hunches and hyperbole do not make good evidence!)

We’ve all seen this happen countless times in profession balance, where “mob rule” has caused our favorite build/profession to be nerfed into the ground. We all get mad about this when it happens to us, but we all have a hard time admitting that we may have played a similar part in a nerf of another class.

All I know is that when I was watching Helseth’s comments on carrying, that I saw a lot of myself in some of the poor play examples he pointed out. How many times our ego has us staying in a 1v1 fight that hurts our team, or how simply “bad habits” have us doing silly things that we never bothered to analyze and think fully through. In soloQ you often just kinda play mindlessly. You expect the worst of your team, and should, but then turn around and also do some pretty stupid/selfish things, and still blame your bad team for losing in the end.

No one is saying you will turn around one of those ridiculous blow-outs, but look at your losing streaks again —objectively-- and see how many of those games did end up with 300+ points on your team. Helseth is right in saying you quite probably could have won those games if YOU played to your fullest potential. You will find that at least 2-4 games will not have been blow-outs, and if you could improve enough to turn some/all of those into wins you will then greatly improve the odds that you’ll never see a long streak of losses.

I dunno, I think he’s usually spot on. Yeah he’s rough around the edges and arrogant, but that’s part of becoming a semi-celeb in a testosterone driven environment that competitive PvP generally is. I don’t take that seriously, and I doubt he does as well. Instead I look at what I can learn from him, and quite frankly that’s a whole lot despite having played >6000 matches on my Mesmer and having mained him since beta. (Proving that time played has absolutely no relation to skill level! )

Using agile development methods, TDD/BDD, Git, CI, and having a test server(s) and a QA team in no way guarantees that you will not introduce new bugs when fixing existing ones. That is the ideal you strive for, but any developer knows that this idea is simply a function of time and costs. Costs and time will grow exponentially the closer you come to realizing that bug-free software development dream.

There are plenty of criticisms I have of Anet, but (obviously) without ever having seen it, I personally don’t feel they have a glaringly bugged or rigid code-base. I have much more of a beef with the terrible decision making process that leads to over buffing and/or over-nerfing of things, which can never amount to a balanced system.

Great stuff. Awesome music! Keep it coming!

You gotta be joking! There is not one single iota of condescension in what messiah said!

He’s probably one of the nicest people on this board as far as build/video critique goes. He’s always constructive and gives genuine advice based on his own vast opinions/experiences on the Condition Shatter Mesmer.

That is exactly what I saw when I read his reply in this thread. It gave very simple and quite objectively formed advice. I mean it’s 3 lines, and no lol, newb, l2p, etc! Just honest advice for both what makes this video better (quality), and what might improve your play (holding F3 for the burst after cleanses are down, refrain from mindless spamming shatters).

Some people man…if you’re that sensitive, then don’t post in a public forum IMO.

No offense, but this build is quite simply woefully outdated. That doesn’t mean it’s completely ineffective or even bad, but it’s just a bit disingenuous to ignore the fact that a similar build using Chrono is just far better off.

- Rabid Amulet is bad as it leaves you with too low HPs in this high burst meta.
- Travelers Runes? Really? This alone almost makes Chrono worth it.
- Dueling becomes a requirement again, but Endurance regen has been nerfed heavily. Wasting dodges to produce Clones is also questionable at this point.

Not to mention you lack F5 Shatter, which is an absolute staple of Condie Shatter builds. Being able to double-up on your shatters is simply huge.

Staff is not bad, I agree. You can just do a lot better in a Chrono/Insp/Ill Condie Shatter build using Merc Amulet and a superior Runeset such as Torment, or Scavenging…

^ Good point. Being without Illusions, which a Chrono Power Shatter kinda is forced to, means giving up a lot of CD goodness. Longer Shatter CDs, and longer Phantasm CDs, which of course synergizes with Chrono Phants.

That synergy between PoM and CP is a large part of what makes the Condie Shatter decently effective. It’s provides a constant stream of multi-illusion shatters to feed MtD.

I agree that it likely has to do a lot with changes in the environment, aka. The Meta.

Part of that is definitely the amulets. Before the most recent Amulet changes, the choice of Amulets for Condie Mesmer were plain terrible. Although we received a bunch of new ones, all of them were either total Glass or only provided Toughness. Without enough HPs, Toughness is pretty useless, especially since the burst of the previous meta was also a tad higher then it is now, and much higher then pre-HoT as we all know.

I also agree that it’s “a thing” because the other builds have simply become ineffective in this current meta. Either it’s clear that another profession can do the same job, only much better (Power Shatter), or it got plain nerfed into oblivion (Bunker).

There are many factors that come together to form a meta.

Laxander, but what you described before was clearly a L2P issue.

You then turn around and describe something completely different, which quite frankly and ironically sounds a lot like fighting a Thief. ;-) (Just let Block == Evade, and instead of Conditions it’s rather strong DD. That combination of burst plus sustained damage, stealth, and high mobility also makes a Thief a serious threat.)

In short, you sounded a lot like you were QQing, when what you describe could easily be posted on the Thief forum with minor adjustments. (And it would be a QQ there too, and I’d get a L2P remark as well…for good reason.)

Yeah GT on iWarden is something I’ve often thought about. Then shorten CD to compensate a bit for it not being able to move, or better yet compensate with a stronger attack. Could just add 1x Confusion for 3s for each attack. That would be completely negligible in PvE and certainly not imbalancing in PvP either. Of course it would still need significantly beefed up sustain for being a purely melee range Phantasm.

Yeah Rogue would be awesome, but it’s not Condition oriented and that would mean no Condition Phantasm at all.

They could just finally fix the silly iMage instead to not kitten so much. ;-) Anet simply refuses to acknowledge that the slow projectile attacks need to at least have a big bang in exchange for their poor performance/reliability. The iWarlock at least kinda does, though compared to iZerker it’s clearly inferior in every possible aspect.

iMage needs projectile speed increased by 33%, and 3x Burn for 3s. Then TP also gets 3x Burn for 3s and you have yourself a very powerful and flexible weapon that is useful for all build types and is competitive to Shield.

OH Sword should grant 1s Blurr after you successfully block with #4. This would improve a huge issue with this ability, as you often end up taking a ton of damage between the time that you block a single attack, and counter-attack & summon. It defeats the purpose of a counter attack when you have to take more damage then it delivers. This would also give the OH Sword the defense it needs to be competitive with other OHs. (We simply need some defense to make a viable OH in my opinion.) The iSwordsman really only needs a bit longer range on the leap (and/or like 10s Swiftness on summon), and more HPs & Toughness for being a melee range Phantasm.

Then there is the OH Focus. Wow, really? How could this remain so bad for so long? Why was it nerfed? lol! The iWarden also needs greatly improved sustain for being, optimally at least, placed in the center of multiple opponents! It’s attack cycle should also be shortened, or damage boosted. (And attack rate greatly improved to acknowledge the severe limitations this phantasm has!)

Into the Void simply needs a reliable defensive component for the Mesmer. Maybe you gain a few seconds of Protection when popping it. And the Curtain could use slight improvements too.

It would require a complete overhaul of the mechanics. In theory I agree it would probably be better to have something like 1 Phantasm slot, and 3 Clone slots. Then re-balance the Phants around that in damage output, attack rate, CD, and sustain.

In fact Phantasms should probably be invulnerable, but only live as long as the target they are summoned on as is already the case. That way they are a dependable source of damage for all build types, with unique “pet” mechanics that fits the Mesmer profession. Clones would be entirely about obfuscation for “defense”, and shatters for offense. They should do little to no damage, no utility, and no CC/conditions. (At most some bleeds, Vulnerability….only weak stuff.)

Then it’s much easier to balance around these restrictions.

None of that will happen at this point though…too much work.

Agreed. The Merc amulet did help a good bit, as the other Condie oriented Amulets are plain bad now IMO. Without at least some Vit & Toughness, it’s really hard to enjoy a condition Mesmer build.

I shouldn’t say this out loud, the Merc Amulet will probably be removed next.

You used to get at least 2k HPs off Insp, which in the meta back then was enough to run Rabid amulet successfully, but now it means either 16k HPs or no Toughness if you want to run Condi amulet aside from Merc, and that in a power-creeped meta. So basically glassy condition builds, which is really a contradiction since you need sustain for a Damage over Time oriented build.

Oh no doubt, but a Mesmer can dream, can’t he!?

Anet rarely does what makes sense from a balance PoV. There was a short stint with HoT where they were listening to player input, since they wanted to build hype for each profession within it’s community, but now it’s back to business as usual:

Balance by Magic Eight-balling.

“Zomg Sir! Our elite core of mathematicians has just calculated a 66% damage boost to the entire team in PvE at the hands of a single support Chronomancer!”
“Holy kitten! What’s the Magic Eight-ball say about a 50% blanket nerf to Alacrity!”
“Sir, it says… – - – ‘It is certain!’.”
“Well, then what are you waiting for private!? DO IT!”

Cool. But didn’t you say something about Mistrust above?

“and also cuase they dont use mistrust rather insp line”

I took it to mean that you play Dueling instead of Insp?

In YoloQ this build is working out nicely, but it’s also a pretty frustrating build when faced with an organized team that easily nullfies your Conditions. It does wreck Thieves, and that is always fun since many of them like to pretend we back on the menu! :-)

I love it when then B-line for you cuz they think Mesmer is easy kill again. It’s always a tough fight for sure, but it’s still very winnable in this build…at least against the average riff-raff Thief. Though I’m sure that now that I said that, some Thief will prove me wrong later today! :-D