My mesmer has ONE viable build in PvE: Illusionary persona with either 20 dom/dueling, or 10 dom/dueling/chaos/inspiration.
When I tried a build that a) didn’t use mainhand swords and greatswords, b)didn’t invest points dom/dueling and gearing, and c) didn’t have Illusionary Persona
it was horrible; on a Chaos/Inspiration heavy build my mesmer was getting respawns before he could finish killing group of mobs. I see warriors and guardians go full glass cannon and still maintain similar survivability to any of my balanced specs just because of the innate armor advantages. It’s particularly egregious with warriors. My AoE even with sword/sword+greatsword and illusionary persona shattering is still deficient relative to the range and frequency of aoe available to other classes.
Some classes like the guardian trivialize PvE with high protection, aegis, regen uptime, while my mesmer even traiting with no damage can at best hope to give allies regen with phantasms, and that’s as far as group support goes besides vigorous revelation. Restorative Mantras is not good at all compared to elementalist and guardian group offhealing.
Supposedly mesmers and thieves offered support with stealth skills for rezzzing. Guess what? Bosses in explorable dungeons LOVE to drop AoE on downed players that will kill anyone before they even finish rezzing, so stealth does nothing in helping get players back up. Mass Invisibility can even reset an encounter. I’ve yet to use any elite as much as Time Warp.
All I do on my mesmer is damage, and that damage isn’t even up to the levels of what warriors and thieves can do anyways. In PvE my mesmer just feels awfully limited besides being a Time Warp elite provider. Anything else another class will provide in greater quantities and more efficiently.
The issue isn’t that these items drop — it’s that the most realistic way of obtaining one is by buying early.
I bought The Crossing for 25g. If I were to go for the crafting alone, the recipe is about 13-14 gold. If I went for crafting it, it’d be close to 140-150g because YOU SIMPLY CANNOT RELIABLY FARM LODESTONES.
The issue is the ori, and mjost importantly the lodestones. You are VERY lucky if you get a core or two from an explorable dungeon. The rate at which you’d need to have enough cores to start processing them into lodestones means running an explorable path well over A HUNDRED TIMES to start getting close to having a chance at having enough core drop rates to convert to lodestones.
You simply cannot farm lodestones in any reasonable amount of time, and the orichalcum needed isn’t that much better.
But if you want to take a look at why prices are so ridiculously high, you need to look at the RNG and thus difficulty of coming by components. Exotics are already expensive or time consuming to craft — you need for for an abysmally low chance at a random precursor, and then, assuming 28 exotics into a mystic forge got you the right precursor out of the bunch, that’s not even half of the gold costs you will incur because lodestones and orichalcum sources, which are time limited (ori nodes per day, lodestones by the rarity of the lesser tier items needed to make them) makes for a much longer grind.
Legendaries are indeed a trademan’s good. If you were to just play the game, say, doing 2-3 full explorable dungeon runs and selling some crafting mats by the end of the day — let’s give you a generous daily intake of 3-4 gold from just doing dungeons and ori node farming.
It’ll take you 125-166 days of doing just that to make enough gold to cover the basic material expenses (Dawn for example is about 500g to make, since you’re very unlikely to get the precursor you want and so will have to trade for it, at the current cost of about 308g; Twilight is closer to 600g). To that you’ll have to add the time of farming the WvW badges, the karma farm, world map completion.
If you want to have unique exotics and legendaries in the game, you’ll need tons of money. And don’t kid yourself, normally playing yourself the game won’t allow you that in any reasonable timespan — download your price tracker apps because you’ll have to spend a LOT of time playing the Trading Post to make actual money in the game.
Playing the economy is not optional when it comes to mystic forge exotics and legendaries.
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They need to increase the grace period for the chain steps so you can better use different skills.
It also still needs a considerable damage boost and the generated clones, like the greatsword one, need to do something.
At least greatsword clones are good at stacking bleed if you take sharper images, which makes them finally useful, but scepter clones don’t even have quick multi-hit attacks.
Counterattack on the scepter just feels wasted most of the time on PvE. It should apply something more than a blind on its alternative chain, and its cooldown should come down.
Torch needs fixes, and phantasmal warden needs some mobility help.
Our weapon viability choices and build choices are just rather limited in PvE at the moment. Illusionary persona shatter build is the only build I feel competitive in for PvE, and our support builds are sort of crappy since stealth rezzing is a waste in most dungeons as bosses love to spam lethal aoe on top of downed players anyways.
And, if you trait for some support from the inspiration line, your damage takes a nosedive into the nonexistent territory while still remaining squishier than DPS specced glass cannon warriors.
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Quite frankly I would like to see such set in PvE as well, considering that even with 33% confusion duration trait and 20 points in domination my Confusions from Cry of Frustration at best ticks twice on regularly attacking mobs, and I’m lucky to get one tick on bosses.
Or maybe the confusion from Cry of Frustration can be increased baseline in PvE at least.
Not arguing, merely asking:
is confusion ever wasted on pve mobs?
I actually figured they would always do ‘something’ and get the damage anyhow. Never considered they might not.
I ask because I haven’t tackled much pve mobs that wait a long time between actions, except one or two event ‘giants’.
Confusion is often wasted on PvE mobs, yes. 4 additional seconds baselines to the duration of confusion in PvE would help a lot.
The trouble is that bosses don’t do attacks that trigger confusion often at all. Abominations are other mobs that do a lot of damage but attack slowly.
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Quite frankly I would like to see such set in PvE as well, considering that even with 33% confusion duration trait and 20 points in domination my Confusions from Cry of Frustration at best ticks twice on regularly attacking mobs, and I’m lucky to get one tick on bosses.
Or maybe the confusion from Cry of Frustration can be increased baseline in PvE at least.
Anachnophobia short bow cant be transmuted and has a 3 hour countdown timer ???
Posted by: Zenith.7301
The way rare items in this game are designed amounts to not playing the game, rather the only way to reasonably get these in less than 6 months of farming is by playing the Trade Post.
I wish MMO’s didn’t force you to choose between participating in economy minigames or incredible grinds if you want legendary items. If legendaries just cost a decent amount of different dungeon tokens and karma and honor badges, it’d be better than random crafting mat drops. Playing the auction house does not entertain me in the slightest, but it is a requirement for getting legendaries in this game.
It looks like a toned down remake of the Arah set. We don’t even look like a withc with the iconic witch hat that females got.
The difference between the two sets is staggering. What a shame.
Endless stream of asura on path 1 make it impossible to get back (as if lack of waypoints in dungeons wasn’t enough), and Tazza’s guardian golems do absurd damage and have ridiculous condition application rates.
Not fun.
You wonder why people do AC and CoF. Borked dungeons like TA and SE are why.
Is there any rep I can contact to help restore tokens I was not given? Will a support ticket assist with this?
There us no catch-all melee build. In some dungeons you can do it; in others you cannot.
Turmaine from CM exp path 2 will rock your world because of all the large aoe’s he places around himself that you can’t permanently dodge out of. There are many bosses and encounters like him.
Then there are bosses like the King Burrower in AC exp, whose one-shot screech is actually easier to avoid if you stick to melee and keep on his back.
Generally, melee is far more situational since encounters are not yet properly tuned to be sensitive to melee, since it appears bosses don’t discriminate in peppering aoe in melee range where reaction windows are shorter compared to ranged where people can spread out and have more time to react to a swing animation.
The Torch’s iMage is terrible and if anything your suggestion is a damage loss when offhand sword has a counter on a much shorter cooldown that can give you a time gap to dodge.
The issue is that there’s not enough endurance regen available to compenstate for the amount of spike damage going out against melee versus their healing per second.
Why not make something like the Zaishen Dailies, since it would encourage their participation in different areas? The reason people are concentrating in Orr is because the profit and relevant rewards are stuck in Orr. The money-making nodes, the places to farm mats for legendaries.
Yeah, that issue was brought up in beta. We wondered whether mobs would stop attacking at certain levels of confusion, but Anet simply replied they attack and take damage like good little mobs. Yeah, like bleed.
I say keep the duration short, but increase damage in PVE so it acts like a little spike if you time large stacks right, but it’s just a little pressure damage if you only maintain a few stacks.
It’s sort of a catch-22, because Confusion either function likes a bleed as pressure damage, or it steps on Burning’s toes if we decide it’s better off as a spikey condition with duration instead.
It feels like a redundant condition when it should be different from the others — they repurposed Poison for this very reason.
I’d argue that even given PvP, Confusion needs to last substantially longer (+200% ~ +300%), in return for doing less damage.
I want Confusion to be something which the enemy either has to clear, or worry about hot using skills at the most rapid pace. In PvE, I want it to be a semi-reliable sort of reactive damage, not higher in raw damage than Burning or Bleeding, but lasting much longer to make up for the enemy having to attack.
I’d do the following:
sPvP
- Reduce damage dealt by 20%
- Increase duration by 150%.
WvW
- Reduce damage dealt by ~50%
- Increase duration by 200%
PvE
- Reduce damage dealt by ~35% – 40%
- Increase duration by 300%+
I pointed out the problem with confusion because its duration means the condition is currently underpowered in most builds.
The condition as a whole is problematic, because if we adopt your suggestion, what is the difference between it and Bleeding? At the moment Confusion feels superfluous in PvE and replacing it with Bleed would see no much symbolic loss while giving better returns.
Confusion needs identity. Mobs in PvE don’t make a decision whether to attack or not based on the Confusion stack.
When I start the client I now get an error
[IMG]http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh242/szspagna/error.png[/IMG]
Before this error happened, my game had suddenly started to intermittently freeze, and my pc reset.
Now, either the game doesn’t want to work or it does, but it gets stuck on cinematics.
Who said Mirror of Anguish was condition removal? When developers referred to anti-spike traits, they were compared to stun breakers. Whether other classes have sufficient traits is besides the point — just because other classes fail to meet a development goal does not mean that development goal should cease to exist.
Either way, you have quite a history of being the resident forum contrarian, so I’ll leave you to your witch hunts as I don’t care for having my thread hijacked by a never-ending argument with you.
I want to guide this thread I created to balance considerations being those of high end PvE, that is, dungeons. I don’t care that MoP helps kill one regular mob in solo PvE — solo PvE isn’t hard and you can easily do without it.
As per the comment on trait vs. utility slot, obviously you haven’t been here since early development. Jon Peters had discussed that they wanted to let people make decisions whether they would gain anti spike or condition removal measures via traits, or utility slots. It’s a customization choice. If you have an issue with that, then argue the position with the developer.
It still doesn’t detract that when a utility slot has to become reserved, playstyle variety and build variety is dampened. You have lesser opportunity to bring other utilities because bringing a condition removal and a stun breaker utility to dungeons isn’t optional. So instead of customizing your playstyle based on 3 utilities, you only truly have one free utility slot, and of those utilities available, many of them crowd the same function.
Guardian, Elementalist, and Ranger utilities offer an example of variety in function, where you don’t get so many utilities doing exactly the same thing (remove conditions, reflect a projectile).
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It really bothers me as a mesmer that I feel less like a liability to my team if I use a greatsword and staff since those are the only two that provide range safety and boon provision and field effects to my team, compared to my sword/sword setup.
Even with Vigor procs from the dueling line it seems like there’s not enough endurance to compensate for the incoming damage from groups of mobs in melee range and the amount of AoE effects around enemies.
Since melee already do well in PvP, would it be considered to give melee weapons in PvE an endurance regen bonus over ranged weapons or a durability boon to the user?
I know Guardians and warriors already do pretty well in melee, but dagger elementalists and mesmers seem to suffer quite a bit and the majority appear to stick to ranged weapons throughout the dungeon. So this endurance regen bonus could be provided to the classes that need it.
At some point running double ranged weapons gets boring.
4- Utility limitations: We have a problem with stun breakers. They’re a mandatory utility slot in many situations, particularly dungeons. It was expressed earlier that we would have trait and utility options to choose from as anti-spike measures. That’s not the case right now.
Mirror of Anguish simply cannot compete with Decoy/Blink/Mirror Image because it has twice the cooldown and doesn’t actually break a CC, but rather reflects it. That reflection is only really useful somewhat in PvP, because in PvE many of the mobs that have lethal CC are resistant to CC themselves, so that reflection is wasted. A 90 second cooldown anti-spike measure simply isn’t sufficient at the frequency spike happens, and because MoA doesn’t actually break the CC, you’re still taking the full brunt of the spike most of the time even if one mob is CC’d with you.
We then have Signet of Midnight: The boon duration passive is only good if you couple it with signet of inspiration, and even then a 10% duration boost is minor considering the duration of boons given by signet of inspiration. Mesmers have a dearth of access to boons and more universal debuffs like Weakness and Blind. I think signet of midnight would be far more desirable if that boon duration passive were switched for a passive speed boost. It fits its defensive nature as well since it is a stun breaker, so you would be trading long term defensive capacity for immediate defense.
The mesmer also suffers from redundant utilities. Mimick simply cannot match Mirrored Feedback, Phantasmal Disenchanter brings all the problems of shatter-tied AI, making it not competitive with Null Field or Mantra of Resolve. Mantra of Concentration cannot compete with Decoy or Blink in a PvE scenario because Decoy provides an aggro drop and Blink repositions. Mantra of Pain is a straight dps loss and its spike is insufficient in PvE. There are too many utilities that do the same thing, and the problem with that is that some will emerge as better, and the other ones will simply not be used. Shadow Refuge is a much better version of Veil of Invisibility or Mass Invisibility — mesmer invisibility traits need more perks as they seem too niche and their cooldowns too long. It seems like the mesmer needs to trait heavily in order to be able to support his allies in more than just projectile reflection or condition removal. Portal, Null Field, and Mirrored Feedback stand as the better examples of mesmer utilities.
5- Some clones are better than others. Sword clones cripple. Staff clones debuff. Part of the reason why scepter clones and greatsword clones suffer is because they require trait support to offer any use to a team, be it greatsword clones with Sharpened Images or Scepter clones with on clone death traits. All clones should offer something baseline, though it’s fine that said something is not damage, but rather utility.
6- AoE needs some help. Yes, I can conjure on different targets and shatter, but Mindwrack’s AoE is more cumbersome and requires careful execution, while still coming short in AoE capability to other classes. If I need AoE, I need to trait for illusionary elasticity, use a staff and a greatsword and awkwardly try to keep up with elementalists and engineers and guardians and warriors.
7- Mantra channel times need to come down. They’re too long and create too much dead time in a PvE environment where fights are far more protracted than short encounters in PvP.
8- Diversion could go back to being AoE if clone count won’t affect Daze duration. The lack of difference in clone shatter yields for this shatter undervalues its usage.
This brings me to my last point: Skills will need to be split. I feel that too many PvE mesmers are being held back by PvP class resentment. We mesmers were told by the end of BWE3 that mesmers and necros were due attention and would be receiving changes. By release, we only got revamped weapon cooldown traits. Some weeks later, it has been a flurry of nerfs related to PvP balance. It’s a real bummer for mesmers trying to PvE to feel the collateral damage of PvP balancing.
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I want to preface this post by saying I enjoy my mesmer for the most part. I’ve played it since the first BWE, and nothing will separate me from its magenta beams and butterflies. Nevertheless, I feel several parts of the class are not up to par on a PvE environment.
1-The iMage needs help. Offhand weapon options are wasted — you take the pistol for ranged phantasm uptime and CC, or you take offhand sword for phantasm damage and defense. The Warden is held back because it is stationary and spawns in such a way that only melee will really benefit from the reflection, while much of his damage is wasted because he will not move while channeling unlike real Rangers. I will go more into the iMage’s failings in the following point.
2- Confusion is too niche and build dependent. I find that Cry of Frustration is dead weight unless you trait for longer confusion duration and traits that upfront more stacks. At the rate mobs in PvE attack, I’m lucky if one tick of Confusion makes it in. Confusion simply lasts too little in PvE, and for a condition that’s meant to stack in intensity (implying ramp up), that’s a strange design.
The iMage from the torch and scepter are barely used outside niche builds for this very reason — Confusion is nowhere near as flexible as power and precision or bleed/burn damage staff builds. It requires too much jumping through hoops to shine. The iMage applies too few stacks to compete against other phantasms — its stack application should be closer to 5 stacks to get even close to matching the relative output of other phantasms. Confusing Images’s wind-up animation seems too long as well.
My Cry of Frustration confusion stacks tick once or twice for less than 1/5 the damage of each clone Mindwrack.
I really don’t understand why CoF and the scepter/torch need to be tied to such niche builds when all the other shatters and weapons function well on a variety of trait builds and stat allocations. The staff itself has a flexibility between power and cond damage builds, whereas the scepter needs to be held up by confusion related traits and condition damage to approach to being a competitive weapon. Its defensive properties don’t outrank those of the staff or sword particularly to justify its current status.
3- Minors: Domination suffers from poor minors, as does Inspiration’s first tier. Domination gives vulnerability on a very short duration from dazing/interrupting; Wastrel’s Punishment is not good. I think what most mesmers have realized is that our interruption/CC capability is wildly outclassed by engineers and warriors. We have a daze on a 45s cd shatter, one on the pistol offhand, and one on the sword offhand, so our effect uptimes for these traits are minimal. We have some utility options for dazing/interruption, but I will address what prevents their usage most of the time since we also suffer utility limitations. The Inspiration minor oddly places retaliation on phantasms, when it could be so much more useful if it functioned like regeneration and worked on teammates.
(edited by Zenith.7301)