Guild Wars 2

OpTic GOON.2560:

too many people would get kitten if we could inspect gear

It’s not like you need to. It’s so obvious when you’ve got a group where someone is a non-zerker, crap dies significantly slower.

They always say it’s an unintended bug when they’re aware of it but don’t want to be bothered to make promises about fixing it.

It’s like dungeon and fractal bugs.

lighter.2708:

Zenith.7301:

It is adorable how just a few months back all the pvp hotshots were saying d/p thief was subpar, that s/d thief was just a mediocre class to bring. That berserker specs are dead and condi bunkers rule.

And now suddenly the thief, which hasn’t changed at all, is finally deemed the supreme berserker amulet class. Who knew, it’s fun to be saying this since beta and people dismissing you only to find out 2 years later that thieves are the very reason for the condi bunker outbreak since no class besides a berk guardian can run berserker amulet and not get farmed by thieves.

Like, why even bother being a berserker of any class but warrior or thief, the rest of the classes don’t have enough mobility and immunities to not die miserably compared to a thief who just needs to spam stealth and port up a ledge while his burst comes back up in less than 10 seconds unlike the scepter ele who needs to wait 30 seconds for arcane utilities, fire grab, and his lightning skills to align.

i don’t really know when exactly are you talking about, because from my experience, thief has always been part of the top teams, and thieves have never been subpar and mediocre.

Oh sure, but all it takes is reading some thread from prominent thief players a month back defending their precious class as just average while all the attention went to spirit rangers and elementalists and necros.

It is adorable how just a few months back all the pvp hotshots were saying d/p thief was subpar, that s/d thief was just a mediocre class to bring. That berserker specs are dead and condi bunkers rule.

And now suddenly the thief, which hasn’t changed at all, is finally deemed the supreme berserker amulet class. Who knew, it’s fun to be saying this since beta and people dismissing you only to find out 2 years later that thieves are the very reason for the condi bunker outbreak since no class besides a berk guardian can run berserker amulet and not get farmed by thieves.

Like, why even bother being a berserker of any class but warrior or thief, the rest of the classes don’t have enough mobility and immunities to not die miserably compared to a thief who just needs to spam stealth and port up a ledge while his burst comes back up in less than 10 seconds unlike the scepter ele who needs to wait 30 seconds for arcane utilities, fire grab, and his lightning skills to align.

Necro suffers same issue as rangers (why rangers are also lacking an thieves preferred over them).

Their stunbreaks suck bigtime. Not only hideously long cooldowns, but garbage effects to boot.

Look at spectral walk, it’s virtually a worse version of Shadow Step, where you first have to travel a distance before porting to safety, whereas the thief gets the immediate movement and then the retreat on demand.

And more outrageously, thief not only gets a double stun break via Shadowstep, but it clears conditions upon use as well.

Then there’s the fact necromancers heal plain suck. They’re like old warrior before healing signet — garbage healing values and even worse for the necromancer is all his heals have these long as hell cast times and long recharge cd’s.

Yeah, I’ve noticed that with male sylvari and norn the armor gets fattened around their waist and shoulders, it’s so jarring.

I also suggested dragonflies, but beetles are also a great idea.

I kinda find it annoying that they deemed butterflies not acceptable for male armor for some weird reason, yet male mesmers don’t have their illusions shatters into spiders and scorpions of pure red/black manliness instead of purple butterflies.

One would think they’d at least be consistent about gender coding.

If only you could manage to carry people with your guardian though. Such a terribly hard task.

I wish they made DS not remove your spectral skills, so when you’re getting zerged by a team your DS scales with the amount of people training you by triggering more spectral armor procs of life force.

Also wish it didn’t remove the utility bar and you could handle bundles in death shroud like the hammer in the colossus fractal.

I also hope they normalize life force gain so that the axe can generate life force with its autoattack, it’s pretty stupid that a class who knows you’re using axe can just double dodge your ghastly claws and proceed to starve you out of life force gain.

Also lich and plague need to not destroy minions or remove spectral effects.

Plague just needs to be made a more useful elite for pve.

Wells should have cd’s no longer than 25 seconds. Well of Power only seems weak because classes like ele/warrior/guardian can already fart boons with ease. Might stacking from fire fields needs a nerf anyways it’s way too strong relative to the other fields.

Junkpile.7439:

Ragion.2831:

We can get almost a 100% swiftness up time with banshee’s wail and warhorn, we have +25 movement speed passive on locust, we have +33ms from spectral walk, we have +40 from D/D and quickening thirst, we even have trait for +25 ms while in DS.

For reals though how much more speed could you possibly need

These are bad options. For example D/D. Why the kitten i would use main hand power weapon and off hand condi weapon? Doesn’t make any sense. Spectral walk you usually need in combat so why i would put it cool down before fight? If i use warhorn i can’t use off hand dagger. I want trait like warrior sprint. Only good adept trait in best trait line. Signet of locust active could give 15 sec stability or something.

Um, because offhand dagger has a good condi transfer and a really nice aoe weakness skill? That’s useful everywhere.

If you are a minion master, rune of the ranger will give you more stable results than rune of the scholar.

With rune of the scholar you need to be at the 90% hp threshold, but rune of the ranger only needs that you have a minion up to get the 7% damage bonus (only less than scholar by 3% but more uptime on pve content that is not dungeon speed runs, such as fractals and dynamic events).

Personally I just choose Rune of Strength for myself, the might duration boost is rather convenient.

Zackie.8923:

So i just came back to dungeon after like a year… and i realise there’s this perpetual fear climate blanketing all the dungeon runs i did.

everyone is like very afraid of playing and enjoying themselves, instead it’s about yea dps , don’t screw up etc..

people kick people for next to stupid little reasons like failing to jump to the ledge at the start of SE1… wut?

i think anet needs to look at the dungeon climate, it’s not promoting enjoyable play at all.

When you don’t jump to the ledge in S1, you aggro those very annoying waves of asura that significantly lengthen the run time of the dungeon.

People have been doing these same dungeons for 2.5 years, understandably they’re sick of them and want to get them over with so they get their gold.

And really, the only dungeon you might find psychopathic ragers on is Arah and to a lesser extent fractal 50.

If you do happen to get a rager, just carry a polite conversation to bait his inevitable insults — while arenanet does not ban people for more egregious behavior, they do reliably ban people who you report for profanity so it’s a very easy way of baiting toxic people into a ban.

“This video contains content from SME, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds. "

grrrrrrrrr

CrimsonDX.4821:

Mesmers have a trait that gives their illusions distortion on creation, so you should at least be able to get the phantasms initial attack off before they die.

Yeah, it’s also a grandmaster trait slot and your sustained is still xrap because the illusion still gets one shot afterwards. 6/6 also means you can’t get phantasmal haste.

I shouldn’t need a grandmaster trait for my illusions to not be totally negated by an encounter.

Rognik.2579:

This seems vaguely reminiscent of the discussion(s) on “sexy male armor” held in the General Discussion. I get the sense you don’t necessarily want more flesh-revealing armors, but it does have that slant. I’m not sure I’ll be able to add much to the discussion, but know this has come up before.

I’m all in favour of both genders having equally flattering armours, however that might be done. Skin-teasing, close cut, or even just interesting patterns. I’m not all that fussy in what’s offered, but it’s “not fair” that it’s only the female armors that show off our overly-toned heroes. Even the human NPCs all have six-pack abs.

I do get annoyed at the wildly different ways male and female characters are displayed, but I’m well aware this is also a game marketed heavily in South Korea and even Asia, and if you have looked at any of those regions, the sexism is rampant (look at Tera for a fine example). Women are designed to look sexy, men are designed to look “cool”. But even cool is kind of lacking in these male armors, they’re just worse off versions of what the females get.

But even if I would like more parity in representation, that’s not my main issue.

My main issue is that in trying to make the costumes different on gender, the male version has always come out for the worse. They are just the same drab coats and the same lack of flourish and detail, with ugly textures and cuts.

It’s also an issue with male models in general. Only male humans have an appealing body shape (and sylvari are done well enough that the gender differences are done in good taste).

But look at the male norn, virtually very little looks good on them because their bodies are horrendous. Drooping chests that look weird, hunched position with thick necks but small heads relative to the body, and thing legs relative to the upper body and a ridiculously large gap in the groin area between the legs.

Meanwhile the female norn is a larger, more curvaceous human female. And everything with the females in this game is designed to look nice and appealing while that is not an artistic imperative for the design of male armor in this game. Most armors in this game are very well fitted to the females and their idealized body proportions.

That is why I say male armor seems like an afterthought sometimes. All the armor seems to be tailored for a female human and female norn body, and just like a bad console port to PC the male get the crappy version.

God forbid thieves were beholden to the rules of chill and interrupts just like anybody else. But nope.
Thieves are the very reason most classes run bunker builds, because other than mediguard and maybe a well played berk warrior, thief hunts all others out of the meta.

lol, are people really saying warrior has medium low damage? Are people so ignorant as to not read tooltips and coefficients for classes to determine warriors have some of the highest base tooltip weapon damage ingame on most of their weapons?

It’s unbelievable people would even say warrior damage is less than guardian. You need to specify, warrior sustained damage is better while mediguard burst is better.

More importantly, warrior has a wide variety of builds while guardian at best has 2.

Warriors couldn’t possibly be in a better place unless they were turned into walking gods. They’re the most polished, complete class in the game with most of their weapons being useful and strong and very little garbage traits in the traitlines they most frequently use.

Yeah a guardian with stability for the necro is a godsend and he can just lock down most targets for the necro to do his work.

There was a time necros did sorta well, as did rangers, and then people whined and whined and whined about spirits and Dhuumfire and pet/minion damage that the necro just got owned into a punching bag again. The problem was always the long terror chains not dhuumfire but they nerfed the living crap out of Dhuumfire in all their fine foresight, just as they nerfed weakness duration upon entering death shroud so now people can just train the necro to death.

If you want to know why any class is currently not doing too well on any aspect of the game, look no further than spvp whine, it’s the source of all class destroying nerfs.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Since when can’t an ele manage? You got a metric ton of condi cleanses, ether renewal makes you immune to cripple spam unlike a mesmer, and if it gets really bad you just take arcane shield+mist form+ lightning flash and d/f for obsidian flesh.

On my ele I joined a run in progress for CM, the thief didn’t seem interested in coming to stealth me through, so I ran all the way from the bridge area to the endboss zone and barely suffered a scratch.

Mesmer is literally one of the worst classes to make easy runs with on a bad group, everyone likes to run ahead of you and with your limited access to speed boosts without using outside objects, it’s very easy to get put in combat run speed with a short, kittenty curtain swiftness.

And I don’t even understand how Guang can say mesmers make the best world bosses range class when the phantasms die immediately before they even do damage to Tequatl and they don’t even bother attacking objects like Jormag’s ice wall.

With that said, as much as mesmers may sufefr in PvE, the OP made a critical mistake:

Context. That statement was given in the context of an spvp centered event. Of course they’re gonna talk spvp to people in tournaments and demos.

It is true that unfortunately too much skill balancing has been done for spvp and WvW without caring for the consequences in PvE, but you have two options — you give up on the chance that the developers might do something right for a change, or you wait and see. Either way, if you’re so sure the outcome will be bad, you always have the option to not play.

In GW1 mesmers waited a very, VERY long set of years before they were revamped into usefulness.

CM isn’t Arah. I’m not talking about doing the bare minimum and running through and afking for 30 minutes while the rest of the party attempts the skip and fails repeatedly, I’m talking about helping them through it so I can avoid exactly that. Mesmer can solo clear all the turrets before Ooze they don’t wipe the bads, then portal everyone from the WP to Entities, then from the WP to Shoggroth if necessary. Then you can easily solo Stargazer, not to mention they make Lupi go much faster with pugs and generally have lots of options to escape being domed or shadowstepped by pugs trying to range Lupi.

Um, a guardian just slaps on retreat+stand your ground+purging flames with condi clear on shout and he can carry any group through any run in Arah. Good for you that you can do the run solor whiole they wait and then portal them, it’s about the same time as a guardian or thief runs the group through with aegis/stability or stealth.

And any class can solo Arah p1 it’s not a mesmer exclusive skill.

Then you have fractal 50 in which mesmer is unarguably worse than a guardian or thief, and hell guardian and thief are better in pretty much most instances for carrying a group, especially in colosus with blind spam and aegis and higher uptime on reflects when mesmer illusions are getting massacred.

Not that it’s much of a plus to a mesmer. Carrying is not something most people want to do.

I’d love to see your guardian help a pack of idiots run through a pack of illusionists or oozes with just those three skills.

If the people you choose to waste your time with are that bad, maybe you should reconsider the runs you do.

Sounds like you don’t run pugs in Arah very often. Or dungeons very much at all, if “skipped through CM without help” is your crowning achievement on ele.

Who said it was a crowning achievement, you’re just trolling and quite frankly I’m not surprised you’re running pugs so often, as insufferable a kitten you seem to be I don’t think there are many people that would tolerate your sullen kitten for long.

Sitting on several cacti seems more pleasant than carrying a conversation with you right now.

More complex encounters usually mean more dead illusions so you’re basically brought for the utilities and little else. What a great place to be in. I’m glad you enjoy your one trick pony.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Zenith.7301:

Anchoku.8142:

The heal is not spectacular but it is on a short-ish cool down and, if channels are traited with Dark Armor in DM, you get extra toughness to make up for being a target while channeling. It is not quite as bad as the dps loss vs AA makes it seem. If I cannot dodge or DS, Dark Armor channeling helps

Why would I have dark armor though, that’s not in a standard PvE build. You put 6 in your power line, 6 in soul reaping, and the other 2 should go in your crit line.

Why are you caring about sustain in PvE?

Because there are instances like fire shaman or if you eat an archdiviner melee where you want to get to full hp back as soon as possible to go back into melee? Or mai trin when you somehow get hiot by holrik’s fireball despite being outside the kitten telegraph?

Or maybe the several living story achievement runs where the mordrem specifically pepper you with poison all the time or events like triple trouble?

Not to mention in HoT where stacking inside reflects might no longer be a 24/7 strategy, you might actually need sustain in some fights.

Windsagio.1340:

Zenith: You’re focusing on only pve which largely misses my point, the mesmer skills are useful in general. They’re exceptionally useful in pvp and wvw which is where the channeling limitation on 100B actually matters

I mean I get downplaying, but c’mon now :p

Useful in general my kitten , if you’re a person who only pve’s it’s pretty crappy design to have a class so useless in the one format you play. Warriors and guardians aren’t only useful in some formats and useless in others.

As if landing a mace burst stun into a 100b is hard…Before any loser says stunbreaks, the cd’s on stunbreaks are magnitudes longer than the relative short cd’s on mace burst stun and 100b so you just bait the stunbreak and within the next 10 seconds you can successfully land a stun into a 7-8k 100b.

Windsagio.1340:

Also, again look at the classes holistically. Mesmers also have some of the most useful utilities and elites in the game across all game modes.

And yes portal/veil/mass haste/mass invis/null field/whateverthehellthereflectiscalled are all a part of the overall calculation of the class. Of course they are.

In the case of 100B, it’s very high damage on a very low cooldown with a disadvantage that you lose damage on mobile enemies — BUT THE OP IS INCORRECT in that it is not self-rooting. It’s a channel that’s broken by movement. There’s really very low risk to 100B compared to melee aside from the temptation to stay in getting more hits when you should move out of the way.

Oh, please, not this crap again. Warriors bring banners, powerful utility EXCLUSIVE to them (while reflects guardians can achieve with higher uptime, so the only exclusive utility a mesmer has is the niche portal use), on top of might and fury stacking, and being able to load up 25 vulnerability stacks easy.

Eles bring projectiles deflection, boon stacking with fire fields, aoe condi clear and CC on top of group healing, on TOP of the highest damage ingame with conjures.

Thieves bring stealth for easy skipping and rez, a spammable blind field to make trash pulls in fractal 50 a joke, on top of being top single target damage.

Guardians, I need not say more. Better reflect uptime than mesmer, better burst and sustained damage, better group defense with aegis and protection, better CC as well.

So let’s not pretend like mesmer has this huge amount of utility relative to the other classes that justifies its pathetic damage, because it simply is not true. Mesmer utility is one of the most redundant utilities since outside portal and illusionary disenchanter/null field, all his other utilities are outshined by either guardian (longer projectile protection) or thief (longer stealth).

Anchoku.8142:

The heal is not spectacular but it is on a short-ish cool down and, if channels are traited with Dark Armor in DM, you get extra toughness to make up for being a target while channeling. It is not quite as bad as the dps loss vs AA makes it seem. If I cannot dodge or DS, Dark Armor channeling helps

Why would I have dark armor though, that’s not in a standard PvE build. You put 6 in your power line, 6 in soul reaping, and the other 2 should go in your crit line.

And it is most definitely a large damage loss vs AA DPS. Don’t get me wrong, I use it because it’s better to be alive than downed, but it is undeniable that its longish channel time relative to its total damage is pitifully low. It does less damage than ghastly claws, and ghastly claws is even wimpy relative to rapid fire anyways.

And in any case you want to range because you’re low on health while waiting for your heal, that’s what life blast is for.

Male light luminescent.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/thumb/4/4c/Luminescent_armor_%28light%29_human_male_front.jpg/188px-Luminescent_armor_%28light%29_human_male_front.jpg

Female version.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/thumb/5/58/Luminescent_armor_%28light%29_human_female_front.jpg/184px-Luminescent_armor_%28light%29_human_female_front.jpg

Male medium luminescent

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/thumb/3/35/Luminescent_armor_%28medium%29_human_male_front.jpg/221px-Luminescent_armor_%28medium%29_human_male_front.jpg

Female version

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/thumb/4/41/Luminescent_armor_%28medium%29_human_female_front.jpg/159px-Luminescent_armor_%28medium%29_human_female_front.jpg
And this is a common theme to most armors.

The female armor fits her body shape perfectly, their armor is flattering and full of flourish.

The male armors have obvious issues with shoulder and waist sizes, they look bloated and make the waist larger than it actually is, and the shoulders are even horrendously out of scale.

More egregious is that every male version is just made more drab. They remove the butterfly flourish from the male version, and what do they replace it with? Not with some interesting flourish of its own (if you want to make a more masculine flourish, you could have used a dragonfly or something else).

They use a flat shoulder plate.

For both the light and medium armor, female armor shows off flesh. The male is covered up in bulky clothes, and in the case of light armor it looks like this awful superhero skintight garments. Like a mummy with weird textures.

Only in the heavy armor version does it actually seem fair to both genders with nice detail to both, and the armors are not out of proportion.

Look at Braham’s disguise for a good take on making the costumes have some parity in design.

It seems like every armor/costume release is made with a female human/norn in mind. Look at the poor female asuras and charr they don’t even get their own gender of armor.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Try using Life Siphon. I know, blasphemy, because it hurts your deeps, but it’s a pretty sizable heal on a relatively short cooldown.

Necro health sustain does need to be looked at, but a lot of the time people aren’t using what tools are already in their build to try and help their situation. This is inexcusable, to me.

Go ahead and watch videos of Power necros that use main-hand dagger. Out of dozens of videos, I can count the number of times I have seen them use Life Siphon on one hand. If you’re wanting some more health, go ahead and use it.

I use it, it heals at best 2-3k health.

Necro sustain is just pitiful next to my mesmer and ele, and I don’t even want to touch on warriors or guardians because those are just on a league of their own.

It is really irritating.

Do Glint’s lair on my guardian, everything goes well.

Do a repeat on my mesmer, and now the boss is surrounded by a lethal aoe zone that means I can’t even use my illusions to whittle down the crystal golem so it takes three times as long.

It’s getting pretty tiresome, I thought you would have learned with Liadri not to totally screw over pet specs, but apparently you just don’t give a kitten about mesmers and rangers having their class mechanics completely negated by negligent encounter design.

If there’s gonna be lethal aoe on the ground the pets need to be immune to it.

Same goes for Tequatly my mesmer phantasms even with signet of illusions extra 50% hp and persisting image 20% hp bonus, the illusions get one shot before they even apply damage because of all the void zones surrounding the boss.

If you can’t be bothered to give pets aoe/cleave immunity in PvE you shouldn’t have wasted people’s time releasing classes whose mechanics don’t work in an active combat system saturated with one shot mechanics that need to be dodged but the AI is too stupid/frail to contend with.

Jerus.4350:

Zenith.7301:

Nike.2631:

Sure, self-rooting can go… but the skill’s damage will drop to about 1/3 of what it is now.

ArenaNet attaches a HUGE effectiveness co-efficient to self-rooting skills. Modest risk nets monumental rewards…

Like Blurred Frenzy? Which has a longer cd than 100b and does less than 1/2 of its damage? Less than Pistol Whip (which also has evasion frames)?

Is this one of those threads? Where we downplay or even ignore class mechanics and compare skills side by side to further our own agendas?

You know full well why blurred frenzy is less damage I would hope.

Your auto attack is poor damage as well

In fact all mesmer weapon damage is pretty pitiful compared to alternatives, why? Because their class mechanics are built that way, your illusions and shattering them is what you’re supposed to use to make up the difference, but you know that right? Please say yes.

What a pitifully deluded response. Shatters hit for next to no meaningful damage in pve, each clone crits for at best 3k used on all clones it’s a pathetic 9k that happens to destroy your phantasms, which are your only source of sustained damage (and who are still deficient because you need 2-3 active to reach the sustained damage levels of other classes).

But by all means make the pvp noob argument that mesmers are balanced around their illusions and shatters when both illusions and shatters do pathetic damage and die almost immediately as they spawn in PvE scenarios. It is straight off the rationalization playbook most pvp’ers make when they justify the pathetic state the mesmer is in where people only use them for time warp, veil, portal and feedback. That’s right, a gimmick class.

A Burning Speed achieves virtually the same outcome as a blurred frenzy, evading damage, but happens to hit for nearly double the amount of damage, creates a fire field for might stacking, and serves as a gap closer to boot.

munkiman.3068:

All the talk of grind here really stems from content. Let’s see how HoT turns out and revisit the grind concept. I sure they learned a few lessons since launch, at the very least.

Luminiscent armor says otherwise. It’s basically farmville.

My bigger issue is with the heals. They suck. Attrition fights really show how deficient my necro is versus a mesmer with signet of the ether and 3 illusions or restorative mantra+mantra of renewal.

They either need to reduce the cd and cast time, or increase the healing amount to heal like the guardian’s signet.

I do feel the minion heal can heal you for quite a lot sustained if minions weren’t such fragile garbage.

And then there’s signet of vampirism, which much like signet of the there is a joke compared to warrior’s healing signet (which heal isn’t though, beisdes engineer healing turret).

Also I find little use for axe with DS vastly outdamaging it as a ranged option. All you need is a couple of dagger autoattacks and you’re back to spamming 6-7k life blasts, which also pierce unlike the axe.

ASP.8093:

Swish.2463:

The stability changes wont really effect any builds that already take boon removals..

Possible exception there is that it sounds like a lot of the big punchy transformation-like elites are getting long-duration stability replaced with pulsing stability gain. Which is pretty annoying because, well, it’s weakening one of our best counters to them (boon rips).

Well, it is pretty dumb a 180 sec cd skill gets cancelled out by a 35 sec recharge one, ad even worse by a shatter as low as 10 sec cd.

Rangers have virtually no other access to stability and god knows necros need buff against being CC’d to death if anything.

Nephrite.6954:

Don’t take everyone’s opinions so seriously. Especially the ones in the forums. Pve isn’t something that’s difficult and you don’t die easily. Unlike pvp, the AI doesn’t dodge your damage. If you’re willing to take a deeper look in how the combat system works I suggest you take a few rounds in spvp as other players are the real obvious threat and treat once you kill them of course.

lol let’s see your fractal 50 solo videos if PvE is so easy compared to rolling some faceroll spvp hotjoin meta build.

MaXi.3642:

Zenith.7301:

Nike.2631:

Sure, self-rooting can go… but the skill’s damage will drop to about 1/3 of what it is now.

ArenaNet attaches a HUGE effectiveness co-efficient to self-rooting skills. Modest risk nets monumental rewards…

Like Blurred Frenzy? Which has a longer cd than 100b and does less than 1/2 of its damage? Less than Pistol Whip (which also has evasion frames)?

you want really take Blurred Frenzy as an example? really?! a skill which is half offensive and half defensive? and you complain about it’s damage? just lol…

Read Pistol Whip kitten, it not only evades just like Blurred Frenzy, it stuns before hand and does significantly more damage to boot and can be chained several times.

Besides calling Blurred Frenzy defensive when it’s meant to be a buffer for the fact a mesmer has 2-3k less hp than a warrior and an inferior healing per second (signet of the there is a way worse heal than healing signet) is just dumb.

I’m just getting tired of Mai Trin as an end boss all the time. More Molten Bros pls I wanna be done faster.

Also the only place where my D/F ele feels risky as Painbow seems to imply is during colossus fractal with the kitten cultists/heartseeker spam. Maybe sometimes the ascalonian fractal. Those are completely trivialized with a thief’s black powder though.

Burning Speed is an evade itself and its hitbox is generous that you can use it to land in max melee range behind boss so you don’t get gibbed after using it. If I feel I’m gonna eat a boss autoattack i just pr-empt it with Obsidian Flesh or Arcane Shield.

I love my D/F ele it’s so fun, although I do wish they made chruning earth just a cast you set and forget and it detonates by itself while you can do other actions, and reduce the cd on fire grab because 30+ seconds of cd on a skill that does much less damage than a 100b or eviscerate is just DUMB. That way I could use D/D for the aoe burst.

And maybe they’ll buff scepter autoattacks to not be total garbage so my ele can use meteorologicus with one more reason other than might stacking and persisting flames usage.

Either way the worse pugs I’ve had lately finish in 1 hour 15-20 minutes at the latest. Most 50 pugs I do finish in 35-45 minutes.

The problem is not that fractals are long, the problem is rewards are total garbage.

Lazaar.9123:

Dhampyr.2813:

The other part I want to ask is what exactly does taunt do? Does it just force the target to walk to you and have you as its target? If so casting any one of the AoEs in the game will be an interesting counter. AoEs don’t need to be centred on your target.

Reason why I ask that is there might be mobs that throw taunt on players. I’m hoping there are but I don’t want to be forced to take a stun breaker all the time. I’m hoping AoE focused builds can do a soft ignore with it, excluded the forced walk.

It locks your skill bar out except for your auto-attack and stunbreakers, and you are forced to run towards the target and attack them with auto-attack.

Oh, so it barely affects mainhand axe warriors or d/d ele in air attunement or thieves (whose autoatttacks all hit like a truck).

Nike.2631:

Sure, self-rooting can go… but the skill’s damage will drop to about 1/3 of what it is now.

ArenaNet attaches a HUGE effectiveness co-efficient to self-rooting skills. Modest risk nets monumental rewards…

Like Blurred Frenzy? Which has a longer cd than 100b and does less than 1/2 of its damage? Less than Pistol Whip (which also has evasion frames)?

Low level fractals are a scourge upon the earth. It gets better the closer to 50 you are.

Just played my warrior in TA and I’m reminded of the vast difference…. downscaled to 56 and yet my 100b is doing 14k damage every 6.5 seconds, my axe autoattacks are critting for 4-6k.

Just looking at the tooltip, I don’t even understand how warrior axe auto chain can be allowed to be so much stronger than the other autoattacks in the game.

Then I look at my Thief’s auto chain and pistol whip, they’re just better versions of what the mesmer has, with a difference of almost 25-30% more damage per toltip, and they can chain pistol whip 3 times versus a mesmer, and on top of it it stuns.

But hey, I get to summon a phantasm that does 6k damage base at 80 every few seconds to a single target, with a 1 second cast time, which dies to aoe/cleave immediately or despawns upon mob death 3-4 seconds after it was summoned.

Then I look at vulnerability stacks. 10 stacks from warrior mace offhand, long duration, relatively short cooldown, on top of another 4 from the mainhand axe. A class that can upkeep 14 stacks of vulnerability not including the traits.

Ugh it makes me sick that a skill which channels for so much damage on a short 6.5 sec cd exists while our shatter does a shadow of its damage, takes more ramp up, and has a longer cd to boot.

And warrior isn’t even the top damage class. Thief, ele, and engi take the cake. Was in a fractal 50 with 2 engineers, mobs died before iWarden could even finish his channel.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Since when can’t an ele manage? You got a metric ton of condi cleanses, ether renewal makes you immune to cripple spam unlike a mesmer, and if it gets really bad you just take arcane shield+mist form+ lightning flash and d/f for obsidian flesh.

On my ele I joined a run in progress for CM, the thief didn’t seem interested in coming to stealth me through, so I ran all the way from the bridge area to the endboss zone and barely suffered a scratch.

Mesmer is literally one of the worst classes to make easy runs with on a bad group, everyone likes to run ahead of you and with your limited access to speed boosts without using outside objects, it’s very easy to get put in combat run speed with a short, kittenty curtain swiftness.

And I don’t even understand how Guang can say mesmers make the best world bosses range class when the phantasms die immediately before they even do damage to Tequatl and they don’t even bother attacking objects like Jormag’s ice wall.

With that said, as much as mesmers may sufefr in PvE, the OP made a critical mistake:

Context. That statement was given in the context of an spvp centered event. Of course they’re gonna talk spvp to people in tournaments and demos.

It is true that unfortunately too much skill balancing has been done for spvp and WvW without caring for the consequences in PvE, but you have two options — you give up on the chance that the developers might do something right for a change, or you wait and see. Either way, if you’re so sure the outcome will be bad, you always have the option to not play.

In GW1 mesmers waited a very, VERY long set of years before they were revamped into usefulness.

CM isn’t Arah. I’m not talking about doing the bare minimum and running through and afking for 30 minutes while the rest of the party attempts the skip and fails repeatedly, I’m talking about helping them through it so I can avoid exactly that. Mesmer can solo clear all the turrets before Ooze they don’t wipe the bads, then portal everyone from the WP to Entities, then from the WP to Shoggroth if necessary. Then you can easily solo Stargazer, not to mention they make Lupi go much faster with pugs and generally have lots of options to escape being domed or shadowstepped by pugs trying to range Lupi.

Um, a guardian just slaps on retreat+stand your ground+purging flames with condi clear on shout and he can carry any group through any run in Arah. Good for you that you can do the run solor whiole they wait and then portal them, it’s about the same time as a guardian or thief runs the group through with aegis/stability or stealth.

And any class can solo Arah p1 it’s not a mesmer exclusive skill.

Then you have fractal 50 in which mesmer is unarguably worse than a guardian or thief, and hell guardian and thief are better in pretty much most instances for carrying a group, especially in colosus with blind spam and aegis and higher uptime on reflects when mesmer illusions are getting massacred.

Not that it’s much of a plus to a mesmer. Carrying is not something most people want to do.

I’d love to see your guardian help a pack of idiots run through a pack of illusionists or oozes with just those three skills.

If the people you choose to waste your time with are that bad, maybe you should reconsider the runs you do.

Draknar.5748:

So basically you don’t think it’s fair that people can get 10AP per day by doing easy tasks, even though you have the same exact access to those easy tasks.

I get your point, but come on, we’re talking about 10AP that you, as a clearly capable player, can complete in 7-10min…

I do the things you’ve listed and take the extra 10min for easy AP…

You needn’t think beyond it being easy AP for everyone.

Then they are CHORES. The whole concept behind an MMO is CHOICE. PvE dailies don’t reward your choices of play, unlike the pvp dailies.

I hate the daily pve and have no interest in pvp most of the time, so I just don’t do the daily.

I play this game to do dungeons and challenging organized content, not to farm or join a zerg mashing 1111111112311111111 in dynamic events which are just zerg content designed for incompetent people.

If the game doesn’t want to reward me for making an effort in their game instead of being bored out of my mind pressing autoattacks against upscaled easymode content, that’s on the developers.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Zenith.7301:

Since when can’t an ele manage? You got a metric ton of condi cleanses, ether renewal makes you immune to cripple spam unlike a mesmer, and if it gets really bad you just take arcane shield+mist form+ lightning flash and d/f for obsidian flesh.

On my ele I joined a run in progress for CM, the thief didn’t seem interested in coming to stealth me through, so I ran all the way from the bridge area to the endboss zone and barely suffered a scratch.

Mesmer is literally one of the worst classes to make easy runs with on a bad group, everyone likes to run ahead of you and with your limited access to speed boosts without using outside objects, it’s very easy to get put in combat run speed with a short, kittenty curtain swiftness.

And I don’t even understand how Guang can say mesmers make the best world bosses range class when the phantasms die immediately before they even do damage to Tequatl and they don’t even bother attacking objects like Jormag’s ice wall.

With that said, as much as mesmers may sufefr in PvE, the OP made a critical mistake:

Context. That statement was given in the context of an spvp centered event. Of course they’re gonna talk spvp to people in tournaments and demos.

It is true that unfortunately too much skill balancing has been done for spvp and WvW without caring for the consequences in PvE, but you have two options — you give up on the chance that the developers might do something right for a change, or you wait and see. Either way, if you’re so sure the outcome will be bad, you always have the option to not play.

In GW1 mesmers waited a very, VERY long set of years before they were revamped into usefulness.

CM isn’t Arah. I’m not talking about doing the bare minimum and running through and afking for 30 minutes while the rest of the party attempts the skip and fails repeatedly, I’m talking about helping them through it so I can avoid exactly that. Mesmer can solo clear all the turrets before Ooze they don’t wipe the bads, then portal everyone from the WP to Entities, then from the WP to Shoggroth if necessary. Then you can easily solo Stargazer, not to mention they make Lupi go much faster with pugs and generally have lots of options to escape being domed or shadowstepped by pugs trying to range Lupi.

Um, a guardian just slaps on retreat+stand your ground+purging flames with condi clear on shout and he can carry any group through any run in Arah. Good for you that you can do the run solor whiole they wait and then portal them, it’s about the same time as a guardian or thief runs the group through with aegis/stability or stealth.

And any class can solo Arah p1 it’s not a mesmer exclusive skill.

Then you have fractal 50 in which mesmer is unarguably worse than a guardian or thief, and hell guardian and thief are better in pretty much most instances for carrying a group, especially in colosus with blind spam and aegis and higher uptime on reflects when mesmer illusions are getting massacred.

Not that it’s much of a plus to a mesmer. Carrying is not something most people want to do.

Advent.6193:

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Unless they revert the ileap nerf. =P

Sure, Chaos. They’ll revert the ileap nerf … just like Eles got the nerf on RtL removed. Or Glamour got put back to rights.

It’s still incredible they chose to give RtL such an obscene cooldown when my ranger can use swoop and monarch’s leap back to back in less than 12 second cycles. Or thief just using shadowstep+infiltration arrow goodbye. Or warrior out of all classes getting better escape as a heavy armor class, with stance immunities, the best heal in the game.

And they will never attack at the same speed players do because mobs in things like fractals autoattack for as much as 4k+ a hit. Player healthpools are too small to support the whole “do damage to the mob for hitting you for 1/4 to 1/3 of your health”.

They just need to retool the way confusion works. Make it like the GW1 mesmer hexes where when you attempt the skill it interrupts you and detonates for a chunk of damage. Retaliation needs to reflect back a set percentage of the damage back at the target (balanced separately for pvp and pve of course). That way it’s not broken against mesmer greatsword and ranger bows but it’s useful against all attacks.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Artemis Thuras.8795:

Zenith.7301:

Jerus.4350:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNepDf9hBHU

Not saying confusion is all that great, but cool video

That’s a bug exploit. And even with an exploit it’s slower than some zerker solo kill.

lol?

So confusion is an exploit now? ok then…

I think he was referring to the “not even dodging, moving, or using any defensive skills, but taking no damage” part, not the “I killed the boss using only Confusion” part.

I had thought of that.

That is how alpha was designed though.

So my reply has to be:
Working as intended is now an exploit? ok then..

Don’t be stupid, that’s about as intended as abusing the hitbox on lupicus for the projectiles to not hit you or not trigger his p3 attacks.

The point is with that bug he was able to also reliably channel scepter 3 for confusion upkeep, whereas in any encounter where you can’t channel it reliably since you need to dodge, a mesmer confusion build does not have good confusion upkeep as in the video — which is pitiful because even by cheesing the encounter to easily have 25 stacks of confusion the kill speed is miserable.

I’ll be utterly disgusted if Revenants replace Ritualists. Ritualists wear light armor and are super revealing, even the men; they don’t wear hulking plate armor covering all their tattoos and body up.

Moreover ritualists used caster weapons.

What a waste of money tbh.

Giltheryn.8603:

So when crafting some ascended weapons today for my guard, I realized that a 1-handed sword and a greatsword cost what appears to be exactly the same amount of materials. See: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Zojja%27s_Blade and http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Zojja%27s_Claymore for example. This seems very odd to me. It means that crafting a main-hand and off-hand weapon is significantly more costly than crafting a 2-handed weapon. I’m wondering if this is intentional, or if it’s a design oversight. If it is intentional, what’s the rationale behind that decision? It may just be because it’s 3AM and I’m tired, but it doesn’t appear to make much sense to me at the moment.

Makes about as much sense as it being the same for legendaries. A Twilight takes the same amount of materials as a Bolt, and Bolt is even more expensive because of the lodestones involved.

Most importantly, a 1h legendary consumes the same amount of gifts of exploration, easily the most tedious task out of crafting a legendary.
There’s also the bias that when you make a 2H ascended you get the 2 infusion slots in one go, whereas you need to craft 2 1h ascended for the same agony resistance.

Don’t ask why, a lot of the stuff they do just isn’t well thought out and developers are pig headed about their babies (their design concepts) to often admit and work to change what’s wrong. This goes for most games.

StickerHappy.8052:

Zarathustra.1458:

You know, nothing really is worth as much as three main hand skills. Utilities always have 20-30s cooldowns, profession mechanics always have long cooldowns, and our mechanics have always been lackluster. So what could really make up for a new auto-attack doing power ranged damage without locking us into a GS?

Uhmm.. Mind wrack is 15 seconds? Shatter is lackluster? Whattttt?

In PvE, shatters are total kitten. In large scale WvW, shatters are total kitten (the clones don’t even live long enough to make it to the target).

Cry of Frustration is total kitten everywhere.

Shatters are the one mechanic where you sacrifice all your damage generating sources (including phantasms) in order to have survivability or CC. A warrior sacrifices little by comparison when he empties 3 bar of adrenaline and crits someone for 12k+. Warrior adrenaline bars don’t die to aoe on the ground. Warrior adrenaline skills aren’t unable to hit certain objects because they have no clear pathing skills.

And when the warrior mace burst skill, which is a longer duration diversion that is a stun is used, it stuns immediately, it doesn’t wait for some kittened, fragile AI to walk to a target and hope the interrupt goes off in time.

Caelus.7139:

Jasher.6580:

Mesmers from inception: Hey ArenaNet, we would really love to have Main hand Pistol.

ArenaNet: Okay, that’s what you want? Here’s an offhand shield.

+1 Sums up the whole dev-to-mesmers communication.

It’s not a mesmer thing.

Remember that “big” patch Peters hyped up for rangers back then? Turned out to be entirely about aquatic skills.

It’s just how they develop. The one MMO without a public test realm/server to test changes out before they happen with player feedback in mind. It’s pretty clear player feedback is very low on the priority list when they make balance changes.

Or, when that person joins your fractal 50 and you see their health dip a lot with agony ticks, you just kick them for lying.

That’s why you also do fractal 40 instead of 39.