Guild Wars 2

Always take a screenshot of their names before you start the fractal.

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.

Well glad to see I can throw my mantra of concentration into the trash can for PvE, those kitten Inquest Technicians in Arah P2 will now be able to stun you to death again.

Yeah OP, great idea, just delete the mesmer and necromancer if you make the only thing they have that an ele or guardian or warrior can’t bring available to everybody or just nerf it.

It’s not like guardians and eles aren’t farting boons right and left to 24/7 uptime on WvW guardian trains.

SkylightMoon.1980:

I don’t agree that mesmer is the worst in pvp. I think that they could use some buffs to survivability, but otherwise its a rarely played class because its so hard to play. Shatter probably has the highest skill cap in game, and is really really capable if put into the hands of the right person. Most people just dont want to put the thousadns of hours of effort into the class thats needed to play it extremely well. Most would prefer to run a cele ele or a cele war, something that really takes no brain to play and is extremely forgiving.

Calling ele a brainless class pretty much shows you have no clue what you are talking about. Going through might stacking rotations, managing your attunements well so you don’t get locked out of water or lightning at the wrong time, using your cantrips smartly so the random sword thief doesn’t just eat you alive with boon steal spam.

Landing a fire grab with its buggy hitbox is a mission, using lightning flash to land burning speed.

Ele is far from an easy class. Just because it’s a strong 1v1 class in the hands of competent players does not make it a brainless class.

Don’t call a class with powerful synergies and properly designed utilities and skills brainless. Maybe the mesmer is just handicapped by design. The difference between a good and a bad ele is fairly obvious, just as much as that between good and bad mesmers.

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.

You could buff these skills by 300% and they’d still be bad. Especially retaliation. You need to give them some actual utility desirable for PvE environments. Husks are not a good example of it at all as mentioned in the interviews, because husks attack so slowly.

There’s also the issue of confusion that the confusion centric class, the mesmer, is actually the worst at applying it. An engineer puts a mesmer to shame in confusion, and it’s all because of how impractical applying confusion as a mesmer is. An engineer does an instant swipe that does large amounts of direct damage and applies a large amount of stacks of confusion that has a good duration.

Mesmer confusion stacks lasts mostly a pitiful 3.5-5 seconds, it’s such a miserable duration and frontloading confusion as a mesmer is not really good, you need to pick up deficient traits and the terrible weapon that is the scepter (with its pitifully weak autoattack and a weak, low duration torment and a 1 second windup on its 3rd chain). Most mobs move very little in PvE so torment is even worse than bleeds in said scenarios.

Then you have the scepter #3, with a huge windup to apply the amount of confusion stacks a single prybar does instantly, and the engineer can even stack more confusion between prybar and pistol.

In fact if you ever make conditions a thing, the engineer will dwarf mesmers and necromancers in condition application with his ease of frontloading conditions, the wide variety he has not needing to use deficient weapons, and on top of having most of them covered with pistol/shield+grenade and bomb kit, he then brings immensely more utility via CC, the amazing healing turret (which is just a better water field than healing spring, whose duration you nerfed for pvp purposes), blinds and easy blast combos for stealth and fire blast finishers.

I’m really trying in seeing the use of retaliation on phantasms, when you don’t want them hit to begin with because they’re all a mesmer’s damage in pve so their death is a huge detriment, or the retaliation on necromancer’s axe #3 (doing 400 damage back to mobs with vast hp pools per time they hit you is a joke).

Things like ethereal fields in general are really bad, as are comboed guardian symbols, and even things like fire shields and frost auras.

You need to find a way to make fields and combos desirable without the whole “you ruined my fire field with your symbol, I hate you”. Taking a look at the strngth of might stacking with just a couple of fire fields is probably needed, it’s too easy to reach high uptimes of 25 might stacks and its benefits entirely dwarf the benefits any other field provides.

And ethereals, especially chaos armor, are just bad if they don’t provide the 4 seconds of protection chaos armor from the mesmer staff innately provides. Randomized boon gain is just a really bad idea, especially with the short boon durations.

Great, so we’re down to nitpicking typos when the context obviously communicated what I meant.

Linken.6345:

Zenith.7301:

Shiren.9532:

Wethospu.6437:

I wonder how people managed to finish dungeons when game launched. No veterans for help. No guides to look up. Somehow we still managed.

Because the current attitudes and beliefs about how people complete a dungeon today are beyond unnecessary (I know your post wasn’t meant as seriously as I’m responding to it). You don’t need to stack, you don’t need to stack might and fury (hell, half the pugs I join don’t do this), you don’t need to be in zerker and you certainly don’t need to bring two ele, one warrior, one guardian and one thief meta builds.

The current meta has become a low skill-cap crutch – dungeons are fast and easy when you all run zerker, all stack might, all run meta professions and builds and all LoS every mob.

Taking it to less of an extreme, there are multiple ways to reach 25 might stacks and perma fury. Many professions have powerful melee cleave weapons, many professions can apply vulnerability stacks and all professions have +% damage traits. We have pug groups thinking they need a speed clear, record breaking meta simply to get their daily dungeon gold grind done quickly and efficiently when that’s simply not the case.

What do you mean it’s not necessary?

I got maybe 2-3 hours to play. The difference between a group that finishes a dungeon in under 10 minutes and one that takes 20 minutes to an hour directly impacts whether I can do my dungeon tour.

What’s more, people who want to save time also do it because if you finish those dungeons faster, you get to have time to do something else.

Let’s give an example. I want Kudzu right now. That’s around 2k+ gold worth of mats. Or I want the dreamthistle skins which each are going for 1k since I missed a few before they retired them.

So doing 20-30 minutes a dungeon path with a deficient pug I might fit say 6 runs at 30 minutes or 9 with 20 minute clears. That’s essentially between 6 (let’s say 7 gold with dropped mats) to 9(10) gold for these runs.

At 7-10 gold per play session, it would take me 100 three hour play sessions for a dreamthistle skin (assuming that by 100 days the skins are not bought out and the prices go even higher for the few remaining) if I am earning 10 gold per play session, or 200 play sessions for the legendary.

That’s really bad.

People are obsessed over speed clears in this game because the rewards are total garbage and the gold grind for skins massive due to everything being attained via low RNG droprates (even with precursor collections in HoT, you can’t farm lodestones or t6 mats reliably so those ridiculous costs due to low RNG remain).

They started with tokens for dungeons and soon after that anet realized if people get their items after a a couple of weeks or a month, they couldn’t milk their wallets dry in the gem store with gem>gold exchange. So they went down the casino route of walling everything behind RNG and low rewards to frustrate enough players to spend some gold on their cash store to speed up the process.

please tell me how arena net take my real life money when convert ingame gold to gems.

Don’t be annoying.

No game takes your money. Much like all F2P games, they put in enough grind/inconvenience that it encourages enough (in case you still want to be annoying, ENOUGH, not ALL; you’re not the center of the universe) people to convert their money into ingame currency to reduce the grind time.

And if you think 3k gold without playing the TP is not a long enough grind, or each dreamthistle skin going for 800+ gold, then you’re just trolling.

That is the entire basis of free to play games. Placing enough annoyances/obstacles to incentivize people to spend cash at the store.

Sublimatio.6981:

fracture.9754:

slow clap

No, I will not stop whining on the forums about necros, because I want to play mine in dungeons

plz read yourself again, even few times. why are you here seeking attention instead of playing your necro in dungeons like u want? i play my necro everyday in high-end pve and i dont feel the urgency to whine on forums about my class anymore. ANet is alrdy quite aware of the uselessness of this class, especially now after AngryJoe mentioned it in front of Colin’s face

AngryJoe only mentioned it in the context of conditions sucking, as if necro were only about conditions. Which is also a constant PvP guy perspective, that power necros somehow are fine.

Caeledh.5437:

tigirius.9014:

Actually no, if you look at the math you’ll see how it doesn’t really scale much at all with the plus to healing on many classes

It does. The problem is you’re not looking at the whole picture.

This is regen’s healing power scaling.

130 + (0.125 * Healing Power) per second

Yes, .125 is very low in comparison to some abilities which scale up to at least 1.0 (could be some with higher). But what you’re not taking into consideration is those other abilities don’t fire off every single second. Most of them have cooldowns well in excess of 10 seconds.

Over a 10 second period regeneration does 1300 healing + 1.25 * Healing Power.

Do the same conversion (based on cooldown) for any other healing ability in the game and you see regen’s scales quite well with healing power.

1300 healing over 10 seconds is pretty meaningless in a game where PvE mob autoattacks hit between 4-8k and bosses can hit for up to 12-13k.

In PvP it’s just worse, people can kill you in under 5 seconds with coordinated burst and even if you lasted 20 seconds 2600 healing is a mere autoattack crit which people are spamming you with.

The classes that make good bunkers heal up with other sources of healing primarily, not regen.

The GW2’s versions of regen and conditions were a good system, they were potent enough.

The problem with this game is crybabies crying about dying to 15 stacks of bleeds and burning and poison. Duh, how else do you expect a condition spec to kill you, certainly not with its 400 damage autoattacks compared to a berk player doing 2-4k with autoattack crrits let alone backstabs and eviscerates and whirlwinds and hammer spam.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Oh and as for shield, yeah I’ll take it thanks. I just expect all other weapons in due time. MH axe to go with my shield lickety split.

Norn mesmer with axe+shield is perfect.

Who’s our forum specialist anyways? Did we get any? Or was that only for non-class categories?

What if using a shield changed all 5 of your skills, with the 3rd skill being a different one depending on the mainhand? Sorta like the thief’s weapon combos.

NO.

I don’t want a ranged single target weapon. That’s called the greatsword, just buff the #2 and #1 and it’ll be fine.

What the mesmer needs is more effective, reliable aoe/cleave, not less. And I don’t want a mainhand pistol. I hate pistols and rifles, my mesmer in GW2 had nothing to do with pistols.

Keep that modern crap for the engineer.

The reason cele works on ele & engi is because they stack boons well such as might, and have a lot of healing skills and hybrid abilities (abilities that deal both power and condition damage, amplified by the stats in celestial AND the might stacks).

Mesmer has none of those. You also notice that rangers do not run celestial efficiently either. Any class that can’t might stack and doesn’t have several healing skills and hybrid abilities sees little returns.

Healing power as a stat is only “good” for guardian, engi, and ele.

Zui.9245:

Zenith.7301:

Meleeing mossman on a pug is a very bad idea as is meleeing archdiviner p2/3 at fractal 50 also in a pug. Everything else you can melee.

Because PUGs who apparently cannot melee mossmann or archdiviner are totally capable of meleeing the rampaging ice elemental or dredge powersuit. Makes sense.

Yeah? The difference is in the speed of the autoattacks. Both the ice elemental and dredge suit have a huge wind up to their melee attack.

Archdiviner and mossman autoattacks are much faster, and archdiviner will plain one shot anything that isn’t heavy armor. I’m not talking the archdiviner’s jump, which is more telegraphed. I’m talking his normal melee swings, which you want aegis or protection for since you’ll likely won’t dodge all of them consistently.

And pugs don’t rotate aegis or keep up protection well much less use their guardian group heals or blast water fields when needed.

Both the ice elemental and the dredge warsuit also have massive models so their attacks are easy to see throughout the spell effect clutter that elementalists and guardians create on human-sized mobs.

Caeledh.5437:

Zenith.7301:

Regen is a pathetically weak boon, you shouldn’t include it there.

You realise it comes in different intensities, right? When it’s at level 5 (Guardian mace symbol of faith) or 6 (Ranger healing spring) it can do a massive amount of healing.

At level 80 it’s 130 + .125 * healing stat per second per level of intensity.

With a healing stat of 0 that’s 650 for symbol of faith and 780 for healing spring per second. With the right traits and enough boon duration the regen on both can be constant.

At level 1 intensity – which is what most other abilities give – it is a bit weaksauce – and sadly doesn’t stack in intensity. But it’s not a universally weak boon.

Yeah well, I don’t want anything under my smoke/dark/fire fields ;p

Even the modifiers are problematic because some of them rely on full endurance or flanking the target when in many scenarios doing so is not feasible. And yeah those are the better modifiers, but rangers also suffer from their power based weapon traits being stuck in the toughness and vitality lines.

I’m also annoyed that with the mesmer, the signet recharge reduction trait hasn’t been merged with something else like the others did. Not that the active effects for them except for inspiration are worth much.

It’s why I’m worried about the revenant. In 2 years they didn’t even get remotely close to fixing the weaker classes and having some semblance of class balance, and for this expansion instead of pouring their assets into fixing the classes they introduce another profession, and a heavy armor one at that as if heavy armor professions weren’t favored enough already.

frifox.5283:

Zenith.7301:

warrior mainhand axe just dwarfs any autoattack damage from the ranger, mesmer, and necro.

Mesmer coefficients / dmg for weapon skills are low because ANet expects mesmers to reach full dps potential with the help of phantasms (or pets for rangers, minions for necros). What they are refusing to acknowledge is how fragile phantasms are, effectively preventing us from reaching that potential “high” dps. Phantasms are more fragile than a fully glass ele yet do half the ele’s damage.

ANet justifies our low dps because we have utility that ele doesnt have. Reflects, crowd control, interrupts, aoe stability, aoe condi cleanse, timewarp, portal.

PS: talking about pve, pvp is a gamemode I’ve never bothered with.

Yeah, for example. I traited persisting images for 20% hp on phantasms, used the signet for 50% extra hp on illusions, and still a single abomination autoattack swing in arah 1 shots them.

Pets need 90% aoe/cleave damage reduction if not total immunity in pve, period.

Another problem is the cooldown on our phantasms is entirely based around pvp scenarios. When mobs die so quick in pve, you just blew a 15+ sec cd phantasm only to watch it die a few seconds later after the mob dies.

Really, I’m surprised they haven’t given us the Kasmeer treatment. If you look, her phantasms stay spawned despite mob death and follow her. That’s how it should function, our images should be bound to us and attack what we are attacking and shatter on who we are targeting when we issue the command.

As far as utility, while we bring reflects and portal, eles bring condi clear, fire fields, and fury on top of useful conjures. And so do guardians. The only classes with utility worse than the mesmer imo are necromancer and ranger.

The developers simply have done a terrible job with pets and minions in this game, they refuse to give pets aoe immunity because two rangers might switch aggro on something like lupicus, yet classes are able to solo the kitten thing already. If minion aggro on bosses could be exploited, simply remove minions off the aggro table of bosses. If we’re balanced around having minions up, then those minions need close to 99% uptime.

Even then, we don’t have much in the way of cleaving phantasms. If they fixed pets to not die from aoe and be off the aggro table, our clones would reliably stay up in PvE. Then we could change shatter so it doesn’t shatter phantasms and buff its damage around the use of 1-2 clones so we can use shatter for aoe purposes without killing our sustained damage.

They also need to switch signet of midnight to provide 25% run speed instead already or buff the kitten swiftness duration and fix the swiftness stacking on temporal curtain.

Signet of Illusions should be reworked to something else. Signet of Inspiration needs to have its interval shortened to 4-5 seconds and apply two boons at a time.

Power Block’s 2 sec stability is pitiful, increase it to 3-4. Mantra of Pain needs a good damage boost, it hits for less than the final chain of our autoattack. Make each charge apply 7-8 stacks of vulnerability for 10 seconds.

Cry of Frustration needs to not be totally useless. And just can all those garbage new traits they gave us for something useful.

I was watching the Revenant skills and traits on Dulfy, and if they don’t revamp necro/mesmer/ranger for HoT, it’s going to be pointless playing any of these classes.

Embrace The Bold.7619:

tigirius.9014:

This needs to be addressed actually because I think it’s a very real possibility if the development team doesn’t complete the fleshing out of the combat system by continuing to fix inherent combat issues like condi stacking and support weakness in PVE.

My fear is this: That nothing more will be done to completely flesh out the PVE combat complexity by continuing to add to the complexity of combat in order to put together teams that use a trinity system (in which trinity lite is an option but not required) and instead we’ll see groups of all guardians, warriors, and now revenants in these dungeons and if you aren’t one of those three they’ll kick you at every opportunity.

That’s what I see coming unless major changes continue down the path started with the addition of Taunt in PVE.

Support weakness? I wasn’t aware that aegis, fury, vigor, condi cleanse, protection, reflects, regen and might were weak. Support means many things to different people and in this game support is fine. Remember this game doesn’t have healers so trying to be one won’t work well! Also if you exclude all classes except warrior and guardian from the game currently your group is got a very bad comp. However condi stacking is an issue but I doubt Anet will doing anything about it.

Regen is a pathetically weak boon, you shouldn’t include it there.

Warrior ability cooldowns if you bother to take a look at them all have ridiculously short cd’s. Just look at 100b, a skill that dies so much damage on a ~6 sec cd. Eviscerate does more damage than a shatter and you can’t really kill warrior’s adrenaline unlike clones which you can just spam your cleave for days.

And hell, look at pistol whip, it’s blurred frenzy with double the damage, a built in stun, and can be chained 2-3 times in a row.

Also it’s no mystery warrior and thieves do well because their weapon autoattacks all have high base numbers. The warrior mainhand axe just dwarfs any autoattack damage from the ranger, mesmer, and necro.

Search and rescue used to rez defeated players. That;s when people ever used it. Then they murderered the skill for no reason — oh, wait, we know the reason. Usual spvp whine most likely.

spvp ruins this game for class balance. It’s also why mesmers and necromancers have been constantly kitten.

Meleeing mossman on a pug is a very bad idea as is meleeing archdiviner p2/3 at fractal 50 also in a pug. Everything else you can melee.

Longbow use is perfectly fine for single target bosses like archdiviner and mossman. For archdiviner you can melee while he’s casting the circles and then switch to longbow when he’s active.

PuG’s don’t generally make good use of aegis or protection or reflects so telling people to melee all the time is really bad advice as melee stacking works so long as people know what they are doing (which most pugs don’t).

Also the mainhand axe is terrible for fire shaman. It has completely kitten single target damage. Use greatsword longbow. Basically, barrage as soon as reflects go up then switch to greatsword and maul/cleave all the things and use your jungle drake’s lightning breath.

Offhand axe for fire shaman is kinda alright. The reflection radius is pitifully small so you’re not going to be reliably protecting your group, and its duration relative to cooldown means you’ll need more deflection than that. Moreover, you are reflecting but in the meantime you;re not doing much damage yourself as you are stationary and channeling a wimpy skill.

Leave the projectiles to your d/f ele or guardian or mesmer. Your job is to burst down and snare/control the adds.

And just keep in mind ranger is not a great class to do fractals with. The name of this game is burst, aoe, and boons. Ranger has neither of those outside a rapid fire.

Fun fact, in beta they toyed around with diversion being an aoe daze, as it should have been. Spvp whine got it to the pathetic state it is in, where now you need a master trait to make it aoe.

It’s kinda hilarious a hammer/mace warrior provides more frequent lockdown than a mesmer and it’s aoe control to boot, and their CC weapon does bucketloads of damage with high base numbers as all warrior weapons do.

Or you can be a /p thief and control on demand. All of their weapons CC without trait investment. Mesmer has to kill his phantasms (damage) to affect a single target with an unreliable daze that depends on the travel distance of the clone to the casting target.

But awful autoattacks are not strictly a mesmer problem. Rangers and necromancers suffer the same issues (the ranger’s greatsword used to be even better than the warrior greatsword, just to give an indicator of how far it has fallen). The necromancer was nerfed to HELL in beta.

Pretty much every class you see that kinda sucks in the game, was one of the classes that received significant nerfs by the end of beta.

In beta they’d do balance patches every 2 weeks, sometimes weekly. On live you get tooltip fixes every 3-4 months and a few insignificant number tweaks or irrelevant additions to skills every 6 months.

Then you have brilliant development ideas, for example with the ranger greatsword the issue always was its autoattack chain doing pitiful damage and maul having to big a windup. Instead of fixing its damage issues, a particular developer went in and wanted to remove the built in evade from the greatsword auto chain and put it on swoop (the built in evade on the attack chain is the lifeblood of any frontline ranger build, rangers don’t have enough mitigation tools beside it to stay in large scale melee). The outrage in the ranger community over such an unnecessary change caused the developer to simply put the evade on swoop and buff the final hit of the autoattack chain by 10%. Basically a change nobody asked for and the damage buff was way too marginal to make the greatsword a competitive pve weapon (rangers only use it over main hand sword because the main hand sword displaces mobs and its animation lock can be a liability in some encounters).

Dub.1273:

xDudisx.5914:

Dub.1273:

Just make sure you never try ele, because once you do and see the huge difference in efficiency, you might never want to touch your warrior or guardian again.

Warrior is still very effective with their unique support from banners.

One warrior makes sense, after that they become wasted party slots. Same for guardian.

Yeah well, welcome to any other class.

At least people still stack guardians and warriors in some instances.

When in hell has a necromancer or mesmer or ranger been stacked; hell, who wants necromancers and rangers to begin with. At least your warrior functions with better versions of spirits that can’t be destroyed by casual pve aoe and can be moved around without needing 6 points of trait investment to be useful. Your greatsword and axe traits are not buried on the toughness and vitality lines, and you’re not flooded with a bunch of worthless minor traits. Your shouts don’t suck for a change (lolranger shouts), and you actually bring boons to the group (lol mesmer/necro).

Have a tissue when complaining about ele’s as a warrior lol. Warriors, thieves, and guardians get no pity from me they’re pretty much the mainstay of any team on all game formats.

Redenaz.8631:

There’s no good way to make this work. If the precursors are tradeable, it would tank the market, and if they’re not…it would still be pretty damaging to the market. Maybe if they’re account bound and randomly assigned, it could limit the impact, because not everyone wants to make the legendary <insert weapon you wouldn’t use or don’t like> even if they had the precursor. (And couldn’t sell it.)

Kinda hard to see birthday precursors as being so awesome, in that light. Many people, myself included, can’t afford the precursor for a Legendary, so they might not mind the precursor market tanking, but I’m wary about the other economic effects that would have. I make most of my money selling rares and exotics on the trading post, and I have to wonder how much of their demand is fueled by people trying to forge precursors.

Just giving out tons of precursors is a reckless solution to a complex problem. Hopefully the upcoming precursor crafting will show the amount of time and thought the developers have spent on it.

To hell with the market, some people just want to play the kitten game not roleplay virtual tradesman.

Market decisions monopolize this game’s development way too much. Keep the market in crafting and convenience, not prestige items.

Rome.7124:

Fay.2357:

Look, I’m not exactly pleased with the state of the class right now, but I like to make sure my complaints have a solid basis in reality.

it’s tough to believe you are not fine with class as is right now, because you do vocally calling people wrong and / or discredit other people’s complaints.

So, I’d love to see your list of what YOU are not happy about, because from the posts I’ve seen you made, you sure sound like you are perfectly fine with the current state of the Mesmer class.

Forum warriors do one thing and one thing only: they argue. That’s what they get on forums for. So just ignore them.

Shiren.9532:

Wethospu.6437:

I wonder how people managed to finish dungeons when game launched. No veterans for help. No guides to look up. Somehow we still managed.

Because the current attitudes and beliefs about how people complete a dungeon today are beyond unnecessary (I know your post wasn’t meant as seriously as I’m responding to it). You don’t need to stack, you don’t need to stack might and fury (hell, half the pugs I join don’t do this), you don’t need to be in zerker and you certainly don’t need to bring two ele, one warrior, one guardian and one thief meta builds.

The current meta has become a low skill-cap crutch – dungeons are fast and easy when you all run zerker, all stack might, all run meta professions and builds and all LoS every mob.

Taking it to less of an extreme, there are multiple ways to reach 25 might stacks and perma fury. Many professions have powerful melee cleave weapons, many professions can apply vulnerability stacks and all professions have +% damage traits. We have pug groups thinking they need a speed clear, record breaking meta simply to get their daily dungeon gold grind done quickly and efficiently when that’s simply not the case.

What do you mean it’s not necessary?

I got maybe 2-3 hours to play. The difference between a group that finishes a dungeon in under 10 minutes and one that takes 20 minutes to an hour directly impacts whether I can do my dungeon tour.

What’s more, people who want to save time also do it because if you finish those dungeons faster, you get to have time to do something else.

Let’s give an example. I want Kudzu right now. That’s around 2k+ gold worth of mats. Or I want the dreamthistle skins which each are going for 1k since I missed a few before they retired them.

So doing 20-30 minutes a dungeon path with a deficient pug I might fit say 6 runs at 30 minutes or 9 with 20 minute clears. That’s essentially between 6 (let’s say 7 gold with dropped mats) to 9(10) gold for these runs.

At 7-10 gold per play session, it would take me 100 three hour play sessions for a dreamthistle skin (assuming that by 100 days the skins are not bought out and the prices go even higher for the few remaining) if I am earning 10 gold per play session, or 200 play sessions for the legendary.

That’s really bad.

People are obsessed over speed clears in this game because the rewards are total garbage and the gold grind for skins massive due to everything being attained via low RNG droprates (even with precursor collections in HoT, you can’t farm lodestones or t6 mats reliably so those ridiculous costs due to low RNG remain).

They started with tokens for dungeons and soon after that anet realized if people get their items after a a couple of weeks or a month, they couldn’t milk their wallets dry in the gem store with gem>gold exchange. So they went down the casino route of walling everything behind RNG and low rewards to frustrate enough players to spend some gold on their cash store to speed up the process.

Why would you want new pets when most of the ones we already have that aren’t cats, drakes, dogs, or spiders are already useless?

I prefer they fix moas and bears and pigs and devourers to not be total garbage first.

Yeah but it’s considerably less than suffering and I’m not even sure over the course of a fight it outdoes the benefit of the alternatives. It’s also stationary so if for some reason your target moves out of it you lose damage.

It’s not really much of a difference.

Sublimatio.6981:

Zenith.7301:

spoj.9672:

Signet of spite doesnt work in DS.

But…. it’s not like the necro has any better options than signet of spite and you’re still bound to use your weapon autoattacks every so often.

You use both wells and BiP for DS build

Which I mentioned? Well of Suffering and BiP. All the other wells are fairly useless anyways in most scenarios, well of darkness is of no use with a thief around and its long cd hardly justifies its use on a boss given its benefit compared to signet of spite. Signet of spite might not work in DS, but extra power is never an extraneous feature whereas condi removal/blind is.

The third slot really is up to you but in terms of damage signet is gonna beat it unless you can afford to use a minion instead on that encounter.

Part of the pull of a legendary though is having a weapon whose stats you can swap on demand without having an inventory full of different stat weapons though.

I would never bother with the cancer that is world exploration (and I did it on my slow as kitten mesmer shivers, never again I had to use runes of the centaur and mantra to keep up perma swiftness) just for a couple thousand gold. Ew.

spoj.9672:

Signet of spite doesnt work in DS.

Isn’t it lovely just how neglectful the design is? Pretty much how rangers begged them on beta to not implement pets, and they went with it anyways and 2 years in we still have that terrible piece of AI that doesn’t even scale with gear stats, cannot cleave (unless it’s a single pet family out of the entire bunch), and doesn’t benefit from foods/consumables and cannot avoid certain attacks or attack certain targets. And that’s just ranger pets, which are miles ahead necromancer minions.

But…. it’s not like the necro has any better options than signet of spite and you’re still bound to use your weapon autoattacks every so often.

I was looking at the Revenant skills and traits and I can only hope anet is going to revamp the vanilla classes’ traits and skills to the same level of potency/utility.

I prefer axe over staff personally, dagger generates life force fast enough when i need it, and in those times i come out of ds and it’s on cd so I can’t range, I use ghastly claws.

But yeah, necro isn’t particularly hard, use blood is power, use focus 4 and drop your well of suffering and go spam life blasts until you get to 50% life force then exist and spam some dagger autoattacks to get above the 50% threshold and repeat.

People like to say necro is broken, but while it’s one of the weaker classes, the necromancer is miles ahead of poor mesmers, who you just bring for a few gimmicks as their practical damage is terrible. I can spam my necro’s life blasts for damage similar to a phantasm that’s on a 16 sec cd, hits a single target if its not the iwarden, and my life blasts are actually not wiped out by incidental pve aoe spam like mesmer illusions are.

The damage from mobs at 39 is so much weaker than late 40’s or 50 that you don’t even need to stack on the Cliffside fractal.

Really, in the third level you can loosely assemble in the tunnel and just be careful not to cleave the markted add or just cc it out of the way or stealth it away. For the fire level you don’t stack between the circles, just run to the other side and spread around and bring a couple of reflects so you’re only dealing with heartseekers.

Stacking is just a feature that trivializes encounters, there’s absolutely no need in a single encounter to stack. Every single fractal is doable at any level without stacking.

What really will kill your fractal is bad comps (bringing more than one mesemer, if any for example, not having any might stacking or fury providing classes or no reflects/aegis) and lack of damage, as lack of damage will wipe you in any PvE in this game because the mobs WILL overwhelm your healing capacity if you let them live too long.

Most classes won’t have enough self sustain to overcome poor damage output. Those PVT or badly traited/runed people who are weighing you down will barely last a bit longer against the damage mobs do at high level fractals but take many times longer to kill them, so in the end your group actually absorbs more damage and is more likely to wipe.

So rather than saying 39 is broken just look at what’s going on with your group.

Mak.2657:

Zenith.7301:

Those reasons were clones despawning phantasms, which is no longer the case

It is still issue in some builds, when you already have 3 phantasms up (easier with new healing signet). And I’m more about idea then such “active” trait should selectable, not minor trait.
Mb you are right. I personally prefer to DE be minor trait (same as PB works on autos ) because of playing shatter builds mostly. Just not sure that would be healthy.

BUFFS FOR MESMERS! (some riot sign there)

I’d love for all those on clone death traits to be baked into clones themselves. The clones are so useless in a pve environment.

I think a fix as well would be revamping shatter and making it only consume clones, and adjust (condense) the damage to 1-2 clones. That way mesmers still use shatters in pve.

And just give illusions and any pets aoe immunity in pve or the 80-90% aoe reduction WoW has so the illusions are not immediately dying.

Can’t even summon a phantasm on tequatl it dies before it even does the damage to the aoe under the leg.

lol well that reply was surprising. Yeah, I’m done.

“It never happened!” people show it did " Well, I don’t count beta as happening."

Mak.2657:

Zenith.7301:

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/45269-why-is-deceptive-evasion-forced-on-us/

Btw ppl in this topic bring good reasons to DE to be major trait

Those reasons were clones despawning phantasms, which is no longer the case and poor ai issues with the DE clones aggroing to the wrong targets if put in combat and keeping you in combat.

Terrible reasons to remove DE as a minor. There are many minors on other classes that are even better. It was just fashionable to ask for mesmer nerfs, it’s why clones lost their damage and are now useless in PvE besides being shatter fodder (which you don’t want to do to begin with, because you destroy your phantasms which do more damage than a 3 clone shatter itself).

People playing mesmer today don’t know what it used to be. Just like rangers today (there was a time where greatsword rangers were actually scary and their autoattack chain hit hard, they were nerfed to the ground and it has taken them 2+ year to build rangers back up).

Wow, this guy is actually suffering from amnesia. Deceptive Evasion WAS a minor trait. It was in place of sharpened images.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/45269-why-is-deceptive-evasion-forced-on-us/

Note the date. BETA. Deceptive Evasion EXISTED as a minor. Maybe you weren’t here when the class was actually better and got nerfed to hell due to spvp whine. I’ve been here since the very first beta events I don’t need to be told what did and didn’t happen.

If you see the classes that are less represented, it’s usually because their autoattacks, the meat of sustained damage in this game, suck.

The only scepter with remotely good sustained damage is the guardian one, but the projectiles are slow so guardian scepter plays closer. Guardian scepter autoattacks hit pretty kitten hard though, unlike mesmer staff and scepter which hit like wet noodles and require ample ramp up of conditions unlike necromancers and engineers who can frontload their condition stacks (mesmer only has iduelist to do so).

Fay.2357:

Zenith.7301:

They didn’t normalize phantasm cooldowns, please keep up with the changes before calling them lies. They flat out increased phantasm cooldowns for spvp reasons.

Yes, they did normalize phantasm cooldowns. A couple were significantly shorter than others, and so they increased those to be in line with the rest. This happened within the first couple months of release iirc.

Zenith.7301:

I’d also love to know what “myriad” condition removals you have outside slotting null field, because I can tell you my ele can clear conditions baseline with his weaponskills as can a necro, but I’m either giving up mobility, stunbreaks, or cc in my utility bar to deal with conditions since all mesmer weaponskills are virtually empty of side utility except for the odd few miserable stacks of vulnerability or a short duration cripple.

Well, you can take the removal mantra, null field, pDisenchanter is extremely potent, traiting mender’s purity allows any heal to remove conditions and it synergizes extremely well with the heal mantra. You can also trait for removal on the torch skills, though that’s more niche. Lastly, you can trait to remove conditions when shattering, and that’s a really powerful condition removal if you choose to build that way.

Zenith.7301:

Clone generation WAS nerfed. Deceptive Evasion used to be a minor trait in dueling, in place of sharpened images. PvP complaints came in, and it was turned into a major trait instead. Not everyone wants sharper images in their build, but deceptive evasion was good for any shatter build, hell it’s good for the sole reason of othere feast and compounding power by keeping your c lone uptime up. So now if you want deceptive evasion, you have to give up something else.

I’m not sure how many ways I need to tell you you’re wrong, but you’re still wrong.

Zenith.7301:

Shatter damage WAS nerfed. We used to have significant might stacking via shattered strength in the master illusions minor trait, and they took it away. Apparently maintaining 15+ stacks of might is something only warriors and elementalists should be able to do by themselves.

No, they nerfed the might stacking, and they nerfed it about 3 weeks after having buffed it, apparently deciding they didn’t want us to stack might. They never touched shatter damage.

Ok now I’m pretty sure you’re just trolling or being obtuse. Phantasm cooldowns were not changed to be “normalized”, they do different amounts of damage with different effects so putting them all on the same (higher, they didn’t reduce the cd on any of them) cooldown is stupid to begin with. Look at iwarden, it still has a higher cooldown than the other ones, as does illusionary mage while phantasmal swordsman has a whopping 10 secs lower cd than iMage. Can you please stop being so dishonest.

Then you give a non-answer to deceptive evasion. Another troll or meaningless reply.

Shatter damage was touched if the standard damage a shatter build could do with shattered strength was nerfed by nerfing access to might stacking. You are so dishonest and nitpicky about this, it’s as if they took away ele might stacking, it wouldn’t be called nerfing the damage of their skills. The numbers on their abilities and that of many classes in pvp is often balanced around the access to boons certain classes have.

For all practical purposes when they nerfed shattered strength, they nerfed builds reliant on shatter for damage.

And if you’re just going to keep lawyerin, I’m gonna pass on this convo. Because it’s getting tiresome arguing with a guy who says shatter isn’t nerfed when specs centered around it have been abandoned in favor of other ones.

frifox.5283:

Zenith.7301:

Then you have skills like Time Warp which actually WORSEN spells like meteor shower and ice bow by actually shortening the duration of the skills so it’s not actually a damage gain.

That’s new. Where did you hear that or how did you tests that?

Use meteor shower in wvw and I noticed a lesser count of meteors, though I’ll be willing to grant that’s not the best test scenario since I’m targeting moving targets and the varying amount of people within the meteor area at those times can muddy that up.

I’ll retract that statement since Fay also appears to contradict it.

Fay.2357:

Zenith.7301:

God the mobility of mesmers is the worst, get a long duration cripple on you after you used your heal, and you’re going nowhere.

Yeah, unless you have one of many other condition removals available to you.

Zenith.7301:

There’s so many annoying things about the class, just like how your clones do nothing at all without heavy trait investments, how shatters suck without heavy trait investment (and even then it’s pitiful, people talk about phantasm damage yet my necro can pump out life blasts that do the same damage as an iswordsman nuke and pierces in a line, and necro isn’t even a top tier class).

Having things be poor without heavy trait investment is the name of the game for mesmer. We have a lot of mechanics that can do a lot of different things. In order to solidify and focus on one particular thing requires you to trait for it. This isn’t an objectively bad thing.

Zenith.7301:

Then you have skills like Time Warp which actually WORSEN spells like meteor shower and ice bow by actually shortening the duration of the skills so it’s not actually a damage gain.

Yeah, this is definitely flat out wrong.

Zenith.7301:

yet time and again they’ve gutted shatter damage

No they haven’t.

Zenith.7301:

clone generation (via deceptive evasion change)

No they haven’t.

Zenith.7301:

increased vastly the cooldown on phantasms

Not since like the first month of the game when they normalized all the cooldowns.

Look, I’m not exactly pleased with the state of the class right now, but I like to make sure my complaints have a solid basis in reality.

They didn’t normalize phantasm cooldowns, please keep up with the changes before calling them lies. They flat out increased phantasm cooldowns for spvp reasons.

I’d also love to know what “myriad” condition removals you have outside slotting null field, because I can tell you my ele can clear conditions baseline with his weaponskills as can a necro, but I’m either giving up mobility, stunbreaks, or cc in my utility bar to deal with conditions since all mesmer weaponskills are virtually empty of side utility except for the odd few miserable stacks of vulnerability or a short duration cripple.

Clone generation WAS nerfed. Deceptive Evasion used to be a minor trait in dueling, in place of sharpened images. PvP complaints came in, and it was turned into a major trait instead. Not everyone wants sharper images in their build, but deceptive evasion was good for any shatter build, hell it’s good for the sole reason of othere feast and compounding power by keeping your c lone uptime up. So now if you want deceptive evasion, you have to give up something else.

Shatter damage WAS nerfed. We used to have significant might stacking via shattered strength in the master illusions minor trait, and they took it away (nerfed the might count from 3 down to 1). Apparently maintaining 15+ stacks of might is something only warriors and elementalists should be able to do by themselves.

And base skills requiring heavy trait investment to be any good relative to other classes’ base skills IS bad design. Guardian and warrior are good examples of classes with skills that have high base damage and low cooldowns relative to the damage they do. They don’t have to heavily invest in a traitline so those skills don’t suck.

Look in comparison to ranger spirits. Compared to banners, the baseline spirits are marginal, you need the proc increase trait, and if you want to use them in any pvp at all you want to go master trait to make them move as well when a warrior or engineer can grab their own crap and move it elsewhere.

The superior classes are GOOD from the getgo and get BETTER with traits. The deficient ones have to build up to the good level, and it means the diversity of skills they can use is heavily restricted by what build they bring. You then answer to that with an is-ought fallacy.

Arantheal.7396:

Zenith.7301:

I mean, is an engineer with an air/fire sigil killing you? Not really.

Ever met a static discharge engi?
from 100 to 0 in less than a second if you run anything else than soldiers, knight or dire.

Yes I have, and their burst sequence is so easy to counter, could it possibly be more telegraphed? He’s not hitting you with a single skill or two. If you get hit by the entire chain, unlike a backstab from stealth or an eviscerate or a mace stun into frenzy 100b, you deserve to die because you had ample time to counter it.

Meanwhile a thief backstab with air sigil on a berserker toon (say, a mesmer, because mesmers don’t have viable condi builds for group pvp) will wipe out 60% of that mesmer’s hp and put him in heartseeker spam territory. A skill from stealth you can’t even reliably dodge. And even if you manage to block/evade it the thief doesn’t get knocked out from stealth.

Don’t use bears, their autoattacks do less damage than a burning tick from a condition spec, they’re just bad.

Use drakes, who can be just as tanky and do way more damage on top of doing basic aoe damage.

Moas are also another terrible pet. Their damage is pitiful and in this game the sooner you kill things the less damage you end up risking to take.

Stick to dogs and cats for sustained single target damage, raven for burst, drake for aoe/cleave damage, and spiders for safer but lower ranged damage.

I don’t understand how you can object to rng sigils yet be fine with the presence of critical strikes in the game, which are also unpredictable.

It seems to me what you’re actually complaining about is classes like the thief piling their already high burst with the sigils, in which case you don’t ask for the sigils to be toned down, but rather the class.

I mean, is an engineer with an air/fire sigil killing you? Not really. Neither is a necromancer for that matter.

There are classes like warrior, thief, and medi guard with really high burst, as well as scepter ele (but scepter ele have really long cd’s on burst compared to warrior and thief, so you see them less often, as well as the fact they’re not as mobile or don’t have the staying power of the former classes when pressured).

The sigils are fine, it’s the classes these sigils stack with too well that are the problem. So shift around their damage from burst into more sustained.

God the mobility of mesmers is the worst, get a long duration cripple on you after you used your heal, and you’re going nowhere.

It’s also been 2 years and they still haven’t fixed our temporal curtain renewing swiftness if we already had swiftness when walking through it. It’s just awful. Also, temporal curtain should root for 1-2 seconds initially upon crossing to give it more group utility.

There’s so many annoying things about the class, just like how your clones do nothing at all without heavy trait investments, how shatters suck without heavy trait investment (and even then it’s pitiful, people talk about phantasm damage yet my necro can pump out life blasts that do the same damage as an iswordsman nuke and pierces in a line, and necro isn’t even a top tier class).

Cry of Frustration is terrible, hell confusion on the mesmer is terrible when you look at engineers who spike confusion far better and with longer durations.

Then our signets REALLY suck. Inspiration, a 10 second interval for some random boon, most of them with pitiful durations.

Just like the ranger’s spirits, much of the class requires heavy trait investment to even get to a barely functional state.

And then there’s the fact our autoattacks for some reason do really miserable damage, and autoattacks are a main source of sustained damage in this game, and our only source of continued cleave since in group fights clones and phantasms die too quickly to aoe spam to reliably aoe groups of people down.

Then you have skills like Time Warp which actually WORSEN spells like meteor shower and ice bow by actually shortening the duration of the skills so it’s not actually a damage gain.

The class is one huge gimmick in group play, just a veil/portal/feedback bot.

I don’t even know how thief backstab and warrior damage has barely been touched yet time and again they’ve gutted shatter damage, clone generation (via deceptive evasion change), increased vastly the cooldown on phantasms, nerfed blurred frenzy’s defense.

And then there’s the fact blurred frenzy is just a kitten pistol whip, doing a mere fraction of the damage of a pistol whip (which not only does more damage, but interrupts/stuns and can be chained twice ot three times in a row for massive cleave damage).

AnniMira.2506:

So, mesmer have to avoid using certain weapons in PvE? And one should avoid playing mesmer in PvE? w t f

Mesmer is a kitten pve class because pvp’ers whine about mesmers 24/7 even though they’re not a top tier pvp class, just a good duelist class. And people hate good duelist classes no matter what because most people just care about winning 1v1’s.

Also, mesmer is a target for nerfing because it’s a very hard class to deal with for beginners, the clones can be overwhelming so people who haven’t practiced think it’s broken.

frifox.5283:

Blades of Sabatine.5639:

I don’t care what you all say, I have tested the build out

Please share your build with us. Weapons, traits, gear, runes, sigils, food. Also, how you play it too.

“I don’t care what you all say…”

Should be hint enough that conversation with this guy is going down the rabbit hole.

Wethospu.6437:

Zenith.7301:

Wethospu.6437:

There you go: http://gw2dungeons.net/Search#Ascalonian+Mage

That is pretty neat, just like mai’s spin swirl has a tell as well. Except when your screen is covered with elementalist and guardian spell effects on small humanoids and then seeing those tells in time gets less consistent.

It’s one of the things I really like about my necro actually, when you go into death shroud, the spell effects from other people get toned down a lot so you can actually see crap.

The important part is that their big attack actually has a distinct audio cue.

Ah, that’s pretty neat. Will check it out next time. Thanks.

Becka Williams.4978:

Jerus.4350:

Becka Williams.4978:

If we make instabilities into gambits, they need to be randomized, and cost relics. Random because if they aren’t, some will simply never be used (and adding new ones would be pointless), and cost relics, because it prevents people from doing too many rerolls to get the instabilities they want.

Random is a cheap way of forcing people to do things. If they properly scaled rewards people would do what is rewarding to mix it up. A scaling reward system would do just that. The more something is done the less rewarding it is, the less done the more rewarding. Simply use their metrics in a function to adjust the rewards on a daily basis, if one instability were done 100 times the day before and another 0 times then the 100times one would drop down to the minimum reward while the other raises to the max.

How would people know what gives the best reward? There are, of course, easy and hard instabilities. Presumably, the easy ones will be done more than the kittenes, but eventually, people will choose the instabilities that give them the best reward versus effort. If one instability gives you, let’s say, 5 gold, but makes running the fractal take twice as long as one that gives 2.5 gold, isn’t the one that gives you 2.5 gold the exact same risk vs reward? Now, let’s say it gives 5 gold, but the one that takes half as long gives 1 gold. Some people will do the one that gives 5 gold, but I think it depends on how long the fractal takes to run in the first place. If it’s a difference of, say, 30 minutes versus and hour, I think people will take the 5 gold. If it’s 90 minutes versus 3 hours, well….I think most would take the 1 gold. Plus, fractals are already randomized. Why not the instabilities?

Look at how Wildstar revamped sanctuary of the sword maiden for a good example. The long options should be not only rewarding, but offer a slight advantage in rewards to take into account the time commitment, convenience has value.

Problem is they don’t actually want to make it rewarding. You have to understand a B2P game needs to be inconvenient/unrewarding enough so people spend money on the cash shop. Otherwise nobody buys their gems to convert to gold (which enough people do, even if you don’t see the point in it either because you’re good at playing the auction house or you have plenty of time to kill grinding gold).