Guild Wars 2

Spectral armor is gifting the new fotm flanking strike thief with protection for him to steal.

It’s a 90 sec cd.

Look at ele Armor of Earth by comparison. Longer prot, and long stability to boot.

Whoop dee doo you get life force after getting nuked down while in spectral armor. Go ahead and switch in to death shroud and watch all your pressure vanish as a condition build. Even as a power build death shroud is a damage decrease compared to dagger auto spam.

x per fection x.2096:

Crazy low DPS thief’s

Took me 28 on my guard for the solo and I was almost falling asleep, can’t imagine how it must of been doing it for 48 minutes, your going to need glasses due to eye straining if you keep that up.

Sometimes I think Wethospu has the right idea going 100% zerker all the time.

Berserker is an OP stat, so of course everyone uses it.

The pet will f3 to the safe zone when it kitten well pleases. I actually often have to force it to be where I want with Guard because otherwise it just runs to my side with f3, and my side is not the safe zone center.

I don’t have the 15 points in WS. If you get to the point of 30 in BM and 15 in WS then you can’t really be called a berserker specced ranger with maximum damage output.

My friend and I did about 30 38-48 fractal dailies before my friend stopped doing them.

In those 30 dailies at 48, I have gotten 3 skins, and one is a repeat. My friend got none.

Fractal 48 is easily a 1.5 hour affair, and if you’re unlucky with pugs even a bit longer. It’s outrageous the time investment of doing that place and coming out emptyhanded or with rings you have since very long ago no longer needed.

Loki.4871:

What’s your build? Last run I had a raven out and it never died.

30 BM just like some people have been saying. Even with 25 MB stacks. health on pet crits from skirmishing. natural regen from 30 BM major.

If you’re meleeing, your pet is bound to die because you can’t call it away from the aoe that you yourself are able to dodge through while it has to walk through or tank the damage.

I know the pet is very easy to manage from range — I’ve done it and yes you can call it back with some success a lot of the time. It just doesn’t work when you try to maximize your damage output by meleeing like everybody else does.

You can’t have your pet dodge out of instant kill attacks when you’re not one of those rangers that like to sit on a bow and do deficient DPS compared to better melee damage.

You can walk inside the Molten Berserker to not get hit by the sequences of shockwaves, but your pet won’t get in so if it’s a jaguar particularly it dies.

And any pet that’s not a jaguar does horrible DPS by comparison. It’s nowhere close.

Tanky guardians use mace+focus instead of shield (bouncing blind+regen+3 blocks is way better than a 4 sec cone protection and the very situational shield of absorption). Shield is as much a niche weapon on the guardian as it is for the warrior.

Just play what class you find most fun. A shout heal condition removal Shake It Off warrior is an incredibly good tank anywhere and he can bring the instant rez banner and maybe one extra banner while still bringing 2 good shouts.

Locust Swarm’s aoe damage is pretty negligible.

Phantom.4157:

Zenith.7301:

Phantom.4157:

Zenith.7301:

And for that you either need an engineer or ele to have enough aoe pressure against a shadow refuge rez. Not all classes have great nontargeted aoe sustained.

The time in which that thief gets worn down is time he’s pelting maybe low targets for a good bit and in a close fight that thief can prolong enough to down someone else. In any other case a guy with stability would have long stomped someone.

Engi nades.
Ele earth/fire attunement.
Thief poison/cluster bomb.
Mesmer curtain pull/shatter.
Guardian knockbacks.
Necro unblockable marks.
Ranger pet fear.

These are examples of good ways to deal with shadow refuge ressing, across professions.
In regards to your comment about a thief pelting at a low target… He’ll reveal himself out of refuge if he does so. Every class can do DPS/CC around the body at that point.

Necro marks hardly outdamage the healing rate of someone being rezzed or pressure anyone. 3 stacks of bleeding doesn’t kill or stop anyone from rezzing.

Shatter needs a target to activate. inside the shadow refuge. It’s not ground targeted.

The pelting comment is unrelated to shadow refuge. It’s related to thief downed state pretty much forcing people to waste time DPSing them down because it’s never worth it to go for the stomp on a thief.

Yes, ele mist form is also silly, mesmer downed less so — but the fact is that after the first attempt you can stomp them safely. That’s not the case with the thief. He’s got the best downed state in the game. And all 3 of these classes have answers against stability stomps.

1. When I mention necro marks, I’m especially referring to the fear mark. It’s not always about DPS’ing the refuge. It’s about getting them OUT of the refuge.

2. There’s a reason why I mentioned mesmer pull before shatter.

3. If you were unaware of this, you can literally avoid thief downstate #1 by strafing side to side, just as you can avoid shortbow #1 now.

Thief downed may be the hardest to stomp, but it’s the squishiest and easiest to DPS. It’s also the hardest to res when under pressure from dps/cc. If your opposing team is able to res a downed thief, there clearly wasn’t enough pressure on the downed body.

If there’s a thief on your team, he should be able to secure a first attempt stomp on the opposing thief with shadowstep or infiltrators signet. Some other classes can perform similar actions.

Fair enough points, but the fear mark is on a fairly long cd and not necessarily up.

Also, necro downed state is bugged and they have 33% less hp than they should because in beta they used to have shroud incorporated into the downed state, and when they took that out they never fixed the discrepancy.

Tobias.8632:

Zenith.7301:

You can never afford to use axe and dagger at the same time because you need aoe damage and control, and staff is your only source of it besides axe #3.

And death shroud 4, and well of suffering, and epidemic, and plague.

LOL, one is a channel that doesn’t last at all in pvp under pressure, well of suffering is on a 40 sec cd, and both epidemic and plague are condition build weapons — they do jackkitten for power builds.

Phantom.4157:

Zenith.7301:

And for that you either need an engineer or ele to have enough aoe pressure against a shadow refuge rez. Not all classes have great nontargeted aoe sustained.

The time in which that thief gets worn down is time he’s pelting maybe low targets for a good bit and in a close fight that thief can prolong enough to down someone else. In any other case a guy with stability would have long stomped someone.

Engi nades.
Ele earth/fire attunement.
Thief poison/cluster bomb.
Mesmer curtain pull/shatter.
Guardian knockbacks.
Necro unblockable marks.
Ranger pet fear.

These are examples of good ways to deal with shadow refuge ressing, across professions.
In regards to your comment about a thief pelting at a low target… He’ll reveal himself out of refuge if he does so. Every class can do DPS/CC around the body at that point.

Necro marks hardly outdamage the healing rate of someone being rezzed or pressure anyone. 3 stacks of bleeding doesn’t kill or stop anyone from rezzing.

Shatter needs a target to activate. inside the shadow refuge. It’s not ground targeted.

The pelting comment is unrelated to shadow refuge. It’s related to thief downed state pretty much forcing people to waste time DPSing them down because it’s never worth it to go for the stomp on a thief.

Yes, ele mist form is also silly, mesmer downed less so — but the fact is that after the first attempt you can stomp them safely. That’s not the case with the thief. He’s got the best downed state in the game. And all 3 of these classes have answers against stability stomps.

OGDeadHead.8326:

Zenith.7301:

Eurantien.4632:

This would be a problem for pvp. There are things I HAVE to dodge and there are times my pet HAS to hit so that I can win a fight. Often times those two things coincide. I do not want this as a mechanic.

Make it so when the ranger dodges the pet just gets distortion or evasion status but keeps attacking.

That would most likely be considered OP, even if I would like such a mechanic.

In the past I suggested that the pet either dodge or get evasion on call back, with some form of cooldown on the ability. Such an ability could help in some situations, but I don’t think that would be a good solution either.

And that is OP how? Pets are a portion substracted from the ranger’s own damage. They should have full uptime just like any other class has full uptime so long as they are alive.

And for that you either need an engineer or ele to have enough aoe pressure against a shadow refuge rez. Not all classes have great nontargeted aoe sustained.

The time in which that thief gets worn down is time he’s pelting maybe low targets for a good bit and in a close fight that thief can prolong enough to down someone else. In any other case a guy with stability would have long stomped someone.

Bosses don’t focus your illusions. They cleave them when they melee you or place one of their many aoe’s on top of you.

Highest DPS when 3 phantasm’s out? Assuming said phantasms attack for 4-8k every 4-5 seconds, that’s not even close to highest DPS in game.

My thor ele can cleave for 9-10k auto hits, aoe. Warrior skills, which all hit for similar numbers, also rest at about 8 second cooldowns or less, and the axe gives warrior the highest sustained damage after ele, with all of his offensive utility.

The most common argument when people don’t want to give specifics is “when used properly at the right time”. I hear the same of ranger pets, but the fact is that the ranger is still garbage with poor pet uptime, minion necros don’t exist successfully in high end pve, and all successful pve mesmers run shatter spec because phantasms simply do not last long at all in places like fractals.

I really want you to show me a video of phantasms having any uptime in the ascalon fractal or any other dungeon where you have hard hitting melee mobs whose autoattacks cleave.

You also seem to be forgetting that phantasm uptime and shatter spike are mutually exclusive. To use shatter for the burst, you sacrifice the potential sustained damage of leaving phantasms up (unlike your thief, whose cnd backstab spam in between autoattacks has no impact whatsoever on his sustained).

There is a reason teams run D/P thieves in tournaments over another class. They do the biggest damage spike in the shortest amount of time with little ramp up. The mesmer’s spike takes longer to wind up, can be shut down by killing the illusions, and is entirely telegraphed by clones having to run up to the target, while with a thief the target;s best chance is guessing correctly as to where to circle strafe and cross his fingers the thief doesn’t land a backstab for half his health (non-bunker).

Eurantien.4632:

This would be a problem for pvp. There are things I HAVE to dodge and there are times my pet HAS to hit so that I can win a fight. Often times those two things coincide. I do not want this as a mechanic.

Make it so when the ranger dodges the pet just gets distortion or evasion status but keeps attacking.

Thief downed state needs longer cooldowns in between abilities. It’s pretty stupid you’re pretty much forced to DPS the thief down in downed state instead of the futile effort that is trying to stomp him.

At least the mesmer is just a delay on the stomp but the second stomp attempt can’t be foiled.

randomfightfan.4091:

Mathias.9657:

I think our burst is fine. What I’d prefer is not to die in 3 seconds when going toe to toe with a boss. I am still dying for a source of protection…

We have that role but it’s not how people want it. We have evasion where others have invuln. Only problem is you need to be quick and jumpy where most other classes can melee bosses with the reaction time of a sloth (for periods of time).

@ zenith
I lol’d, thanks for that. You need to do some research on mesmer. You’re right about the 12-13k, add an 8k blured on top of that. Here’s the big deal though about the dps you thought was so low. Phantasms. That is all. I’ll leave you to figure out the rest.

Have you played a mesmer? In full berserker with 110% crit damage, BF hits for around 4.6k. An 8k BF is not happening often at all, and on top of it all it roots you in place and is on a 8-10 sec cd.

Phantasms don’t stay alive on any dungeon shortly after they’ve been summoned, and at best hit a target for 8k. That’s 2 warrior axe autoattack crits. Warden doesn’t even live beyond a few seconds in fractals. Standard single target phantasms are 16 sec cd’s — warden is even longer.

Test next time before you talk out of your kitten With spending on points on inspiration for extra phantasm HP and signet of illusions, a Frostgorge Sound normal alpine wolf still kills your Warden phantasm in 2 hits. A single normal alpine wolf.

You really seem to have no clue about ramp up in mesmer burst (the fact that each phantasm has a cast time, and you bring 3 clones out to do a shatter, which is several more globals than it takes a thief to do any amount of similar damage. Neither do you have any respectable insight about the applicability of mesmer damage in fractals or dungeons outside cof p1 where bosses and trash aoe the crap out of illusions the moment they come out or how sustained damage is misleading (HB seems really high damage until you figure out its channel is outdone by thor eles or mainhand axe warrior autoattacks — the same case goes for ranger rapid fire).

randomfightfan.4091:

“Thief
Thieves are the masters of mobility, stealth and high single target damage. They can be very fragile if you counter their stealth with area of effects or large stacks of conditions, but they trade this fragility in order to have some of the highest burst damage in the game. They are able to help allies through traps, venoms and the mobility to flank most encounters.”

Right now our single target burst is beaten out by the aoe burst (per each target I mean) by warriors and mesmers. Are thieves ever going to get their burst increased to become #1? Are warrior and mesmer going to have their burst nerfed so they aren’t at the top? Or is everything just going to stay the same?

…..What?

Mesmer 3 clone shatter at best is about 12-13k damage every 12 secs, assuming your clones don’t get 1 shot by mob aoe.

Mesmer sword auto is WAY inferior to thief dagger auto, and the frequency of burst a thief can do with cnd>backstab is much more frequent than mesmer.

Once the mob drops to <50% HP, heartseeker will outdamage a mesmer by a great deal.

You’re not even doing the same burst on a warrior compared to a thief — their haste is nerfed, so now HB at best is a 4 sec damage channel for burst, while your actual mug>backstab burst is much higher damage per action on a single target.

Warriors are just better than anyone because they do close damage to thief, but aoe and on top of it all bring the best offensive utility in the game with banners and for great justice+ vulnerability and might stacking, on top of a 2 sec cast aoe instant rez.

Mesmers are just brought for time warp. If they didn’t bring time warp, they’d be replaced because their sustained damage is actually less than a guardian’s.

What’s the point of types when the game values only a particular type in one of its formats?

Durzlla.6295:

Zenith.7301:

Durzlla.6295:

I’m pretty sure Sick’Em makes your pet deal more damage (assuming it hits the target for the full 10s) than you and your pet boosted with sig of wild…

25% extra damage and stability for both of you for 8 seconds, 10% extra damage from flanking for you vs. 40% extra damage for the pet and nothing for you.

Dojo’s calculations still put the pet at around 40% of your total damage.

Why would you get 10% from flanking in one but not the other? And not gonna lie, I kittening LOVE my BM build of 30/10/0/0/30 build, those signet actives are awesome, i just don’t really use it in PvE because i don’t like multiple gear sets and i just wanna pretend to be the support character of the group in PvE because i don’t tend to take that aspect of the game too seriously xD.

PS: I was assuming that we were in an environment without much CC, if there were a lot of Dazes/ KDs/ KBs etc Sig of Wild would be better hands down, no questions asked.

For example, since we were talking about Molten Facility, gunner loves his little jump that aoe knockbacks. If you are meleeing, this is more of a disruption to your DPS.

Granted, the guardians can bring stand your ground, but it’s not something you can always rely on, and SyG is shorter duration so you can melee till it’s about to run out and then chain it with the signet.

The thing about running 30 BM is that you either lose the 25 in skirmishing, or go for 25 in skirmishing but only get 15 in Marksman. And TBH, marksman has weak traits for the first major trait slot.

You can never afford to use axe and dagger at the same time because you need aoe damage and control, and staff is your only source of it besides axe #3.

I love how people say BF has an 8 sec cd as if mesmers just sat on one weaponset without switching weapons ever.

Mesmer usually spends the majority of his time on staff or greatsword to soften a target and only really uses sword to close a shatter spike with the Swap root.

Durzlla.6295:

I’m pretty sure Sick’Em makes your pet deal more damage (assuming it hits the target for the full 10s) than you and your pet boosted with sig of wild…

25% extra damage and stability for both of you for 8 seconds, 10% extra damage from flanking for you vs. 40% extra damage for the pet and nothing for you.

Dojo’s calculations still put the pet at around 40% of your total damage.

Quarktastic.1027:

People seem to be forgetting that master’s bond and beast mastery increase all of a pet’s stats, not just toughness and vitality. I don’t run master’s bond, but under the right circumstances, I’ve seen my drake crit for as high as 7.8k. Meanwhile, under the same circumstances, I’m critting for over 4k with Maul. Am I dealing as much DPS as a warrior? Not even close. But putting 30 into beast mastery certainly doesn’t kitten my damage.

I could get +300 power if I replaced my beast mastery points with points in marksmanship, but my pet would lose 300 power, In addition to 300 points in every other stat. To me, beast mastery is a traitline that just makes sense to invest in.

You don’t spend in traitlines just for the raw stats. The major traits are a large part of the build, and major traits for BM are garbage in the damage increase department.

Signet of the beastmaster gives you a 25% damage increase to you and your pet for 8 seconds every 42 seconds. That’s an important burst tool. It also gives you better personal survival through signet of stone’s immunity, so you can melee safely for 6 seconds even during a dangerous phase.

It’s also worth noting that the increase from power on you as a player on berserker gear with 110% crit damage bonus and over 54% crit chance is much higher than a drake’s benefit from power when at best they can get 30% bonus crit damage.

So when you got 30 BM, you are sacrificing not only the raw stat for yourself from either skirmishing or marksman, but you are sacrificing beastmaster’s signet trait, and you are sacrificing 10% extra damage from flanking on skirmishing’s 25 passive.

Xsorus.2507:

Cempa.5619:

build for regen and never worry about anything other than a mesmer again.

Really? i find mesmer’s to be one of my guaranteed kills

Most mesmer’s out there don’t run any sort of Condition Removal, so just keep applying conditions while dodging their damage and you should win.

tpvp mesmers put points in inspiration to remove condi whenever they heal and whenever they shatter. It’s about 4 condi clears every 15 seconds with just mindwrack+heal use. Pair that with null field and it’ll be quite some time condis are shrugged off.

Phantasm mesmers are also pretty rare, though, and that’s their prime dueling spec.

Warriors and guardians can carry anyone.

There’s actually a video of a Molten Facility solo with guardian. Guardians really do trivialize threats in the game because most mobs in the game are not terrormancers or engineers or classes that remove the OP boons guardians are constantly stacking on the group.

It’s very hard for you to die when you have a guardian around giving prot, regen, offhealing, aoe blinds, and putting up walls. Then comes in the warrior or thief and blows things up.

I love my ranger and would not play anything else but necro in spvp. Condi builds are very good in spvp. They are NOT good in dungeons.

Mirta.5029:

Einlanzer.1627:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

It seems pretty diverse with five different races. I understand you would like more choices in regards to humans, and that may or may not be available in the future, but it seems ArenaNet took a slightly different course on giving us diversity at this time.

It really isn’t though, it’s all culturally very standard western fantasy (that is not to say it’s bad).

western?
Races given are not mentioned in fairy tale books. They’re completely made up. they can’t really belong to a culture, when it’s a culture that was completely made up.
I can understand you wanting diversity though. Playing trough Cantha on Guild Wars 1 right now and I’m really enjoying the continent

Don’t be obtuse.

Norn are nordic culture. Charr have greco-roman idiosyncracy. Sylvari are the Romantics.

It’s pretty much western civilizations under a different guise.

Psychogene.6780:

Blurred frenzy is one of those skills that is currently maximum reward for 0 risk. With its cooldown and the fact it can be so easily executed out of illusionary leap means pretty much every mesmer runs the sword as a weapon set.

Those 2 second of evasion has so much going for it you can pretty much spam this whenever its off cooldown and never get punished for it if you can dodge,teleport,stealth away. As an offensive tool, its more or less the mesmer’s version of 100 blades with a built in immunity button – this is probably a skill a warrior should have had rather then a mesmer, who really doesn’t need it due to the fact they practically have everything going for them in their favor.

My suggestion is to tone it down as a defensive tool, to stop people mindlessly spamming it to avoid damage. It should receive a penalty for this and rewarded if it hits. So something like this

‘Blurred Frenzy’, 10 sec cooldown -
If it strikes a foe, 10 sec cooldown. If it does not strike a foe or if your not hit in melee range, cooldown is 50% longer (15 secs).

So a nerf similar to ride the lightning for ele’s is how I can see this skill being more balanced. Also the shatter skills should be locked out while this move is being done.

People run the sword because it’s the only mainhand weapon that is not garbage.

A lot of people would love to run a scepter or even maybe a primary staff setup, but both weapons fail horribly as offensive tools. The staff is used purely for the defense — it’s autoattack is one of the worst in the game and Chaos Storm is absolutely awful as an aoe.

Scepter just has nothing good.

The mesmer’s setup is quite limited — condition builds don’t work because of the random condition application, which causes very slow condition ramp up (and vulnerability application is useless for condition specs — the phantasm won’t even hit hard anyways on rabid gear).

So you’re left with either phantasms or shatter. Phantasms don’t work in teamfights because phantasms and illusions are pretty much 2-3 shot — casual aoe will wipe them out easily. So you have shatter as the only viable spec, and worst of all is the fact that their utilities are redundant and phantasm utilities and mimickry and thievery and mantras are just inferior versions of null field and feedback and decoy/blink/MI, and it’s not like you have the option of not running portal.

Using the greatsword on the mesmer pretty much makes you a train target.

Mesmer signets are likely the worst signets in the game. Domination’s condition damage stat is absolutely horrendous (and condi spec for mesmer is terrible anyways), Inspiration’s passive is just really bad and only good with someone else around, and Signet of Illusions makes little difference in illusion survival — with the extra phantasm HP trait from inspiration and signet of illusions, my Illusionary Warden was still dying in 2 hits to a normal Frostgorge alpine wolf’s autoattacks.

Durzlla.6295:

@Zenith actually I did not bring Guard, I used Sick’Em, I also ran axe/axe (as did a lv 25 ranger in the group who was using drake + fern hound), we cleared the instance in 20min with 2 guardians and a warrior.

Fights normally went as so: Guardians pulled everything together, rangers would WD in a position that made all group members safe from projectiles, both pets thrown onto called target via Sick’Em and/or sig of wild active for burst.

Ran with this group 3 times, between me and the other ranger we had 25stacks of vuln an 25 stacks of bleed on the entire enemy ball, -my- gear is total kitten, my weapons were Rares, I run in Magi + Cleric armor, my build is 0/0/10/30/30 so my cat has a perma +5% damage boost (normally not a cat).

Only time someone went down was the low lv ranger who had the RNG gods laugh in his face as he got smacked by every flame circle at once during the final boss fight. Had me and the other ranger, one of the guardians, and the warrior actually been in full exotic gear instead of a mix match of Rares, exotics, no runes/sigils and some greens it would’ve been A LOT faster than 20min.

So please, you have no idea what you’re talking about, pets hit like a truck he I was hardly gimping my group by allowing my pet to regularly hit the enemy for +2.5k damage in a build not built for damage, a few alterations and he could’ve been hitting a lot harder.

Hahahahahaha, you run2 guardians in a group on a 30 BM build and then say pets are fine.

Guardians mitigate the damage the group takes immensely. In fractals more deficient groups just stack guardians because projectile negation and aoe healing is actually effective there.

TBH I don’t even buy your “20 min” run. A lot of the time I’ve seen these wild claims for you but never have I seen anything to substantiate them, not even screen caps.

The pet dies quick enough against eles and engineers. A single HGH engi has me constantly watching my pet.

Ezrael.6859:

Salamol.7963:

You can move away from it, so no I don’t think it’s a problem. I realise that it’s usually used right after a tp/root but it’s one of the reasons to have a stunbreaker.

Stun breaker’s don’t remove the immobilised condition.

Swap and Phase Retreat from Sword and Staff should not be stun breaking skills.

Stun breakers on weapon skills are too powerful.

You mean like thief sword?

Blackhat.4016:

I know that. DPS = Mesmer. Bunker = Ele. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough.

And I’m telling you that as a comparison of DPS ele vs. DPS mesmer the ele still has those advantages vs. the DPS mesmers because ALL of them are universal traits and utilities every ele regardless of gear or weapon setup takes.

The closest to a survivability hit you take between the setups is maybe replacing 2 cantrips for arcane utilities instead on a valkyrie/berk ele.

You don’t take /D for RTL. You take offhand dagger because it gives you 2 aoe knockdowns, a fairly hard hitting fire field and your only hard hitting spike skill (fire grab), and an area denial skill (churning earth forces opponents to either waste a dodge or back off a point.

Focus is garbage. With it you basically have no burst or meaningful damage. What will you do, use your weak autoattacks to kill people and rely on Burning Spped as the only burst skill you’ll have?

D/F only works as a bunker anyways. It doesn’t help the offensive builds that mist form hurt most.

Smooth Marc.8743:

By dps ele i mean scepter/dagger or dagger/dagger.Weapon skill healing,healing ripple ,soothing mist,regen and self healing is more than enough to keep you alive in a 1v1 fight

Really? Because in Valkyrie gear that D/P thief with a single backstab takes away half of my HP and then it’s 2 heartseekers to finish me off.

Same goes for mesmers or any decent trap ranger.

As an ele I can’t go berserker unless I get babysat by my team.

Blackhat.4016:

Zenith.7301:

Swim.6830:

Salamol.7963:

You can move away from it, so no I don’t think it’s a problem. I realise that it’s usually used right after a tp/root but it’s one of the reasons to have a stunbreaker.

It autofaces, unlike 100 blades…

If mistform rooted Eles but was on a 10 sec cooldown, everyone would scream…

Mesmers don’t have prot or regen on attunement swap, they don’t have a pulsing heal that cleanses them of conditions. They don’t get aoe chunks of healing or several aoe knockdowns and a stun aura when hit in melee, and their utilities don’t grant them a long amount of prot and stability or rampant condition removal.

Mesmers don’t get an aoe weakness or a skill granting them near 400 toughness on activation, or aoe blinds. Mesmers don’t have their skill split between power skills and skills that apply powerful cinditions like chill or burning.

Not sure how comparing a DPS build to a bunker build makes this a good argument about Blurred Frenzy. Besides that there are several wrong assumptions. Maybe you should look up a few things before you post here…

Are you drunk?

Standard build even for berserker ele has 20 water 20 arcana at least. Everything I mentioned is included in those traits, and cantrips are available to all builds.

No ele specs into fire or much into earth, and most at best go 20 into air, most often staying at 10 for zephyr’s boon.

Fire, Air, and Earth all have pretty miserable offensive boosts for an ele compared to the survivability sacrifice they suffer if they don’t spend at least 20 in water and arcana. Elemental Harmony, Renewing Stamina are not really optional, and neither is cleansing wave or vigor/regen on cantrip usage.

An elementalist without 20 in water or arcana is a sitting duck.

Swim.6830:

Salamol.7963:

You can move away from it, so no I don’t think it’s a problem. I realise that it’s usually used right after a tp/root but it’s one of the reasons to have a stunbreaker.

It autofaces, unlike 100 blades…

If mistform rooted Eles but was on a 10 sec cooldown, everyone would scream…

Mesmers don’t have prot or regen on attunement swap, they don’t have a pulsing heal that cleanses them of conditions. They don’t get aoe chunks of healing or several aoe knockdowns and a stun aura when hit in melee, and their utilities don’t grant them a long amount of prot and stability or rampant condition removal.

Mesmers don’t get an aoe weakness or a skill granting them near 400 toughness on activation, or aoe blinds. Mesmers don’t have their skill split between power skills and skills that apply powerful cinditions like chill or burning.

Interpret Interrupt.3824:

jportell.2197:

Blackhat.4016:

jportell.2197:

And how many really high damage skills do mesmers have that don’t require a target? How many utility skills offer us invulnerability? How many movement skills do we have inour wweapons? How about for escaping a fight? Even necros can out run us or catch us… What about evades on our weapons as far as weapon movement goes we have 2 that’s it

This… doesn’t make a 2 second invulnerability on a 10 second CD less OP. If you think other skills need a buff that’s fine but this thread is not about the other skills.

It doesn’t make all other classes skills for avoiding damage while still being able to do high damage and deal with conditions better than us any less annoying to us. Blurred frenzy only does high damage in shatter builds and it is the only reliable damage mitigation we have in weapon sets… Both blocks that we have available only block ONE attack while other classes that have them block them for a set duration on matter what. Other classes have better weapon evasion than us. And if they bite off more than they can chew they can run away much easier. And to the person that said “Anything I said is now discredited” A necro with signet of locust is hard to catch especially for mesmers and especially since phantasmal berserker still does not freaking work… I’m sick of my class get nerfed over and over and over just because kittenes cannot L2P. I would loveee to have the damage mitigation that other classes get that mesmers are severely lacking but I deal with what I got. (FYI i’m not defending blurred frenzy because I use sword… haven’t touched it in months.) Objectively speaking other classes match our damage mitigation with their skill and put out high damage still. Blurred frenzy also only does high damage in shatter builds… in other builds (immortal and such) blurred frenzy damage is terrible.

Lol at the l2p claim. No one cares about the blurred frenzy damage.

Two problems with the skill:

1) it auto faces the target and tracks the target. You cannot walk through blurred frenzy and mitigate the damage.

2) 2 seconds of evade. Key word here EVADE. Which means unlike block skills that you claim about every other class which are not evades btw.
Advantages of being an evade:
1) Unblockable items do not hit through it. I.E. warrior new signet, unblockable marks, ground fields etc.
2) it is effectively a dodge, like whirlwind. However before you go on whirlwind 8sec traited cd remember that whirlwind does not track the player automatically. And the evade is only 1 second. Effective up time 12.5%

The mesmer also has lower armor base value, less HP, his skill damage outside shatter cycles are vastly inferior to warrior autos+skill damage spike (mesmer gets shatter — warrior gets eviscerate, whirlwind, 100b and his autoattacks on both greatsword and axe hit like a truck).

It’s kind of silly to compare classes.

You nerf blurred frenzy, and you nerf mesmer viability. He will be squishier than a thief in team fights since he doesn’t have a wealth of teleports or active defense utilities like the ele or massive heals or condi removal.

All mesmer needs like any other aoe cleave skills is for the shatter (and other aoe) to hit the target for 100% and everyone else nearby for 40-50% of the original damage to the target.

Cleave spam problem solved.

The better question is how the queue system allows such horrible team compositions.

Each randomly assembled team should have a queue search for one ele or guardian at the very least.

It’s kind of dumb how a game can match a team with zero effective bunkers against one with 2.

Lorian.4028:

Indoles.1467:

It isn’t hard, people are still learning how to manage their pets. Honestly, this is a huge factor is separating the good rangers from the bad ones. People tell me I should use drakes in wvw because canines get blown up. If my pet dies, it is my fault (most of the time, sometimes the pet gets a mind of its own) and I much prefer the team utility provided by a 5 man fear or immobilize than some chain lightning or crappy cone based attack.

Edit: And this isn’t a BM build at all.

This sums up the pet situation imo. Using the right pets with the right content and knowing that each pet can be more effective depending on your level of micromanagement is important in keeping that extra body alive and effective.
Using selfish versions pets like the lynx/jaguar in a dungeon is normally not good but using the jungle stalker or snow leopard can be more useful to a team, with might and chill respectively while still keeping the extra damage from cats while supporting the team.

Using a drake or hound means you just robbed your team of higher total damage done.

Damage IS team utility, and the most important one in this game.

It just so happens that you have no option other than to rob your team of optimized damage by playing a class forced to bring smaller portions of its DPS to dungeons.

You probably ran 30 BM and Guard. That alone is a deficient setup for maximum output in a team.

You gave up somewhere either crit damage from skirmishing or power and burst capacity (beast master’s signet is 25% extra damage for 8 seconds) to have a cat up most of the time.

So you brought your cat, but part of potential damage was lost in order to have an alive cat, you sacrificed group utility by having to bring Guard, which is something other classes besides minion necro or phantasm mesmer (mesmers are pretty much forced into shatter specs for dungeons) don’t suffer.

What did your ranger bring to that group? Certainly not damage. Burning a guardian, ele, or engineer can cover while putting out better damage (aoe to boot). Group prot from spirit? Guardian and ele got group prot covered. Did those traps do anything against bosses? Did you bring spotter? Too bad, warrior brings the superior Power version while also bringing flags that give over tripple the benefit of spotter plus the activated banner boons.

Oh, and Warrior Banner is an instant rez on placement, while ranger spirit needs to be set, and then wait 2 seconds for the rez command (both banner and spirit have cast time setups).

Ranger shouts and their traits are completely selfish except for the now decrepit search and rescue, while warrior shouts benefit the group and can be traited to even heal allies or remove conditions.

It’s a 2 second self-cc, in case you didn’t notice. You can do nothing else besides shatter while using it, and are rooted in place as a low mobility class.

The only way to land it offensively is by landing Swap, which is as obvious as an Eviscerate or Bull’s Charge. You either dodge or cleanse the root and move.

Cari Shrine.7065:

I don’t get this…if people really want to farm, and already do the most boring of things…why not just run path 1 of CoF over and over again? you’ll get more money that way than just beating mobs senseless

Because you only get into efficient cof p1 farms if you’re a warrior, mesmer, or thief. 3 classes out of a lot more that are not wanted.

Apothecary trinkets are a non issue if you get the ascended versions. In a single month I have the amulet and one trinket, and in 2 weeks I’ll have the other trinket.

garethh.3518:

Durzlla.6295:

I always find it curious why people say Axe isn’t a good BM weapon… Axe/Dagger may be -the- best BM weapon set out there because you can keep them permanently snared…

In somewhat competitive play…
Splitblade is extremely situational to land with a beastmaster build.
Snares are nice, being able to bunker with BM is better.
Its a nice concept your aiming for, just not terribly effective.

@Zenith
A 3s chill isn’t typically very devastating.
I’d be more worried if splitblade had a much more obvious animation.

The issue with splitblade is that all they need to do is keep distance to decrease dramatically the effectiveness of the skill, and the whole keeping distance part goes hand in had with kiting the pet.

In tpvp axe is more effective because people are forced to fight over points and they can’t just kite as well without risking a neutralized point.

What people don’t consider about the axe chill is the projectile speed. Easy to dodge skills are usually bad, especially against people that know what to dodge. You saw the thief always saving her evades for that chill because she knew if she got chilled she couldn’t kite the pet, and the pet is the ranger’s majority of damage.

It’s the same for warrior axe. To people not familiar with the weapon they end up eating an eviscerate, but once they know which skills they need to save dodge for and which ones they need to tank, warriors don’t become so dangerous.

Outside necro pretty much any class with swiftness and vigor can kite your pet without issue and their top priority is dodging chill axe and crippling talon, both of which are obvious projectiles with not the best speed.

Xsorus.2507:

Zenith.7301:

This just show what a disgrace pets are. That duel with the thief would have probably been easier if you were just allowed to stow your pet.

That thief just used your pet on demand for cloak and dagger healing, and the pet rarely got to hit the thief since it became kitten everytime he stealthed and the time it took it to get and hit the thief the thief just kited it or went into stealth, leaving the pet dumbfounded again.

Cloak and dagger should not work on pets/minions, it’s just a ridiculous penalty to classes that rely on those mechanisms.

Also, axe damage was atrocious, you barely scratched that thief with the auto, and because he knew to dodge axe chill and always kept a distance so splitblade couldn’t land, the only thing you hit him with was throw torch, which he healed off with stealth.

I seriously question the effectiveness of axe/offhand vs. shortbow now that I’ve played so many tpvp games. The shortbow just sustains a lot more damage, and for how situational splitblade is and how generous the flanking arc is on shortbow, it’s really a matter of bringing an offhand to make up for that terrible axe mainhand sustained.

Also, ravens have a very large wind up on their attack animations, making them easy to kite. Dogs would have probably been better this duel, especially the wolf. Even jaguar would have worked because you can have him stealth when you are expecting the thief to go for a cloak and dagger.

I use to think stowing my pet would help, but then i’d just lose a regen and my ability to get rid of conditions, not actually worth it.

As for Axe vs Shortbow, I have no power or precision, trust me when I say that it doesn’t matter which weapon i have…My damage is going to be god awful.

Remember, this BM Bunker is Condition Based, not Power based… You’ll have about the same luck as landing Splitblade on a thief as you do landing a Bow attack from the Side or Behind the target.

For the shortbow it may seem like you need to hit the sides, but it’s actually a more generous cone. Just hitting diagonally instead of the side grants the bleed.

In tpvp the meta BM build runs shortbows. Trap rangers run condition damage as well. The shortbow can be run as a condi weapon, and the difference is the single target sustained damage even without power or crit for the shortbow is much better than the axe.

Also, for getting rid of conditions, you could have run signet of renewal instead of signet of the hunt if they allowed you to stow the pet.

I’m just frustrated at how knowledgeable players can just kite pets with no issue, and they make up a large portion of our damage.

At the very least the speed training trait and signet of the hunt should stack….

Yes, power is only good when you put those together — in pvp. In PvP power is much more mitigated than in PvE, so often classes that are not warriors (who have stupidly OP traits to increase their offensive stats) need to use berserker in power builds or be deficient.

On a necro with rabid I will eventually overwhelm a bunker ele’s healing with conditions, as can an apothecary ranger. Same goes for guardian. Try however a power build against any sort of bunker build, and you will get nowhere.

Boons hardcounter power setups by quite a bit unless you can get it to scale to ridiculous levels like thief or warrior berserker numbers.

That P/D thief has investment in acrobatics, all he needs to do is dodge your phantasm volleys and he can stall again. He’ll use withdraw and have vigor on top of it all — it’s a 15 sec heal+ his cnd on a phantasm is a lot of healing, and he can put on a crapload of boons on himself (arcane thievery steals only 3 boons).

Pyroatheist.9031:

The only counter to a phantasm Mesmer in a 1v1 is another phantasm Mesmer.

Since you’re assuming a 1v1 scenario, that allows for specific counter utilities. If I’m going against a condition heavy class, I will take the heal mantra for rapid condition removal through mender’s purity as well as the condition removal mantra. Between the 2 of those, you can remove about 8 conditions every 20 seconds, which is far more than enough to deal with any condition class.

Other classes and builds have different counters. I will change my utilities to suit each individual 1v1. There is no counter to a phantasm Mesmer with utilities set up for your class. If you catch the Mesmer with poorly set up utilities, you have a chance, although the build is still immensely powerful.

So how do you kill P/D thieves that are getting free cnd heals and resets off your illusions?

With P/D thieves it’s not just their conditions — it’s the mini unload from stealth opener they can chain while using basilisk to stun to land the cnd with steal.

Cleric is terrible against bunker specs. Ranger has no boon hate or boon steal mechanics, so his only counter to engineers and guardians and eles in particular are conditions.

Power builds only really work with some investment in crit damage. Otherwise, conditions outperform them in pvp because once the condition is applied you can’t dodge out of said condition.

Ranger has enough sustained condition application where cleanse is not really an issue. Your only barrier to apothecary is the prohibitive cost of the trinkets (about 50g a piece), so you’re better off getting the ascended trinkets instead.

You’d be foolish to spend laurels on amulets whose stats you can get by other means in PvE. The difference in stats between and ascended and exotic amulet is negligible, and apothecary is the only stat combo in the game you cannot get from anywhere except expensive crafting components.