Showing Posts For apharma.3741:

Feedback thread for Weaver!

in Elementalist

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Sword
The auto attacks are slow and clunky, why most are 3/4s casts with the associated aftercasts is beyond me but a simple QoL change is to reduce them to 1/2s casts which would improve the sword immensely.

Damage at least the direct damage feels on the low side right across the board on sword with dagger seemingly doing more damage as a main hand than sword while not suffering from it’s focused target nature. I can’t even recommend it as a condition weapon as the bleeds and burns on the auto attacks are stuffed onto the back end of the chain. I’d recommend increasing the damage scaling by 10% to begin with and see how it goes, the reduction in cast times will buff the damage and that part is what is needed. Also put conditions on the first parts of the auto chain or at least attack 2. Cripple on the fire, chill on 2nd auto of water would help this stay melee and get the final hits in.

Gap closers/openers on the number 2 skill. I like this idea and I think whoever came up with that idea was fantastic because it makes a complex class a little easier to get to grips with. The only improvements I’d like to see is 600 range on the fire uprising (fire) and polaric leap (air), 5s duration on riptide water field (water 2) as the field is hard to blast due to half it’s duration you’re in the evade frame.

Traits
Minors, I feel they’re all decent but elemental refreshment needs the barrier part increasing by 3 fold.

Adept majors, the weakness duration on superior elements could do with being increased to 4-5s but otherwise the rest feel alright and in keeping with core specialisations.

Master majors, weavers prowess seems a tad too strong, maybe reduce to 10% condition duration and 10% condition damage. Bolstered elements, I like the stability on stance portion but the game has too many automatically activated skills. I would much rather see this skill do something else consistently on stance activation, maybe 3s of protection on stance use however I feel it would make this a mandatory trait.

Grandmaster majors
Elements of Rage is a big damage boost but feels like it goes against the philosophy of weaver. I honestly don’t like that, it’s right up there with how berserkers power used to encourage not using adrenaline. I’d prefer it to be a shorter (3s) damage boost when attuning to an element.

Unravel Hexes the wording on it indicates it removes all conditions however in actuality it only removes movement impairing conditions. Superspeed isn’t something that stacks so to keep high uptime requires careful skill chaining and large trait investments. I would remove the gain superspeed on receiving chill, cripple or immobilise and instead make the trait remove damaging conditions as well when you gain superspeed.

Invigorating strikes is decent but needs the barrier component increasing by twice as much.

Duel Skills
On the whole from what I got to play with they all seem alright but I’d like the range on sword and dagger duel attacks to be a little more consistent. Some are 130, another is 170, one is even 180 and another is 600 on sword alone. I’d rather see them all 180 (240 on dagger) or 600 and not have to worry about if I’m 40-50 units too far away for them to hit. It’s just really inconsistent.

Otherwise there’s just too many duel skills to really get to grips with in this short time and I feel they’re generally ok or at least there are much bigger flaws with weaver at the moment that need addressing than a few number tweaking on duel skills.

Feedback thread for Weaver!

in Elementalist

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Attunements
The attunement cool down being 4s is far too long. It takes about 10s for each attunement to recharge on base ele. Which means when paired with modest boon duration (50%) and elemental enchantment reducing this to 8.5s you can maintain defensive buffs like protection and regeneration the ele needs to survive in melee environments. However with weaver unless you keep revisiting an element (earth) every 2nd or 3rd swap you cannot maintain protection uptime and it breaks any kind of flow. Fresh air also doesn’t work very well with the current weaver as you get air back but everything else goes on cool down for switching.

I would propose reducing the attunement swap to 3s on weaver with arcane reducing it to 2.5s, this allows much higher uptime of these defensive boons. Possibly even folding weave selfs cool down reduction into baseline weaver, weave self is easily a great skill on its own without needing the 2s recharge. The other alternative is to increase the weavers access to other defences namely barrier.

Barrier
At the moment this is a very bad joke for sword. An 800 barrier will do sweet kittenainst melee classes and the damage mitigation it provides might as well not be there. For comparison a warrior can auto attack for 2,500 and do other hits for 5,000 and upto 10,000. An 800 barrier reduces that damage by 33% for the 2,500 but scales considerably worse to being not worth mentioning at higher levels while protection will always cut that damage by 33%. At the moment because of the attunement swap cool down protection is quite difficult to maintain in weaver without going into earth every 3rd attunement and that’s with 80% boon duration.

Simply put the damage mitigation on weaver is shameful for a spec that has a 170 range weapon as its showpiece.

Stances
In general the count recharge is far too high for the pitiful effect they all have and the duration on many is equally bad. You look at other classes with stances and they last much longer and have great effects like complete damage immunity while you can still attack for decent durations.

Aquatic stance, the healing is far too low and the recharge far too high outside the initial double use. It is categorically the worst heal in the game currently as the initial heal is incredibly low and the stance heal requires you to actively hit the enemy to get it while expiring after a certain time. It also scales hilariously badly with healing power. My recommendation is remove the heal allies aspect, weaver is a damage spec and many of the balance issues in previous ele iterations have been precisely because it gives too much team support for the power it had. Increase the base healing to 3500 and make the next 5 attacks heals only you for 800 and lasts upto 10s.

Stone resonance, the barrier gained from this is far too low to warrent a 50s count recharge. With menders amulet (1050 healing power) I got ~3,700 barrier and without healing power it was about 3,200 there’s no point in using healing power. additionally that will nullify 1-2 hits possibly while arcane shield has a 40s cool down, a stun break and deals damage and will block 3 hits regardless of damage. It doesn’t even compare. My recommendation is to double or even triple the amount of barrier given and/or reduce the count recharge. Possibly double the barrier given and make the count recharge 30s.

Unravel, you get to use this to fully attune twice and that’s it. It’s a very unremarkable stance with very little flavour that acts as training wheels for a weaver but still has all the downsides of global cool down on attunement swaps. The only good thing I can say is that the count recharge seems fair but otherwise I’d rather see this as a different skill. Weaver is about forgoing full attunement for the combo attunements, if I want to fully attune I would either go core ele as it’s already far superior or better yet I would have the global be 2.5-3s so wait it out. There needs to be some degree of forethought in the elite spec and giving a stance that goes around that feels like a discredit to the remarkable concept of weaver.

Primordial stance, I’ll be honest not really used it but looks decent on a condition build, would argue it needs to be distinguished from glyph of elemental power a bit more other than being a straight up weaver tailored clone.

Twist of fate, I honestly don’t know what to make of this. The superspeed is nice for getting away, the break stun is nice and the evade is nice. However the count recharge for what it is isn’t that good in my opinion. You compare it to other stunbreaks in the game and it’s not that great for the recharge. My only suggestion is reduce the recharge on the counts to 20-25s. This is meant to be a melee specc, getting locked down especially on the class with the lowest base health and armour is very punishing already.

Weave self, this is a good ability on it’s own but it seems it’s balanced for it’s flip over skill more than anything. I would personally decouple both of these and place the weave self portion (minus the recharge reduction which gets folded into weaver at a 50% rate) onto where unravel currently is with a 45s count recharge. I’d then have the elite be on a 60s cool down and be simply tailored victory. Whether this changes or not I feel the elite is good on weaver as is but unravel feels like it doesn’t belong while weave self feels like a great thing to switch it with.

(edited by apharma.3741)

Renegade Worst Elite Spec for PvP

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Weaver is probably contesting renegade atm, certainly sword on weaver is a complete joke.

Helseth's review of mirage

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

I agree that oasis seems flat out worse than ether feast. I think you have to stand in it to get the full 8k heal but ether feast +1 clone will give you more.

False. False Oasis gives you a buff that ticks the health. The Oasis itself is just an indicator of where the Mirror will spawn.

Ah fair enough, I used it once and decided it sucked compared to ether feast.

Helseth's review of mirage

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Personally the only thing I like about mirage is the ability to run lemongrass poultry soup in WvW with the chaos line for high regen uptime for -40% condition duration. You could run hoelbrak or Melandru runes for complete overkill beefing it up to -60%/65% condition duration. Stunbreak on dodge and being able to use skills in dodge are really useful too.

Also the ambush skill for sword is a non target leap skill which makes getting away easy. The deception skills I largely ignored and I agree that oasis seems flat out worse than ether feast. I think you have to stand in it to get the full 8k heal but ether feast +1 clone will give you more.

Jaunt should be 600 range then it might see more use.

Unravel hexes straight up does not work

in Elementalist

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

I did some rough testing in WvW (let some ice drakes chill me), and it appears that it does work, but that it only cleanses cripple, chill, and immobilize.

Which is: 1. Not what the trait text says it does, and 2. Really not all that great.

This, when we were duelling and testing them out in a private PvP arena we noticed it seems to only affect movement impairing conditions which makes it a very underwhelming GM. I guess we have to go back to water again.

PoF - Elementalist - Weaver

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

TBH for me the stances are complete garbage.

The heal is too little without investment and even then it requires to be in close melee to get the other half of the heal.

Stone resonance gives too little barrier on way too high a count recharge to be useful for defence at all.

Twist of fate also has a long count recharge and feels awkward to use, sure a 1s evade and break stun but it just doesn’t feel very strong at all and I would rather have most other skills like arcane shield or armour of earth instead.

Super speed removing conditions trait is either hilariously bugged or it only affects movement impairing ones and the person writing it needs to go back to GCSE English.

Quite frankly the sword is dead in the water as weaver brings very little hard mitigation to survive vs warriors, revs, guards in fact most classes and doesn’t have the excessive constant health regen needed either. The attunement cool down being 4s and 3.5s with arcane messes up the ability to stack protection and regen too so survivability feels much less than with DD core ele.

I found DD weaver sort of OK in PvP and staff was alright but many classes could either keep pressure on you much better than you or you didn’t really have much follow up for killing them if you locked them down.

To improve it I’d like to see the count recharge reduced or stance durations increased, preferably the recharge reduced.

I’d like to see the barrier given increased a bit more as 800 means nothing to 2000+ damage skills, which is most power based skills ATM.

The attunement recharge needs reducing, I’d say 3s and 2.5s for using arcane. Weave self is a weird elite, it’s strong when you get all attunements and the flip over is a good CC but I feel the attunement recharge is best removed and instead make the attunement swap as above.

Sword needs more damage on it, it does barely anything for damage considering eles usually have to invest in vitality and/or toughness. It gets even more hilarious when you look at the damage scaling on many other weapons for power classes in the current PoF preview.

(edited by apharma.3741)

Holosmith.. for real? that dmg ?!?

in PvP

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

The holo leap is the biggest offender, seen it hit for 7k on people easily with no other damage investment traits. The photon blitz damage isn’t too bad, best I’ve seen is 5k with demolisher amulet and about 3k off the shockwave same amulet, thing is it leaves them vulnerable to everything else that follows up.

Holo leap in my opinion could do with a 40% reduction and 20-30% reduction on corona burst too. The autos aren’t anything stupid from what I saw but could do with a 10-15% reduction just off the tooltip.

While you’re all talking about holosmith being so strong, worldly impact on soul east I’ve seen hit for 15k+ on glass pretty easily so there’s plenty of one shot kills about.

surviving a thief (pvp)

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

To add, most thief players are very obvious even the ones who’ve been playing for a long time. As soon as they’re in range to steal they will because it’s instant cast, no tell just teleport and get boons and an essential free win vs mesmer (doubly so vs power mesmer).

So find out what sort of range 1200 is and be ready to dodge, blurred frenzy or distort as soon as they get within range.

Another super obvious thing most thieves do is they use basi venom on approach, they might as well wave a flag saying I’m going to steal now at that point. Sometimes they will use black powder at max range, if you see this wait for them to use the stealth ability and dodge when they do as they will either heartseeker into steal for the free hit and almost guaranteed backstab or use bounding dodge into steal. Regardless you know when the steal will happen and preventing that means you’ll essentially not give them the upper hand straight away.

Cool down on traited steal is 21s so try to keep track of it and if steal is about to come off cool down and you have no defences jump onto or into places where you can’t teleport as it makes steal fail.

If you fight a thief who isn’t using steal off cool down and carefully headshots you when you have to heal etc then you found the 0.1% of thief players who actually are good with the class and you’ll probably not win. Go to a DH, thieves don’t like DHs.

(edited by apharma.3741)

Can we have a misty Torch skin?

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Fractal torch is quite nice but I’m a fan of the white mantle torch myself, fits bolt nicely.

Guild Wars 2 PvP AUGUST POWER RANKINGS

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Hi,

If I pay $400 can I get on this list?

That’s how NA works right?

It’s $400 + new IP costs now.

Unidentified gear - Please No, No, No, Nooooo

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

I don’t like the idea of having to identify gear for the following reasons:

1. It will make me feel like I need to identify it in case of it being a very expensive item.
2. From what people say we need to go to heart vendors and with the trend of putting repeatable hearts in the game lately you can shove it up your jacksie.
3. This is a step backwards, many games gave up the identify system because it wasn’t fun and didn’t fulfill a purpose other than pointless busy work.
4. It adds another layer of work into enjoying the game if you want all your drops, we should be playing the game and enjoying it for what it is, not forced to go back and forth all the time to identify stuff when backs get full.

I really hope we get changes to this system as I personally don’t find it fun and engaging and as I said earlier you know where you can shove it if we have to repeat hearts on a daily basis almost at some point in the future.

Mesmer backpiece

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Hi guys I’ve recently been building my Mesmer and I was wondering if it is still recommended to use an exotic back piece with a platinum doubloon with the doubloon now giving concentration and not a flat 4% buff.

No.

Remove "Feel the fires of Balthazar" line

in Elementalist

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

But think about how hilarious it will be to shout that at Balthazar and proceed to bombard him with his own flames.

Besides… if you ever played GW1 you know that the old God of Secrets, Abaddon was long since denounced and is now dead, having been replaced by Kormir who ascended to Godhood after absorbing his power when we killed him and became the new Goddess of Truths… and yet the Durmand Priory have a giant statue of him in their library and revere him… and no ones gone about lynching the Durmand Priory for revering Abaddon instead of Kormir…

No need to think, just play Flashpoint. Best part is you can beseech Balthazar to summon the hounds of Balthazar to fight the hounds of Balthazar while yelling feel the fires of Balthazar.

FYI on BGDM (it's no longer being supported)

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

I think the non-TOS-compliant things got remove from arcdps as it seems but I’m not 100% sure. Anyway, I can’t find the gearcheck version on the site and in addition to that the build template possibility also isn’t available any longer.
So, for me personally it looks like that arcdps is TOS-compliant at the moment.

I believe arcdps had the non TOS compliant features removed and made into standalone plugins and buried them in their site where you can’t download them without hitting several messages saying they aren’t compliant. Even then I think many of those aspects land in the grey area rather than straight up breaking TOS like BGDM did with its non compliant version.

(edited by apharma.3741)

Mirage's master minor: Nomad's Endurance

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

You have to intentionally build for quickness uptime though. Mesmer can otherwise accidentally have high or perma Vigor uptime. However easy it is for Firebrand to maintain quickness, its easier for a Mirage to maintain Vigor.

In pvp and wvw it might be .

In pve , nope . perma quickness is granted by boon bot while vigor is not .

and in wvw and pvp , this firebrand trait combined with their tome skills and how easily firebrand apply quickness . those stats are still too much . its 750 stats . pure ridiculous if you look at other class self buff , 150 is not that good in the age of 220 stats or 20% duration or 20% dmg buff .

also by your logic :something that is harder to achieve should have better effect in this case chrono should have better quickness uptime and more to add on that comparing with firebrand far easier quickness rotation .

its same for firebrand mantra ,3 charges with better effect for each charge usage .
and somehow anet didnt apply that BS (more charge =player burn through charge to gain final greater effect )to firebrand mantra .

anet just fixed our staff and torch cdr traits after almost 2 years. i just wish for cd and stuff like mantra or stats buff , they could give us same standard treatment as other classes.

In PvE it’s super easy to get and keep up permenant vigor, even more so now most condition builds are the top damage dealers as druids will be bringing sun spirit which traited grants vigor. This is then shared via the chronos, even without sun spirit druids would be granting vigor on pet swap that gets shared = permenant.

Those mantras from what we’ve seen have 25s cool downs so you need to stagger your quickness application with the mantra cool down trait competing with the trait giving quickness on aegis/stab so you can’t pick both at the same time.

The fire brand will have to trait and invest in boon duration to keep up high levels of quickness, remember it’s 2s base quickness for most of the traits, that isn’t much without boon duration which just got harder to keep up since the last patch.

Firebrand would need 100% boon duration as well as Loremaster, another mantra and most likely stalwart speed to get good duration on quickness. That’s at least 2 major traits (probably 3 as they’d need honourable staff) and a significant investment in concentration. No matter which way you cut it, it’s trivial for mesmers to maintain over 50% vigor uptime regardless of game mode.

I agree with an earlier post, pulsing might while you have vigor would be better for power and condition builds, assuming ANet wants this to be played with power stats.

Does orrian truffle and meat stew stack?

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

The better question is how this all works with weakness.

Let’s say you have signet of stamina, the food and vigor for 140% endurance regen in total, when you get weakness does it halve the regen after the effects giving you 70% regen or does it essentially counteract the vigor leaving you with 90%?

Now that we have Cat commander tags..

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Now that pandora’s box has already been opened: I’m voting for raccoonmanders, obviously.

This is a fanTasHtic idea +1.

Absolutely dislike the new fractal.

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

I like the new fractal and the T4 is nice, punishing poor mechanical play but rewarding it equally.

The challenge mote can go die in the fires of every hell with people who talk at the opera. The overlapping mechanics and how you can have the expanding circle with half the squares gone, an anomaly, while he’s attacking isn’t fun and almost feels like beating it is more down to luck than skill. Nightmare fractal CM is fun because luck plays no part in it, there’s no random spawning of stuff where you might have to kill something where you can’t really get to it or rely on using a special action key to negate a mechanic in a way that seems unintended.

It’s been improved with phases happening at set health levels, that was a great improvement. Another improvement I’d like to see is the enraged symbol not obscuring the sun when he gets enraged. It makes it very difficult to see when he’s doing the attack you can projectile block especially when you have to focus on everything else going on.

Best roaming POF elite?

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shadow_Meld

If you thought it was hard to kill daredevils that spammed 5 dodges away when they lost 2% hp, get ready for the shadow meld future.

3s stealth duration, 2 charges, 45s to recharge one charge.

the only “issue” I’d see with it is that it removes revealed – but hey that’s a hefty CD on it and you know what will be also added with that expac to one other class?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sight_beyond_Sight

AoE reveal, 2 charges, 20s to recharge one and if revealing that thief who have just stealthed was not enought it also removes blindness and guarantee next hit being a crit – and is much more spammable

frankly I’m afraid that most of thieves will actually need that 1500 range to not be masacrated by all those spellbreakers that are bound to show-up on them…

It’s not just thieves, most classes are very concerned about spell breakers at the moment and they will be able to chase and kill most classes depending on weapons used. Ironically deadeye has the least to fear as they have the mobility and stealth to escape coupled with less boons than other classes for the spell breaker to exploit.

As far as group roaming goes I think scourge, spell breaker, condi rev, druid and possibly mirage will be extremely strong. Stealth and super speed to escape, less boon dependant and good spike healing and sustain from druid and scourge. Condition spikes from mirage and rev will be annoying but it depends how mirage plays out as those clones will die to a stray fart making mirage possibly useless.

Now that we have Cat commander tags..

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

They need to change the UI first to accommodate this, the catmander tags clutter it up quite a lot.

Having a row for icons then colours would help greatly, then they can add gold sinks in edgy skulls, hipster beards, unicorns and all sorts of other icons.

Mistlock Sanctuary's Fractal Access

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

I think the pass it’s great but… is not possible to camp your characters in the mistlock sanctuary ?

We have 2 loading screens if we want to do that… kinda annoying although I had SSD is still slow.

Considering it’s got access to fractals as well as everything other passes have I think it’s a fair trade off. It is straight up the best pass atm because of that and it’s central location in core Tyria making WP costs essentially very low.

Suggestions to Improve Base Power Mesmer

in Mesmer

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

I think Azukas has a pretty good idea of what he talks about. I think he cares about the game and mesmer. And unlike a lot of people in this subforum, he isn’t pessimistic, miserable, and he doesn’t actually hate this game.

Lol.

As far as your suggestions go, I told you exactly why it was bad. Clones being target bound isn’t an issue because they’re very disposable or should be and most clone summon skills are on short cool downs. The issue is that phantasms do a significant part of mesmer dps, about half of it and are target bound this presents the following problems:

Low hp trash waves render phantasms useless as they spawn and die a few seconds later and having cool downs of 12-20s.

When bosses disappear or go invuln you lose damage as they either retarget or if the boss moves too far away they just disappear.

If you get moved away from the boss too far then they disappear.

They have no cleave except berserker and warden, making adds or mini boss type mechanics poor.

You have to spawn 3 of 1 type of phantasm to start doing the maximum damage, this takes time that other classes don’t have as a drawback.

Phantasms have no spike so this is all just a level dps mostly and no MW won’t spike hard enough during burn windows, see KC for this.

Phantasms being half your sustained damage gives opponents far more control over your damage than you do in competitive game modes.

There’s other issues I’m sure other players will mention however above is some reasons why phantasms are a poor mechanic as they make up a substantial part of a mesmer’s damage. You’re trying to force a mechanic to work (like ANet is doing) with your changes instead of doing the sensible thing and realising the mechanic is flawed from the get go and changing it.

You should not be developing skills and utilities to get around mechanics that don’t work very well in any game mode, this is at its core incredibly poor game design. Even more so that it’s tied to a core aspect of a class, you could argue it’s fine as an elite spec if the options and play style was completely optional however it isn’t, it affects the entire class from top to bottom.

Also Azukas has no idea what he’s talking about at all when it comes to dps.

(edited by apharma.3741)

Next season starts 8/22 according to pvp tab

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

We’re hoping to reduce the gaps from what they were in the past. The season schedule is never set in stone though. It’ll change depending on our release schedule.

Will there be balance passes during this period or will we just get one or two after PoF to tone down things that slipped through the net and ended up far stronger than intended?

Mesmer Stealth bugged etc.

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

If the warrior is firing his auto and you stealth it will complete however if he also queued up another auto it also continues to fire at you. You can see this happen a lot in WvW with pew pew rangers where they will still hit you with 2 autos even when you’re in stealth.

At greater ranges of 1500+ you can have an auto on its way to you, one being launched and the queued one hit completely negating the point of stealth sometimes.

I’m more surprised no one is complaining about ranger staff which continues to track targets in stealth for several seconds due to its long channel.

I haz Ruthless Legend title from Season Six?

in PvP

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

But I don’t have the top 100 title o_o

Because you’re not, you’re the 5th best gerdien in wurld

Suggestions to Improve Base Power Mesmer

in Mesmer

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Alright fellas, let’s not derail the thread please. I put a lot of thought into these suggestions and would like to keep things on topic.

Alright.

Your suggestions are terrible because it’s trying to put a bandaid over a problem with the core design. You’re coming up with ways for the retargeting of illusions (read phantasms) but the reality is that had these been simple clones and played no part in a mesmers damage outside of shatter fodder and a byproduct of an attack we would have no need for it.

Phantasms as a mechanic just about worked at launch and for a year afterwards but haven’t been particularly good without there being a huge HP sponge and very little other targets to deal with. It also works counter productively to the class mechanic of shattering where you don’t want to shatter as you take a massive hit in damage for no real benefit given the HP of many enemies.

The answer isn’t to come up with several new skills to make an awkward mechanic work, the answer is to change the mechanics.

Suggestions to Improve Base Power Mesmer

in Mesmer

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

It’s this skill: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shadow_Meld

Jesus christ is that really deadeye’s elite? That’s so kittening cancerous. Revealed is the one counter to stealth, allowing them to just flat out remove revealed, and then also re-apply stealth in the same skill, is just broken.

The skill designers really need to stop with this constant one-upmanship. Stop introducing mechanics that circumvent balancing mechanics in the game. Removing revealed needs to go. 100% damage reduction from spellbreakers full counter needs to go. Anything else that is designed in a similar manner needs to be thrown out and re-designed

Welcome to Guild Wars 2, where by now no skill should have less than 4 total effects. Also the more spammable the better. Instead of any purity of design, we get barraged with effects and skills at all times.

I mean, having skills that do 4 things is definitely a problem. But its a smaller problem than what this is. This is none other than ignoring counters and balancing mechanics.

Stealth is a ridiculously powerful mechanic, and its pretty broken in GW2 in its current implementation. Revealed is the one and only counter to it. This allows deadeye to flat out ignore the one and only counter to stealth in this game.

Spellbreakers full counter is similar. At its core, its a blocking skill that procs various effects if you sucessfully block something. But the counter to blockable skills is unblockable skills. However, this ignores that counter by instead going with a flat 100% damage reduction, allowing it to also block damage from unblockable attacks. Yet its not invulnerability, so you can still contest nodes while using it.

This is pure cancerous design. The Anet skill and class design teams really need to figure out that adding new mechanics into the game purely to ignore counters and balancing mechanics is the quickest way to ruin a game’s balance forever. You can’t improve it by making it more and more complicated, you just can’t.

Skills doing 4 things at the same time and being overloaded is exactly the problem and is a much bigger balancing issue than removal of counters. There is nothing wrong with allowing a class to overcome a counter mechanic so long as the cost is high enough, it’s all about risk vs reward and investment.

Engineers were supposed to be weak to conditions but the trait changes from 2.5 years ago essentially made it so they just pick up alchemy line and slot elixir C and they’re pretty much golden against anything that isn’t a necro or necro elite. In this case engineers don’t really have much of a cost to being able to deal with condition builds as they can run a traitline and utility to essentially render this vulnerability moot. In actuality they could probably just run this trait line and be generally fine vs condition builds considering how they will run an elixir or two anyway.

Super elixir with just the minor alchemical tinctures will remove 2 conditions which you can blast with acid bomb which removes another 1 from the acid bomb being an elixir and another for blasting a light field. While also doing considerable damage from the acid bomb and giving great skills to lower the enemies damage and healing via fumigate (which removes conditions from allies too).

is celestial gear still useful ??

in Elementalist

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Since it isn’t available in pvp I will talk pve and wvw.

For wvw, celestial can be good for roaming and decent for support ele in zergs. If you roam build just celestial trinkets or build just celestial armor, but not both. Focus on building damage and maybe a bit more defensive stats.

For pve its good for casual play, but I don’t think optimal for high tier pve

Agreed and to add to this:

In higher level PvE gameplay it’s zerker power ele or viper/sinister condi ele, the extra vitality, toughness and healing power is unnecessary.

For WvW if you’re playing tempest and support you want more healing power and probably a bit more vitality and/or toughness than celestial provides. You’re not there to deal damage, you’re there to heal, cleanse, protect your allies and help set up kills so you should focus on that.

As said above roaming on celestial or celestial + other damage stats hybrid is perfectly fine, D/D is very good for this with durability runes. Weaver is also likely to be very good with the above stats as it puts out decent condi pressure on the dual skills and likely will have good power scaling too. You probably need some might stacking ability though to really make the use of that condition damage stat.

Balli 4, netshot needs to be buffed

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Flak cannons would be nice.

Rune swapping on wvw legendary armor (Solved)

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

They made it lesser legendary armour…

Best roaming POF elite?

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

1-2 deadeyes with 1-2 DDs, if the DDs don’t take you out you’ll get one shot at 1500 range as they all pick at you.

Also Dawdler, deadeye doesn’t give up stealth entirely and doesn’t really lose much for teleports if running shortbow as alt weapon. They will be terrible at melee but when you have the mobility that even core thief has it would take a thief or a high mobility warrior/Druid to catch you. Even then few classes can match the Z axis movement which is where deadeyes will be most irritating.

Duh, that was the entire point.

Ah sorry was still waking up, now I see.

I can see deadeyes being a plague for months in WvW, enjoying a fight? Not for long, pow one of you instadowns and no-one has a clue why.

Anyone else want harmonious mantras back?

in Mesmer

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

The only thing I miss is power cleanse on the minor in insp and the healing of mantra of restoration. I can get behind the changes in some way to restorative mantras but to straight up nerf mantra of restoration like they did means condition cleansing has plummeted.

Best roaming POF elite?

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

1-2 deadeyes with 1-2 DDs, if the DDs don’t take you out you’ll get one shot at 1500 range as they all pick at you.

Also Dawdler, deadeye doesn’t give up stealth entirely and doesn’t really lose much for teleports if running shortbow as alt weapon. They will be terrible at melee but when you have the mobility that even core thief has it would take a thief or a high mobility warrior/Druid to catch you. Even then few classes can match the Z axis movement which is where deadeyes will be most irritating.

Controversial, Celestial back with PoF

in PvP

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

If cele was brought back at 450 all stats (except concentration and expertise) it wouldn’t bring back more stats than any other amulet currently. It would also be essentially useless without might stacking and might duration, there’s not a lot of classes and builds that could take advantage of that or they would have better options currently like menders.

Edit: Since cele was removed there’s been a number of changes to might the boon, ways to stack might outside of traits with similar of battle nerfed and many traits that used to stack might have been reduced considerably. Also many sustain skills with HoT have had their base healing reduced and the scaling buffed so you need a considerable amount of healing power to see good numbers from it. 450 healing power will do very little for a healing tempest and Druid even though they can might stack in some ways.

(edited by apharma.3741)

what class to tag now that guard is dead?

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Flamethrower scrapper with might on stab, stab on flamethrower and quickness when over a might threshold.

Hahahaha hohoho…

Click 1 once and you instantly die from retaliation.

Sssssshhhhh don’t tell the zerglings!

Red Team disadvantages due to Glider exploit?

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

This is now the second week that the Red Team in WvW faces the brunt of disadvantages due to “Glide into hostile objectives” exploits (e.g. Gliding from Pangloss to Ogrewatch, bypassing gates and walls rendering Ogrewatch indefensible).

Since Red Team is (by ranking) already the “weakest” Team, this adds even more disadvantages to them. Will there be any compensation for them / consequences for those that use the exploit (bypassing hostile gates & walls?) or will Arena.net just shrug and say “we don’t care, sucks to be you, don’t forget to buy the expansion”?

They said they will review gliding and make adjustments. If it’s clear that gliding is too much trouble to sort out then they will remove it altogether.

If you would like to post some screenshots and/or details as to what these exploits are then it would help to get them sorted or gliding removed. I know it might seem obvious to you and everyone else but this is a stating the bloomin obvious competition sometimes.

First and foremost, on EBG, if you control Pangloss you can glide straight into the upper level of Ogrewatch completely bypassing the walls and gate.

Yes but you aren’t stating exactly from point A to point B.

What you should be saying is that if you control pangalos you can exit toward Veloka and take an immediate left when you come out of the mine and go up the hill. Then you can activate a decent duration stability skill and glide from the top of that hill into Ogrewatch landing on the path that goes to the lords room facing the bridge.

On a side note, not been in EBG since the gliding change, my poor ogrewatch what have they done to you!

dont need stab for it, and my description was clearly enough for you to know what I was referring to

Not without going there to look which defeated the point of your description as that hill is newly added for some strange reason.

Red Team disadvantages due to Glider exploit?

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

This is now the second week that the Red Team in WvW faces the brunt of disadvantages due to “Glide into hostile objectives” exploits (e.g. Gliding from Pangloss to Ogrewatch, bypassing gates and walls rendering Ogrewatch indefensible).

Since Red Team is (by ranking) already the “weakest” Team, this adds even more disadvantages to them. Will there be any compensation for them / consequences for those that use the exploit (bypassing hostile gates & walls?) or will Arena.net just shrug and say “we don’t care, sucks to be you, don’t forget to buy the expansion”?

They said they will review gliding and make adjustments. If it’s clear that gliding is too much trouble to sort out then they will remove it altogether.

If you would like to post some screenshots and/or details as to what these exploits are then it would help to get them sorted or gliding removed. I know it might seem obvious to you and everyone else but this is a stating the bloomin obvious competition sometimes.

First and foremost, on EBG, if you control Pangloss you can glide straight into the upper level of Ogrewatch completely bypassing the walls and gate.

Yes but you aren’t stating exactly from point A to point B.

What you should be saying is that if you control pangalos you can exit toward Veloka and take an immediate left when you come out of the mine and go up the hill. Then you can activate a decent duration stability skill and glide from the top of that hill into Ogrewatch landing on the path that goes to the lords room facing the bridge.

On a side note, not been in EBG since the gliding change, my poor ogrewatch what have they done to you!

Red Team disadvantages due to Glider exploit?

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

This is now the second week that the Red Team in WvW faces the brunt of disadvantages due to “Glide into hostile objectives” exploits (e.g. Gliding from Pangloss to Ogrewatch, bypassing gates and walls rendering Ogrewatch indefensible).

Since Red Team is (by ranking) already the “weakest” Team, this adds even more disadvantages to them. Will there be any compensation for them / consequences for those that use the exploit (bypassing hostile gates & walls?) or will Arena.net just shrug and say “we don’t care, sucks to be you, don’t forget to buy the expansion”?

They said they will review gliding and make adjustments. If it’s clear that gliding is too much trouble to sort out then they will remove it altogether.

If you would like to post some screenshots and/or details as to what these exploits are then it would help to get them sorted or gliding removed. I know it might seem obvious to you and everyone else but this is a stating the bloomin obvious competition sometimes.

Which sword skin?

in Elementalist

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Bolt but possibly the weaver sword from the previews depending on if the blade changes with the elements.


Sohothen has a datamined new look with more fire so that might also be worth looking at if we get it or another sword like it.

what class to tag now that guard is dead?

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Flamethrower scrapper with might on stab, stab on flamethrower and quickness when over a might threshold. Get wanderers armour or a mix of marauder and wanderer, durability or leadership runes, bounty sigil and any other boon duration and you are a tagging machine.

You don’t help anyone really but you can survive a Zerg, have plenty of stab and health regen and you will pretty much tag everything for loot.

Legendary Armor in PVP

in PvP

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

if u wanted legendary armor i suggest you try raid. same as pver tried pvp for legendary back piece.

thats a bold lie and you know it. pve has a legendary backpiece.

It’s not a lie, many PvE players did PvP for the legendary back piece, some liked the look, others just for AP and collections.

Controversial, Celestial back with PoF

in PvP

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

out of the current elite specs mesmer would probably use it the most. after that possibly engi due to auto might from hammer but with a different build.

i don’t know how well rangers can use it without a shortbow or a torch.

ele would stay mender because shout healing was nerfed already, if you drop even more healing shouts will become obsolete.

necro could possibly use it but is most likely better off with a pure condi or pure damage build.

guard nope.
thief nope.
rev nope.
warrior maybe but i don’t think so.

it’s all about the might stacking. if the coming balance changes can keep that in check it won’t be a problem.

Mesmer wouldn’t use it, mesmer might stacking isn’t that great even with strength runes (probably use hoelbrak tbh) and shattered strength. Additionally you’d lose torment on shatter to take shattered strength so that’s a big loss of damage and the power stats aren’t high enough to make mind wrack or cry of frustration do much damage.

You could switch a trait line but without inpiration condi will absolutely destroy you and illusions is just too good to drop for most builds. Power shatter or condi shatter would be much better picks with zerk/marauder or sage respectively.

Many have tried making celestial builds with mesmer but it just doesn’t have the same long lasting might stacking potential as other classes, if shattered strength was 15s baseline it would be possible as you’d get to have 10-15 stacks all the time. Right now it’s not likely though mirage might possibly be a different story though that’s more about not shattering so not sure how you’d stack might without chaotic interruption or the GS trait that no-one uses.

Base mesmer power dps for raids

in Mesmer

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Many will hate this build because it is literally summon 3 swordsman and then sort of afk pressing 2 when off cool down after an auto chain. For that I feel they are somewhat justified in their criticism.

Sadly that is how mesmer is designed. I suspect that Mirage will be in the same spot. Whether it uses clones or phantasms in the end.
If we were to use more of our kit the dps would decrease.

  • Every newly summoned clone/phantasm is a dps loss
  • every shatter is a dps loss

The problem is that 2-3 skills on our weapon bar are summons which means we’re stuck with 2 skills to use (autoattack and one dps skill).

I’ve written it in the past but in my opinion they should remove phantasms and instead have attacks that do damage and leave behind a clone. You can then swap places with the clone for up to 5s after. They can then put various damage traits in trait lines to give a power dps rotation where you use 3-5 skills in a rotation with weapon swap, same with condition damage in some ways. It also allows much more control over play styles for the mesmer, you can make sustained damage higher if it’s lacking without affecting burst (mindwrack) and if burst is too high you can adjust as needed.

It would also do another thing, make mesmer actually feel like an illusionist as they would be a decent amount of clone swapping going on, as long as they’re not instakilled by auto attacks.

Regardless the phantasm mechanic has been a lazy way to play for the entire game as well as being mechanically bad. It’s no excuse to be 5 years into a game and this not have been addressed. Phantasms don’t work for anything but higher health shatter fodder in PvP/WvW either so it’s not like there’s a reason to keep it as is anyway.

This content requires GW2 HoT

in WvW

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Arena Net employees are people too, they need to buy groceries, pay bills, pay off their mortgage, pay for windows their kids broke and everything else adults need to do.

A question to those who honestly think $20 over 2 years is too much to ask for, just how will Arena Net pay these people who made the changes required for the armour if you don’t pay Arena Net for their time?

Base mesmer power dps for raids

in Mesmer

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Looks like Eles are going to be joining thiefs asking for nerfs because we dare encroach on thier territory. Eles can focus on asking for PvE nerfs and thiefs can focus on PvP. Mesmer is promoting unity between the classes.

Yup, called it. It’s been barely 2 days since the patch (1 if you had the luck to be playing on EU servers which were down) and the salt is real.

Funny, no one was complaining when mesmers had to tank, boonshare and distort as chrono which was harder than most damage dealer rotations (and far more important to get executed properly) but dare and behold we get a simple damage rotation its wacka wacka.

Where was the thief hate when they were pulling high dps with autoattack rotations?

Where is the guardian hate atm for being top dps?

Also Staff elementalist doesn’t pull 28k, he does 35k+ atm. Always good to throw in some false facts to make people rage even more. Why exectly is this guy with quantify?

The thief hate was and still is real with their incredibly simple high damage auto attack rotations. Heck DD core thief was pulling the same numbers as this with a 2 button (ok three if you count steal) rotation.

Many don’t actually realise the mechanical limitations or the ramp up time, though so they flock like seals slapping their fins going “nerf, nerf, nerf”.

Many will hate this build because it is literally summon 3 swordsman and then sort of afk pressing 2 when off cool down after an auto chain. For that I feel they are somewhat justified in their criticism.

PvP Post Persistence of Memory Nerf

in Mesmer

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Yesterday I’ve been running around in wvw with domi/duel/chrono and condi cleanse mantra. I’ve been pretty successful so far.
Since inspiration got destroyed by removing it’s capability of removing conditions, I don’t see a reason to run it anymore. Now with automatically refreshing mantras I find condi cleanse mantra is a strong skill to replace inspiration trait line with.

My only issue is that dealing with thieves becomes much harder without instant cast daze/stun which is why I tend to take inspiration. The condition cleanse and health regeneration was very nice but that’s getting gutted and gutted each patch. Meanwhile guards keep the uninvested 2k health regen on meditations, warriors kept adrenal healing all without any investment and don’t even get me started on rev sustain.

I dunno why but I’ve been beating thieves easier with this build lol.

BTW I think adrenal health got nerfed by 66% so yeah. Power berserker RIP. Only core warrior is viable now IMO.

Yeah that’s a recent change but how long do you honestly think it will last before they change it to level 2 for trait purposes? It also doesn’t address the issues I razed, it’s a non invested regen (same for rousing resilience) that hasn’t been touched, same for many classes yet it’s the mesmer that gets hit with the nerfs to a trait that has more counterplay than pretty much anything else in the game.

That’s without bringing up how much they gutted mantra of recovery and meanders purity, at this point I’d rather they had put a 10s ICD on meanders purity than remove the extra cleanse.

PvP Post Persistence of Memory Nerf

in Mesmer

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Yesterday I’ve been running around in wvw with domi/duel/chrono and condi cleanse mantra. I’ve been pretty successful so far.
Since inspiration got destroyed by removing it’s capability of removing conditions, I don’t see a reason to run it anymore. Now with automatically refreshing mantras I find condi cleanse mantra is a strong skill to replace inspiration trait line with.

My only issue is that dealing with thieves becomes much harder without instant cast daze/stun which is why I tend to take inspiration. The condition cleanse and health regeneration was very nice but that’s getting gutted and gutted each patch. Meanwhile guards keep the uninvested 2k health regen on meditations, warriors kept adrenal healing all without any investment and don’t even get me started on rev sustain.

Base mesmer power dps for raids

in Mesmer

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

+%dmg upon shattering a phantasm, like Berserker’s Power?

Hrm, maybe. Frankly I’d prefer a set of patchnotes which start with “Phantasms have been removed as a skill type”.

Agreed, the phantasm mechanic doesn’t work.

Decent powerDPS build, but still.....

in Mesmer

Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

Minstrel chrono is not a dps build.

Not every build needs to use every aspect of the class mechanic, I said it’s not much but we have one endgame-viable build that does use shatters. I personally also use F3 on pretty much any raid breakbar and F4 to block things like sloth shake but my static isn’t good enough to fullclear every week so maybe that’s just for casual scrubs.

As for ele, switching to water or earth is just switching to more defensive/supporty skills. Its not as if eles aren’t using attunement swapping or overloads at all. Don’t play enough druid to know what to say about its pet swapping, or lack thereof. But again, a druid a support class, so we should be comparing cRanger to the power mesmer build.

Condi ele exclusively camps fire, some guardian and warrior specs might only press F1 for a damage modifier trait, necro rarely used more than (RS5+)RS4. A burn guardian built around VoJ passive procs is somewhat decent and technically never “uses” the class mechanic. The vast majority of ranger pets see no use in PvE. All of these could and should be criticised but given the general state of the game mesmer not using shatters in one dps build is not a major concern.

And none of that changes the fact that we have a self defeating mechanic. It literally destroys itself when we use our F skills.

Until the next round of PvP nerfs roll in I prefer to think of it as an optional choice: you shouldn’t shatter and blow up your dps, but you can if the situation calls for it. Like an ele who can switch to water, lay a field, switch to earth and blast it where a low-health thief would just keel over and die.

I would much prefer to have CoF replaced with an illusion retarget skill (illusions last 1s after a target dies so you can retarget them) and the condis be shifted to MW/traits, that way the dps build would at lest use 1-2 “shatters”. I quite like the current phantasm concept though since it focuses more on planning and resource management than mechanically grinding rotations which the “single-use phantasms” I’ve seen suggested would inevitably devolve into.

Edit:

Would it be op if we something like this?:
You summon a phantasm or 3, let them do their thing, let’s say they do 50k damage in total from few of their attacks, then you shatter them (mindwrack) and each phantasm or clone now deals 25% of the total damage they have done in the time they were summoned?
Let’s say for every 10 seconds they were summoned, daze from diversion would last 1/4 longer?
That would give mesmer a reason to let them attack, but also a reason to shatter.

Hard to track/display, incredibly confusing if anyone ever got hit with it in PvP, nothing new over what we could already do with Chronophantasma if chrono had a viable dps spec.

You’re missing the point, very few of the classes are actually punished for using their class mechanic, the only one you can possibly say that does is core necro though as you say reaper does still use it for 5+4 and possibly 3 for CC.

Sure if a guard uses F1 they mess up but they are encouraged to use F2-3 when needed without penalty. Indeed I don’t know a single dps build for any other class that doesn’t use their class mechanic except rangers.