Guild Wars 2

Funny thing that you guys mention that last boss. My ele, war, guard, necro, engy and thief did it in 2 burns. My ranger took an extra burn but not by much. My Mesmer took 4.

Gee whizz I must be some kind of terrible right? Well, not quite. The phatasms wouldn’t summon on it and GS auto attack kept saying blocked. Had to burn it down with simple sword auto and BF.

So yeah add to the gripe list: Mobs being invuln for various reasons or out of LoS slightly and having phantasms go on a full cool down and GS and staff missing half the time because who knows why, the mob is in a field and yet something is blocking it.

Flamingfoxx. First of all this hacker has driven many people from WvW in T8 and T9 and caused a lot of people to stop enjoying a game they play to have fun for months.

Secondly, read the second post by Chris Cleary. I very much doubt this is the only account associated with the guy in question and it wouldn’t surprise me if he had accounts on multiple servers doing this.

Thirdly, a dev can do and see more than you or I. They have the tools to know they get the right people and see if something fishy is going on. This is not an abuse of power, this is him investigating and dealing with a problem as outlined in the T&C which we all agreed to.

As for the video, you find it appalling but to the 50 people on WSR, UW and FoW that I know, they find it funny. It has made them feel the devs do not simply ignore us nor that they are robots without any form of emotion or humour. I’m sure many others are rejoicing on BT, FoW, WSR and UW.

Same as above really. I find the single target nature and that AoE burst between groups of mobs in open world is where it’s at. Weirdly I find myself running a dps shatter build for those with iWarden for extra AoE, however I do have to think about where to summon it for damage. My staff or D/F else just carves a path of destruction wherever she goes and has just as much utility a lot of the time.

What I found really depressing is looking over frifox’s calculations and DeKeyz stuff on the DnT forums. To put it bluntly, mesmer damage is bad for dungeons and having seen the live stream on the traits I am having very large concerns about whether the effort to get dps will actually be worth it if you’re still subpar to nearly every other build and class.

I would love to play mesmer in dungeons and more in open world but all these little problems keep coming back, lack of AoE, phantasms dying easily, ramp up times and having to sacrifice utility slots for damage.

Oh and never do the dust mites in dry top as a Mesmer unless you love disappointment.

I’m don’t think it will be mandatory, though I think on demand clone generation will be a lot better with it (did I win the stating the obvious competition?) and so will feel mandatory in a lot of builds. As others have said we’ll have to wait and see on chronomancer traits as well.

Another thing that has me curious is that turrets can now be crit which to me seems like maybe they will change the way minions, turrets, illusions etc take damage. Perhaps they may reduce cleave damage to these things unless targeted or do a balance pass at health/armour so they’re not simply cleaved out by 2 great swords.

If such a change happened then maybe DE would not feel needed if clones lived longer. Which would then bring us to “Why is DE a grandmaster if no-one really needs it and it doesn’t do anything else?”

Thing is chronmancers only get to choose 2 out of 5 trait lines (and it’s the whole line now, not just cherry picking) so will be limited or have to give up some really good traits if they want to fill a roll AND be a chronomancer.

A Mesmer not being chronomancer gets 3 out of 5 and so can be much stronger.

The person arguing about memsers being second class citizens needs to think about that. As a chronomancer if you want interrupts as your play you will go chaos and probably domination, you get the extra jazz from chronomancer and that’s sweet.

BUT the base Mesmer instead gets a frankly amazing pistol trait, 3 awesome minors (which 2 act as cover conditions) and to reduce recharge on sword attacks in addition to a choice between 2 very defining grandmasters in duelling.

Sure the chronomancer could spec into duelling too but then it would miss out on the amazing power block or CI which are imo too good to give up. A base mesmer gets to make the base class better through more trait choices that affect the base class, that is its identity.

A chronomancer is going to be facing some very tough choices on traits and won’t be able to have all that a “base mesmer” has. Base mesmers won’t be facing as tough decisions as they can get so much now.

In the above example, would I say picking the duelling line instead of the chronomancer and the shield/F5 combo was worth it? At the moment and on the limited knowledge we have of it all, yes, yes I would. In fact I would say it’s better.

The trade off is as Fay said so I won’t repeat her words.

However if you’re looking for a more obvious one, you just used continuum rift in the middle of a fight, mortar engy, ele, guardian and warrior just accidentally cleaved out your sprite and rendered your specialisation mechanic worthless. This is without mentioning the revenant who will most likely get a trait for killing anything that isn’t a revenant in 1500 range, instantly.

There’s just too much AoE and cleave in this game for squishy things like sprites and illusions. I remember doing some dealing against a zerk GS warrior and he just massacred all my clones in one hit. An entire class mechanic rendered useless by an auto attack, just glad he didn’t use axe!

Oh and by the way, did you miss the part where a SA thief gets a minor trait for 50% damage reduction in stealth? I’m far more concerned about that than anything shown about the chronomancer. SA thieves are a plague atm and it’s just getting worse.

Am I the only one that remembers how easily illusions and phantasms die to a stray fa**?

Or that most weapons (even the dreaded mesmer bane D/X thief) have cleave?

Also some people seem to be forgetting the part of the F5 skill that leaves a vulnerable sprite which from what they said on the podcast is most likely not got a lot of health if putting some AoE will destroy it and bring the Mesmer back to the AoE.

You also have to be in combat to be able to keep enough clones to use the ability, which to me says it’s very high risk even if you found a hiding spot for the sprite. The application will be great for PvE and to be honest, I’m glad, maybe I can play a Mesmer and not feel like I’m the least damaging person on the team and that I’d have been better off rolling guard.

Well, Anet just has to make sure the core traits are right on the mark, gel sensibly and are very desirable.

In all honesty I like a lot of what I see, being able to shatter phantasms without losing them, the defence of the shield and offence of its phantasm. The way that the new shatter works looks like it will allow for some neat tricks, especially in PvE and possibly a big (sorely needed) damage boost in that area. They have added counter play to the shatter too which hopefully won’t die as fast as clones but not be hard to kill.

It’s also worth remembering what the dev said. For every 3s of alacrity you’re getting 1s shaved off the cool downs. At the moment it doesn’t look like you will be getting much more than 3s off a single shatter and stacking it up for long periods might not be too easy or worthwhile. So while on the surface it looks super powerful, on the other hand, you’re realistically only shaving a few (1-3) seconds off all your cooldowns.

Though that won’t stop the whining and I think rchu has the right idea. Ah well, at least the guardian specialisation is safe, code named G.O.D.

Strill.2591:

That’s how it works already.

No it isn’t. Now they can be CC’d once and then gain stacks that need to be removed before you can CC it again. This allows a co-ordinated group to control when they hard CC the boss as opposed to a predetermined time.

Generally my parties use deep freeze on bosses to get a 3s window of safety. This allows us 3s to Rez someone if needed on higher level fractals or just allows us to DPS safely (them long channels are a b***h) during the freeze period. Stripping is then done down to 1 stack left, we check how everyone is, if everyone is good and healthy we strip, freeze, dps. Rinse, repeat.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiance

ODB.6891:

All I see is Mantras repeated again and again, while still having to deal with phantasms/illusions. Worst of both worlds in my opinion. I may be personally biased, but I absolutely hate the mechanics of mantras. I hate having to worry about charges on them. I hate having to channel them to have them ready again…either in our out of combat. I hate having them forced on me to be effective. I think I hate the concept of having to spam them during combat (and then have to deal with the resultant channeling to get them ready again). I also don’t think the changes to them will really equal a net gain for us dps wise due to having to stop and channel them during combat. Even if they did, I still hate being forced or coerced into loading up my utility bar with mantras versus other utilities I would actually rather use.

I actually like not having to worry about stats associated with trait lines anymore…that was a huge and positive change. I don’t know if I said that in this thread already, but I have in multiple other threads. I have also said multiple times that I think their changes are great as a whole…I just think that PvE mesmer’s are getting the short end of the stick here. Its like the developer who does mesmer balance has his/her brain stuck on mantras and PvP.

Pretty much this.

I always hated the way the mantra damage trait worked but the new trait isn’t any better in my opinion. Where other classes get straight up do more damage because they’re on fire, bleeding, you’re using a symbol etc instead Mesmer gets a smallish boost to crit damage when using a mantra for a small amount of time.

At the moment playing a Mesmer in PvE feels either like playing a cut price guardian with less stability and having to put more effort in or some kind of terrible thief knock off trying to help bad people skip easy stuff.

The damage at the moment is very underwhelming, bosses neuter the class mechanics with AoE and straight up don’t target anything but you so no “hiding” with your clones. I feel that Mesmer with these traits will be reduced to a reflect bot or condition cleanser and even then, why bother when a guardian does all that for little to no effort and does more damage more reliably.

Also a lot of people are talking about interrupts, they’re supposed to be changing defiance into that break bar. From what I understand that means bosses are essentially immune to every CC except a timed spike at the right (as in designated, well telegraphed, neon signposted) time. So gg on that.

As far as I’m concerned the best thing to do would be add a caveat into mental torment where it does 200% more damage to NPCs or whatever would make it on par with the ludicrous damage other professions can dish out in 10s. Then we get PvE shatter Mesmer, devs can stop worrying about passive play and PvP isn’t ruined by Helseth wrecking a whole team with 1 shatter.

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

So, one single thief is single-handedly taking EVERY structure on every map at once and nobody’s stopping him? Whaaat?

From what I remember and saw they do it on the off peak hours. By that I mean when most servers would be lucky to have more than 20 players in total distributed across all 4 maps. They also like to do it at night, it’s like these infamous nightcap servers but instead of having a small zerg at night you have a guy or two (it’s a pair of hackers usually) that teleport into everything and kill the Lord.

Also, yes, really. T9 at off peak hours generally has that few people, WSR has a few more than the others so they’ve been dominating the matchup.

I’m just disappointed that the title isn’t “Inspiration – a lack of” or something like that.

Well, the simplest solution is to make keeps take no damage from anything but siege. That can be treb, cata, rams, ballista or golem. Towers stay as normal though it might not hurt to make things immune to conventional damage. Would also be a nerf to map blobbing a keep and PvD the door down.

Before someone starts by saying that then towers and keeps will be impenetrable, yes they will be hard to take but then maybe if we had more siege options it might help, thinking rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock type of set up.

I feel that some people seem to either be misunderstanding what’s happening or are coming up with solutions to problems that really don’t need solutions to. The fact is they are using a programme to speed into and out of keeps, towers camps etc and kill the lords then go straight onto the next. A lot of people in UW, FoW, BT and WSR have seen, video’d and taken screenshots of them being inside keeps that have been held and swept for hours. They have died and then reappeared seconds later.

They were banned at one point but after crying on the forums it seems their IP was unbanned. I would urge people in the servers affected to friend pro heals and get in contact with him when they do it so he can catch them and ban them.

As I type this they are in WSR T2 keep failing to kill our Lord and take it, both run around guild less and there’s no holes in the walls or gates broken. We killed the Mesmer and maybe 20s later he’s back on inner.

A lot of hackers roll Mesmer or thief to make it hard to tell if they just stealthed or portalled etc.

However this is not the case here. These two flip an entire border in 15 mins. They reappear seconds after you kill them. Yesterday they were even flying golems into a fully upgraded and defending SM. Yes, flying, not even hiding it.

Moraxxo, I believe there’s a person to contact in game called proheals, there may be a few more devs that are on and can help too. He can swap to that server and check or ours when it’s happening.

Pretty sure I saw you in CM for a few hours the last few days Gobbes =P

To be honest if you could just do certain skill challenges in a few zones and be done then it wouldn’t be so bad but I doubt that. I really don’t understand everyone’s aversion to PvE, especially as it seems to be account wide from what I read. Suck it up, do it once then never go back.

Here’s an idea though, once per day you can get a hero point from killing the overgrown grub in EB =D

You really should care about a class throughout the whole game. A class that is a solid choice (like guardians) for most content that feels useful and never a burden whether it be PvE, WvW or PvP is what mesmers should strive for.

A lot of people get into a class via PvE, it’s how I was first introduced to Mesmer and if it is pants on head ret….yeah, well people won’t play it. The less people playing a class, the less likely it will get much needed attention and fixes.

Ah well, here’s hoping the specialisations and trait revamps will be good and sensible.

When I first got GW2 I read the descriptions of the classes and thought Mesmer sounded a lot of fun. I tried it out as my first character, didn’t even get to the champ oak (as it was back then) before thinking it was really weak when other players were massacring stuff. It got deleted.

I then tried other classes, ranger, engy, necro, guardian and ele. It was hard work but eventually I deleted all but ele and have learnt to use staff ele for over a year and run that or D/F but not often S/D or S/F. All I can say is when I finally got Mesmer to 80 and tried the high dps builds for them is that I was severely underwhelmed.

To me it feels like I’m playing a cut price guardian in PvE. In WvW it’s a lot more enjoyable due to the burst nature of shatter but…well, I have a thief which can wreck people a lot easier, safer and I don’t become mostly useless (or a veil bot) if 30 people show up.

I want to play Mesmer more but that mantra damage trait is awful to play with, especially comparing to other classes I play more of. I feel that other classes can put in half the effort and do better than a Mesmer and most of the problems with damage are simply that there’s either way too much cleave in the game or phantasms just don’t stay up long enough.

The only other class I feel is less useful in PvE is necro but even then they have pretty decent damage in that it doesn’t drop every time a boss does AoE and well of darkness.

I don’t pretend to know GH and exactly how many more people they got but they got 2 guilds (one medium, one huge) from your old server Grendal. I can certainly say that of those two guilds there are no hackers atm as WSR cracks down on them swiftly by reporting them (kinda easy when in T9 and there’s almost no-one else around to hide with) and I knew them fairly well.

It’s worth remembering that apart from reporting hackers and supplying screenshots to Anet then there’s very little that can be done. I know BT in T9 has a real problem with 2 that they can’t seem to get investigated and banned. I don’t hold it against the server though as the rest of them don’t resort to that even thought they are in such a bad place.

Perhaps in future just reaching out to GH community (or any other community there’s a problem with) and asking them to PM you about something on their server would be a better first step.

StickerHappy.8052:

Ele (d/d cele) is broken as hell though, no whining here, just #realtalk.
And i disagree with your statement with the partially being true.

Eles also have high might uptime from fire fields and blast finishers they have, Pair that up with battle sigils or hoelbrak runes.

Armor of earth gives you prot stab with both 7.5 seconds. Traited with an adept major trait.

Thats only 1 trait. now pair that with elemental attunement.

2 traits with high boon uptime, + cele stats (Makes you utilize all pros of those boons)

But again this is D/D ele only

Blasting fire fields is open to all to do if they have blast finishers. The D/D ele has only 3 blasts (4 if you count evasive arcana in earth) for 12 might. Accounting for max uptime of those blasts and fire fields you can sustain 15 might however your combat will be severely affected. With str runes, str sigil etc yeah you can sit at 25. Other classes are just as capable in other ways, even Mesmer can get a decent level of might through traits depending on build and weapons.

Armour of earth has a 10% uptime (high 75s base CD) on prot and stab, hardly spamming and people use it for the stab usually, not the protection, though it is nice. The trait is nice but only extends it to 20% uptime with little control about it activating when you want. Most people pick up the auras apply protection trait.

Elemental attunement is 5s base duration on boons, with 6 in arcana you get 6.5s and the CD on attune nets being 11.5s if I remember. Yes high uptime but remember they also have the lowest health and armour with no stealth and only 1 teleport which has a 10s longer CD than blink. Without that they would be as bad as mesmer there’s a reason why corrupt boon makes eles run. I really wouldn’t touch the amount of protection an ele can get in that spec as it is a bunker spec.

But let’s be constructive.
Things I’d like to see is maybe an extra second on all these random boons, maybe 2s so they last a bit longer.

I’d like to see either deceptive evasion changed or adding something like clones grant 3s vigor to nearby allies (or just the mesmer) on death.

I’d also like to see clones having the same boons as you when they’re generated or at least show them having the same boons/conditions so you can hide better.

2 might on each clone/phantasm shattered instead of 1 with the trait.

Better blast finishers for mesmer, not a lot, but more than 1 hard to time blast.

An extra something to GS auto attack so clones serve a purpose like on other weapons. Perhaps a short duration cripple (0.5-1s) on the last hit.

I’d also like something done with how easy it is to cleave clones down, it’s so trivial for most classes even thief now dagger got a small cleave.

Can we please stop with this “eles have all these boons in spades” talk as it is only partially true. Yes, they can have high protection, regen and vigor uptime but it requires a number of traits to keep it up. By my count it requires a major (possibly 2) master and 3 major adept traits to get constant of all 3 as well as utilising combo fields, leaps and timing of auras.

You could run a fresh air build like that but chances are you’d be picking up more omfg save me traits like final shielding and you can’t choose both vigor on crit and final shielding otherwise you miss out on elemental attunement.

Yes Mesmer has been nerfed too much but I still stand by my original statement. The problem is deceptive evasion requiring dodges and thus vigor to generate clones not the vigor uptime. Come up with a non OP on demand clone generator trait which doesn’t need dodges and you may not miss vigor on crit.

I dunno a non violent, non destructive protest like making Wednesday a no play day in protest and stating it on the forums could be alright. Though looking at the SAB or riot guys maybe it’s not a great plan.

My server (WSR) has been floundering in T8 and T9 for a year and a half now, we’ve seen 3 mass exodus of people in that time. It was bearable the first time as it wasn’t the entire WvW population and when the PvE players pulled their fingers out we had numbers but over time the population has been in decline.

The reason for the last exodus was one guild had GvG all the guilds in our likely to be match ups for the next year and wanted new opponents. The other guild were getting sick of being the only ones tagging up and having to carry the server more. The third guild hasn’t left but had a period of not really raiding, more quiet time.

So now we’re in T9. Do I need to transfer to have some fun? No we can have a bit of fun in prime time. Outside of prime time there’s not much to do. The enemy has barely anyone to fight a lot of the time. People are even solo attacking enemy keeps as our enemies don’t even bother to upgrade them and don’t respond.

If I was to transfer (to silver or something) then there’s almost no doubt in my mind that I would have more fun though as there would be people to fight and fight with. To anyone from BT and FoW I really feel sorry for you guys having so small a WvW population.

Pretty much what Zenith said but also pointing out that those eles that do go 6 in water and arcana are playing a bunker/support spec. Even with renewing stamina, tell me how many ele’s are running zerk fresh air or any other zerk builds in PvP? I think I only have heard of one and even then he kept getting focused to the point he switched if I remember correctly.

The problem isn’t the nerf to vigor uptime, it’s the necessity of the trait deceptive evasion to generate clones. If the trait was replaced by a trait that say reduced the cool down of clone generating skills (not including phantasms) by 5s for each clone killed then no-one would complain about lack of vigor.

aspirine.6852:

Kungsmurfen.2861:

Atm FoW and BT could use some more players.

I started out in FoW and it was a very good server for beginners. The higher end servers are more a bandwagon and zerg server. I would also would go for the lower ones to start.

Being in T9 and fighting both those servers and seeing how few people they have and how little there is to do there almost has me in tears of sadness. I cannot in good faith recommend joining any server in T8 or T9 even for a newbie.

Outside of prime time you either outnumber your enemy so much you steamroll or they outnumber you and steamroll you or in the case of T9 there’s maybe 5 enemies in WvW and you’re lucky if you see another soul outside of EB. Prime time is usually a bit better but it’s nothing spectacular, there will only be 2 or 3 groups running around all 4 maps.

My advise would be go to mid silver or higher, I know a lot of people in Aurora Glade and Gunnars Hold and they always say there’s fights to be had. You’ll find harder opponents but then it will be better in the long run.

Edit: I can’t recommend T8 and T9 as WvW currently is, with no incentive to move down outside of just wanting a drastically reduced population. There are no merits, no bonuses or anything like that for being on the low coverage/population servers.

To me it depends on the reason siege was built, trebs and catas to take down a wall, nice. Ballista and AC to take down defensive siege, yep, nice one. However I do find it annoying being in a 3 way where both enemies outnumber you 2-3 to 1 and they both start building ACs in the middle of the field.

Can we go around? Sure but we find it harder to push the blob off the AC especially as we’re 15 and have maybe some roamers with few (or no) mesmers given the skill required to be good at Mesmer. In the end we just left the other two to play while we tagged their keeps and dispersed the fight.

The whole thing just reminds me of bad RTS games where you get PD creep and arty wars, where you’re more likely to die to boredom as whenever a side “wins” the fight they can’t solidify the territory they just took due to the enemy already having siege.

But that’s just the thoughts of someone in the largely forgotten, unloved and insignificant T8 soon to be T9.

Yesterday and today between 7pm and about 10pm GMT I’ve been experiencing more rubber banding, disconnects and skill lag both on EU T8 EB and most borderlands. Funny thing is I’ve been experiencing it in PvE too, certain dungeons like caudicus manor and fractals.

It’s only this last 2 days it’s really happened like that. I also don’t think numbers are much to do with it as on T8 a ktrain blob is usually 20-30 people at most 50 but this has been happening when there’s relatively small numbers from what I can tell.

Asteroid seems a little salty and perhaps biased, cryokro is giving the more accurate account.

A lot of our WvW guilds have left or become very inactive. TasH hasn’t been raiding because many have RL commitments, WvW had a fall off in numbers for some reason and then decided to leave, CC have left, WM left a fair time ago, TT fell apart and many are no longer here. We’ve lost a lot of our commanders and many of the people that actually do the stuff that keeps the ppt and stuff rolling.

The other side is that it’s not fun to fight 1 vs 2-3 against people. Fr and vabbi got the numbers to steamroll if we’re not careful so we’ve been on the back foot in those fights and all I’ve seen is field siege and rezzing of the dead knowing full well we can’t push to clear them like we could before the stab change.

It goes without saying though that as fellow T9ers for half a year with Vabbi, I’m glad you’re hopefully going up and may get to top of bronze maybe higher. Give Dz our regards when you get there.

A lot of good advice here to listen to if you’re just picking a server, also mentioning if you’re EU or NA is usually a good idea, you may find someone gets in contact and will show you the ropes.

As others have said the only thing that server dictates is your WvW experience and so that’s the crucial part of picking. I would echo the advise of waiting till your level 80 before going into WvW and also say in map chat you are new and ask if anyone is willing to help you.

If you could give us a rough idea of when you will play people will be able to advise best, for example if you mainly play prime time and don’t want to wait to play on some maps, maybe T1-2 are not for you. If you play at say 3am because you have nocturnal patterns then T1 or T2 might be the best place to start so you never run into the “no-one on” situation that happens in T8 at those times.

I’ll also assume your primary language is English from the way you type but there are servers with a different default language in EU which can be nice if English is not your primary language or you speak another more fluently.

Well that kinda sucks, I would like the Calf and puppy but it’s not worth 1000 gems in my opinion.

I have to admit I was tempted to get these until I found out about not unlocking the ones used in the forge to get the dolyak calf.

If however I was to unlock the Fawn, Puppy and Arctic fox when they get forged I would buy this in a heartbeat, as it is now, I just don’t feel it’s worth it as I don’t really like the fawn or fox.

Is this likely to change or not?