Guild Wars 2

180s CD single target elite that can be dodged/obstructed etc. Remember, it’s a team game. I agree that stealth moa is cheap, but a lot of things are cheap. Some of them are highly spammable and moa really, really isn’t.

Please stop pretending Attunement is “just weapon swap for eles”. No other class can weapon swap between 20 different skills. No other class besides warrior can trigger any sort of effect on weapon swap. It’s F1-F4 skills and those skills are affected by chill. Should Engineer toolbelt skills also be immune to chill? No. And only necro has easy, reliable access to chill.

Glass cannon shatter has a pretty high skill cap but it is very satisfying. I wish you luck!

Also, if you are glassy, Blink is your best friend. Probably even if you’re not.

Saturn.6591:

calavel.6249:

Saturn.6591:

Let’s see… imagine you run over your curtain 4 times in a row:

4 × 6 seconds = 24 seconds
4 × 12 seconds = 48 seconds

Whoa, deja vu.

Just because you wouldn’t do it (I guess you refer to your post in the other topic where you said that you wouldn’t want to do that), doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be possible to do it.

It’s got nothing to do with what I want. This is how TC worked way back. They nerf-broke it precisely for this reason and it’s never fully recovered (still stacks with absolutely nothing).

Ross Biddle.2367:

This isnt quite as simple and straight forward as you make it sound. Couple problems. In stealth, or just vs certain classes, thieves are faster. So running isnt an option. In fact turning and heading in a straight line is opening your back to them in an obvious way. Healing might work after the first burst, but he can do more than one backstab in the time it takes for your heal to run through it’s 30s cooldown. Procing protection isnt available to all classes/builds, at least not on demand. We all known the problem with the likes of aegis vs stealth, but the real problem is targated skills. If you have a lot of them, if you rely on them you cant use them in your so called free period you’re talking about. So, in fact, that period isnt free at all. It’s pressure the thief is applying despite the fact he’s not hitting you for the second.

What’s this mysterious 30s CD heal? Is it some sort of made-up average of all heal skills cooldown time? They go as low as 10 and as high as 40 or 60 I think. Running is more than just moving in a straight line. You can dodge, use port skills, leaps etc. And please explain to me this “pressure” the thief is applying while in stealth and not damaging you.

But yes indeed, the real problem is targeted skills. I see you’re beginning to understand. Now take away the backstab and replace it with 3 fake thieves spamming bleeds on you.

I’m trying to find a good build for WvW roaming with a small group of primarily direct physical damage dealers, something that can move fast, support a bit but focusing on chase moves/stun/immobilize and dealing direct damage. Not too glassy, because I will need to extend a bit more than a light armor class really should and because my utilities will be mostly aggressive in nature. Very little focus on illusions because I need to move around a lot and illusions move too slowly.

This is the setup I am currently playing around with:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQRAsa8dlwzipXTzoGa9IyJFQ3yRSRpxaleYbXYuB-jUyAYrioRTkCNVIQJwioxWxKiGriBTVOka1Lk3gIrWIARTAA-w

20/30/0/20/0

Key traits are Far-reaching Manipulations, Duelist’s Discipline and Warden’s Feedback. This gives me lots of mobility skills that are both defensive and offensive in nature, as well as a 1200 range magic bullet for stopping runners.

Blink helps me chase or get out of a bad situation.
Arcane Thievery is mainly there to eat swiftness and stability from runners and apply it to myself. It also deals with cripple, immobilize and other things that prevent me from moving fast.
Decoy is for retreating or misdirection when I close with a target.

I’m struggling a bit with the Dom Major traits, but I really feel like I need the +20% condition duration as well as the minor traits for vuln spiking through daze/interrupt (any condition just slides off warriors these days). I’m also not sure if I should slot Compounding Celerity. It could potentially help deal with swiftness downtime, but I don’t know how reliable it is or whether there is a range limitation on it based on your distance to the clones…

Azgarn.2145:

calavel.6249:

Blinds are only a real problem with D/P or P/P thieves. And the D/P are fading out of the meta I think. Besides, just step away from the blind field and you’re golden. Can’t really think of any other blind spammers, it’s not really an overused condition.

lol… d/p is not getting any less popular. and on top of the blind field thieves have Shadow shot (blind is unblockable), and blind on stealth. It’s a crazy amount of blinding.

Okay, so thieves can trait for lots of blind. But it’s not like it comes free with every thief build and it’s not really that powerful a condition. Black powder field is tiny, you can stand outside it and auto-attack with most weapons and they still get hit (and you don’t get blinded). Signet of Shadows active is about as useful as Signet of Midnight and stealth on blind competes with a lot of other good traits.
The next time a thief blind-stealths you, just target an ambient mob or another nearby enemy and hit it once. Problem solved. You lost target anyway, so you might as well negate his blind by hitting something else. If warriors can deal with thief blind, we sure as hell can too.

Pretty sure that swap applying immobilized to a stealthed character is legit since it doesn’t require a target. All it needs is an enemy close to to the Leap clone.

Morfedel.4165:

When a thief can pop out of stealth, hit you for half your health and immediately restealth, heal up, come out and finish the job, yeah it is a problem.

And while in stealth they have time to identify which is the real one very easily.

5s is not immediately. It is in fact rather a long time. If you get backstabbed, then the thief gets Revealed, there is no way around this because he has to break stealth prematurely in order to backstab. Revealed is not as big a problem for a mesmer because staying in stealth has more benefits then breaking it prematurely (thus triggering Revealed).

But this is not a thief vs. mesmer 1v1 discussion. Yes, it is easier for a thief to back off and play the waiting game against a stealth mesmer. But other classes do not have this advantage, every time they lose target they have to run around and try to find the stealthed mesmer while clones pump out conditions or damage.
When a thief stealths he is effectively giving you a couple of seconds to do whatever you want (run, heal, stealth, pop prot etc.), because he needs time to set up his hit. He is also making it abundantly clear what is going to happen next. He is going to backstab you, and it is going to happen within the next 3-6 seconds because he needs to do it before his stealth runs out.
A mesmer with a heavy stealth build is constantly pressuring and applying damage even when they play defensively.

… because only thieves run full zerker gear and high crit damage traits. Right.

Were you fighting alone? The only thing I can think of besides this being a bug is Phantasmal Disenchanter hitting you with an attack bounced off one of your allies.
Any idea what kind of phantasm it was? What kind of attack did you get hit with (animation/damage type/number of hits)?

You’re trying to do too many things at once. P/P – D/D makes no sense because there is next to no synergy. You have a variety of skills to use in different situations but none of them do anything special. Your condition damage is half of what a condition focused build would run so your bleeds won’t impress anyone. You have no crit damage so you’re not hitting hard enough with direct attacks even when you crit. You have several stealth utility skills, but no traits to support them.

Pick one weapon combo as your main damage set and try to build around that, using either condition damage or direct damage (power, precision, crit damage). Pick your other weapon set based on what the first one is lacking. If you have a melee mainhand, you might benefit from shortbow. If you have a ranged weapon mainhand but high damage, you could benefit from a main hand dagger in your swap set. You could run a dagger offhand just to get cloak and dagger.

Also, if you have never used the Withdraw heal, go try it right now. It’s amazing.

Confusion is bad in PvE because most mobs don’t spam skills the way some players do. Confusion does have a niche in WvW but it mostly relies on your target being
a) not too bright
b) a skill spammer/quick auto-attacker, i.e. mostly thieves

With that said, confusion does punish any skill use, including active healing and it can serve as a cover condition for bleed spammers. It bascically comes free in some form with most condition builds so you might as well try to stack it up when you can. With the right timing it can offer a nice little spike that bleeds can’t. But again, it’s highly dependent on what your target chooses to do and thus hard to control.

Saturn.6591:

Let’s see… imagine you run over your curtain 4 times in a row:

4 × 6 seconds = 24 seconds
4 × 12 seconds = 48 seconds

Whoa, deja vu.

Ross Biddle.2367:

I smell roleplay.

I smell character bound wedding dresses.

… as a random drop from BL chests.

Good post.

This is for group play mostly, sPVP? I like the focus on interrupts, but without high spike damage I’m not really sure how I would play it. CI is a great trait but you really need to follow the immobilize up with something heavy-hitting to put people on the defensive.

The general lack of condition removal also seems like it could be harsh to play in the current meta. But fun.

Morfedel.4165:

However, I feel almost obligated to do so because of stealth spamming thieves. Every time I get into a battle with one, if i’m not also running heavy stealth, it feels like I don’t have much of a chance.

I honestly don’t get this. I hear this “thief perma stealth” argument all the time and it makes no sense to me. Thieves stealthing is not a problem. Thieves do 0 damage while they are in stealth. Mesmers can apply bleed stacks from clones or DPS from phantasms while they stealth. Thieves can only run and hide or try to set up a sneak attack.
Yes, backstab hurts but it’s the only trick high crit thieves have. Find ways to deal with it and they will be forced to run or have a straight fight (which they will likely lose).
And let’s not also forget the fact that stealth drops target. This is a problem with thieves because you have to find and call them when they come out of stealth. But with stealthing mesmers this becomes even harder because not only do you have to find the right target among 2-4 identical ones, you have to keep doing it every time they come out of stealth.

Oh, and please don’t start lecturing me about how easy it is to tell a mesmer apart from clones. Yes, it’s reasonably easy but:
a) hotkey targeting means possibly cycling through targets before getting the right one
b) click-targeting is unreliable, especially in groups.

all of this wastes up to several seconds where you are trying to get a target instead of doing something useful. Granted, this is not so much of a problem if you are not playing in a group, but trying to call/find target on a stealthy mesmer is generally a pain.

More focus on interrupts and punishing enemy skill recharge sounds good to me. This was the style of mesmer I prefered in GW1, because it’s all about skill, timing and intimate knowledge of other classes and their skills.

Xaylin.1860:

Mesmers are the secondary stealth class so why shouldn’t they have something like PU?

I’m not saying mesmers shouldn’t have stealth traits. I’m saying PU is too many things packed into one trait. The thief list is just an example of how many traits it takes another stealth class to build the same benefits. It’s wildly overpowered compared to the rest of our GM traits.

Joonks.7501:

Your argument for why it isn’t a key feature of the class is the same as my argument for why it is. Four different ways of accessing stealth, one of which should really count twice (veil) makes it seem prominent to me.

Not going to argue the semantics of “main class feature” with you so I guess we can just agree to disagree.

My point is that while mesmers (and engineers and possibly other classes, I dunno) have access to stealth/cloaking skills, it is not tied to the class in the way it is tied to the thief. Thieves are the “heavy” stealth class.
PU in itself provides almost as many stealth benefits as the entire Shadow Arts + Actobatics trait lines when you pick all the good stealth traits.
PU provides regen. Thieves have to trait for regen in stealth.
PU provides swiftness. Thieves have to trait for +50% movement speed in stealth.
PU provides protection. Thieves do not have access to this boon AFAIK.
PU provides +1s stealth. This is a thief minor trait (25 Shadow Arts)

I’m not saying classes should be the same or have the same traits, access to the same boons etc. I’m just pointing out that the “heavy” stealth class has to use several traits to get a benefit similar to PU. And since thieves can’t do any damage while they are in stealth, they cannot exploit the defensive nature of stealth as effectively as a mesmer.

Joonks

Except stealth is a main feature of the class. This post is a pretty great example of how people make arguments to nerf something that they really don’t understand.

Nonsense.

One weapon skill on base 30s CD. Two utility skills, 40/90s CD. One elite, 180s, obviously not designed for single-target. Not tied to class mechanics in any way. A single GM trait tied to stealth (The dueling stealth trait counter-acts a stealth-heavy build. It’s also broken and has a horrendous CD).

Yes, we have stealth. No, it is not in any way imaginable a main class feature.

The fact that mesmer stealth is 75% utilities and elite should tell you all you need to know.

You should always start with some PvE (IMO) to test your new skills/weapons out and see how they work together. Even more so with a class you haven’t played at all, if I understand you correctly. And mesmer is not exactly the easiest class, featuring a somewhat complex class mechanic that can do a lot of different things depending on your trait/stat spread.

Most condition mesmers run rabid gear because we need high precision to trigger bleeds. Condition mesmers need as many illusions active as possible as well because the illusions apply the bleeds. The good news is that any illusion may trigger a bleed, phantasms take no precedence over clones in this regard (unless you trait Dueling II, perma-fury on phantasms).

Also, and I might be wrong here, but it doesn’t seem like you understand the difference between clones, phantasms and illusions.
- clones are mainly annoyance/shatter fodder. They do next to no direct damage.
- phantasms do good damage and can be affected by a variety of traits. They do a reasonable amount of your direct damage.
- illusions is a general term that applies to both clones and phantasms.

Skill tooltips will tell you if they create clones or phantasms. A general rule is that all main-hand weapons produce some sort of clone, all off-hands produce some sort of phantasm and all two-handed do both.

People running away is a general problem of condi mesmers because you rely heavily on your clones. PU condi mesmer, even more so. You might be able to catch a runner, but your clones likely won’t. So unless you can apply spike damage independently of your clones or shut them down hard with daze/stun/immobilize, you’re out of luck.
It’s one of the main reasons I decided to switch from condi to DD. I was sick of people just running away whenever I was getting close to a kill.

Blinds are only a real problem with D/P or P/P thieves. And the D/P are fading out of the meta I think. Besides, just step away from the blind field and you’re golden. Can’t really think of any other blind spammers, it’s not really an overused condition.

What’s wrong with PU?

It’s a grandmaster trait (XII) in the arguably overall worst trait line mesmers have (chaos), yet everyone is running it. That alone should tell you that something’s wrong.

PU is a sad and continuing attempt to hide the fact that the Chaos line has bad synergy, both with itself and the rest of the lines.
PU turns stealth, a mechanic that is not a main feature of the class into a very powerful tool. When a class that’s not based around stealth suddenly gets a lot more of it combined with aegis-regen-prot spam you get a broken class.

Considering that Temportal curtain is now getting “fixed” down to 50% (6s) I wouldn’t hold my breath.

But hey, at least now we get to feel important when a whole zerg runs across the curtain and get a whopping 6s of swiftness each, right?

Some nice buffs for Phantasmal Healing and Time Warp, but wth is going on with the focus? Are they just reverting it to its original state after all the complaints last time? Or does it no longer stack with itself?
Whatever the case, I can’t see myself using it now. I don’t have time to dance around in a curtain for a few seconds while someone is trying to rip my lungs out. I need it to apply swiftness/cripple and then be ready for a pull. Now it becomes a zerg swiftness offhand and nothing else…

BTW what would happen if you cancel your heal with the new Mender’s Purity? Is it a free condition cleanse with your heal back up seconds after?

Me Games Ma.8426:

The time.
The swordman attacks as the fastest of all phantasms with a hit every 4s
Berserker hits every 6s and the warden every 9s (source: WIKI)

Aegis or any 1-hit block will completely negate all of its damage though.

Xaylin.1860:

Redg.9807:

…

You might want to reconsider your analysis since many of your numbers are off.

You compare a traited Prestige and untraited Decoy. I also have no clue at all how you got your numbers on how many boons you get. Assuming the maximum time in stealth with PU untraited Prestige gives you 1 boon every 7.5s (30s/4). Decoy gives you 1 boon every 10s (40s/4).

Regardless, Prestige is not the reason for PU being overpowered. It just happens to be the most efficient stealth skill because it got the lowest cooldown.

Saying PU stealth gives you x number of boons over y amount of seconds in relation to cooldowns is also just nonense IMO. PU fires off 3-5(?) boons depending on what stealth skill you used, in quick succession. Arranging the numbers in this way makes it look like PU provides a steady constant stream of powerful boons, when it is in fact more like boonspam where you hope that it will stack either regen or swiftness, depending on what you need the most.

I’ll have to disagree on The Prestige. Stealth, AoE blind, AoE burn, blast finisher (if they ever fix it) and condition cleanse when traited is too much for one off-hand skill on a base 30s CD.
I know it’s hard to get full use out of it all the time, but I think that’s because they packed way too much stuff into a single skill.

Me Games Ma.8426:

What do you think is bad about phantasms beeing targetless?

F1-F3 won’t work with them for one thing.

But I do like your ideas, I agree that phantasms are boring and all about mediocre damage and little else. Some should have no damage component, some should have more conditions, some should apply boons. Right now, the only phantasm that is both interesting and useful is Disenchanter.

Speedrunning dungeons gives a high gold reward without any random factors. But I can understand if you don’t want to do that.

AoE should be more about skill combos (field + finishers) as well as positioning, and less about trading survivability for AoE win damage.
Siege AoE is good, I like it. It takes time and resources to get siege equipment up in the right place and that should be rewarded.

Why is it even something you buy with gold in the first place? Any PvE title in the game requires more skill than becoming a commander, which is just… well odd.

If it’s an option, targeting them and checking the class icon is the easiest way.

Barring that, most heavies are warriors since guardians tend to stick to zergs or at least groups. If a medium armor tries to close with you, it’s probably a thief. If they try to keep distance, it’s likely a ranger. Engineers may do either. Turrets are a dead giveaway, but most people don’t use them in WvW.
Mesmer is easy to spot but harder to catch. Most necros have one or more pets, and their skills have a characteristic black/green colour scheme.
Eles are the least obvious class for me, but it’s also one of the classes I don’t know very well. Elemental attunement (glowy hands) seems to be what most people look at but I don’t think it’s very obvious with lowest settings.

Another way is to look at which boons they currently have, but this requires some knowledge of each class and their builds. And if you have them targeted already, just look at class icon.

Just in case you were in doubt that loot is essentially random to a ridiculous degree, I’d like to add that at rank 20-ish I have received 2 ascended drops from WvW chests so far.

You are using the second-lowest tier of armor (blue). You can usually get a full set of Masterwork (green) lv80 armor, weapons and tinkets (next tier) for 30-50s on the Trading Post for all of it. Although recent silk prices has probably pushed the price up.

But if you have the funds, you should go ahead and buy a set of rare (yellow) gear. A full set will set you back some gold depending on stats, but it’s not bad. A few dungeon runs or dailies should net you enough cash to buy rare gear. The stat changes compared to Fine are huge.
If you don’t have enough cash for all of it at once start with weapons, then armor and finally trinkets.

Exotic (orange) gear is better than rare but the difference between gear tiers become smaller and smaller as you progress.
WvW is about mobility and keeping on top of the situation before anything else. If you are outnumbered 2 to 1 by reasonably skilled players you will die or be forced to flee most times. Rare gear is perfectly viable for dealing damage if you don’t trait too tanky and exotic gear will not keep you alive for any longer if you’re already in a bad situation.
It will, however, give you a fair chance against most players since any armor tier above exotic gives only minor benefits to most builds and the majority of players are not running better gear than exotics.

Screw fear, just fix confusion instead. It’s the perfect condition for mesmers but they decided to ruin every confusion build instead of fixing/replacing one trait. I’ll swap back to condi mesmer the second confusion becomes viable as a main condition.

SlimChance.6593:

Actually, I think it would make more sense for the Mesmer to have more “Chilled” access. Not necessarily the movement speed decrease, but the “skill cooldown increase” part.

Also this.
For those who remember GW1 mesmer was a class primarily for messing with other classes. Interrupting key skills or completely shutting down a dangerours target for a short time and generally being a nuisance without being directly in your face and doing damage. We still have good access to daze and interrupt but chill (or a similar condition messing with skill CD) could really flesh out our ability to control targets.

I can’t imagine much of an outcry over a request like this, chill is generally not one of the more coveted conditions even though it is incredibly annoying.

If you’re human check out racial T2. I’m using that with the starter mask (comedy). Basically trollface in a weird smoking.

It’s all about Sharper Images, forcing condition mesmers to stack precision to have a reliably stacking damage condition. I can’t imagine running an offensive condition build without it. This is also my main problem with condition mesmer, being shoehorned into using rabid gear and not getting enough out of your high precision and crit damage.
And with crit damage and precision neatly stacked in one awesome trait line, what power mesmer wouldn’t trait at least 20 Dueling?

Add in the fact that Dueling is just packed with great and above-average traits and it becomes clear that this trait line is just way too good compared to the others.
IMO Chaos traits need major rethinking. PU is only the beginning of what’s wrong with that trait line. Domination is good, but CC belongs in Inspiration or Illusion if you ask me. Illusion has major synergy problems and too many traits doing nothing for shatters.

PtL is bad because of the cooldown. Sure, it’s fun and fits perfectly into the mesmer theme and a boon stacking/sharing build but it’s essentially random. If you get a good boon and a good condition (the ones you need the most at the time), then the 12s CD was kind of maybe worth it. If either one of them or both was bad for the situation, you’ve wasted your time casting it.

Null field is a vastly superior support skill, as are most mantras since they are now AoE.

OK so I have been running a lot of different types of condition builds in WvW and I’m getting a little tired of it. I want to try something more power-focused but I don’t like being too glassy. So I came up with this:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgEQNAR8al4zionRTmGa9IxJFQ35kUo6UX6BuvduB-jEyAYLBZiAMVIQJwioxWSLiGraBTVSEV7NKiWNA-w

I might swap a few of the berserker trinkets for some more defensive stats like PVT or cavalier.

The main idea is to have good direct damage and crits without sacrificing too much toughness. GS does what it does best, high ranged damage. Pistol + sword inflicts lots of damage, vuln. and a bit of daze. There is a general focus on phantasms over clones and shatters are mostly for vuln. spikes with Diversion, spike damage with MW or Distortion for survival.

The build is meant to be used mostly in smaller battles or duo-roaming, possibly circling the edges of larger battles for stragglers to pick off.

Restorative mantras + Mender’s purity should hopefully turn healing and condition removal into a natural part of the flow of combat, negating the need to “stop and heal”.
Mantra of pain has a natural CD of 1s (3/4s traited lol) and the active skill pain spike has the same CD, meaning it can be spammed reasonably quickly, then channeled immediately as an extra minor heal.
Mantra of distraction exploits the vuln. stacking from domination minor traits.
Blink is for chasing and escaping.
Time warp for mantra spam and because it’s a great skill.

Other skill options:

Mantra of Concentration – the build lacks stability and stun breakers and this brings both. The CD is long though, and the stability is short.

Mantra of Resolve – along with Mender’s purity and Mantra of Recovery this should take care of most conditions. Also AoE!

Ether Feast – The main reason to bring Mantra of Recovery is that with MP traited it gives you 2×2 condition cleanses to top off your heal. Basically Mending (warrior heal) only better. EF offers a much larger direct heal, even with 0 clones active. Power Return, however, will pretty much never be interrupted.

Phantasmal Disenchanter – more regen uptime, condition cleanse and boon strip. May be superior to Mantra of Resolve.

Null field – this build has a lot of combo finishers but no combo fields apart from Time Warp. NF could make up for this, but Chaos Armor or a short retaliation seems like the only semi-useful thing you could get out of this.

Alternative traits:

Domination:
There is a lot of daze going on, so Halting strike might be an option instead of empowered illusions. However, daze does not guarantee an interrupt and I prefer a passive damage increase even if it comes from clones. Could potentially make Magic bullet more of a spike skill, which sounds kind of fun.
Nothing really seems to be able to compete with GS trait.

Dueling:
Mantra Mastery is not super essential (and completely wasted on MoP), but don’t neglect the 2 seconds shaved off the mantra heal.
I struggled with Blade Training for a while, but eventually decided that since the IL/swap mechanic are so horribly broken, all I’m getting for that trait is 2.5 seconds shaved off BF. Oh, and 50 precision yay.
Protected mantras could potentially be a better choice than Mantra Mastery since RM rewards spending and recharging your mantras whenever you can.

Inspiration:
Compunding Celerity could do a lot of good here, since the build is rather lacking in mobility and escape options. CC with 3 clones is basically swiftness, but anything that makes you highly dependent on keeping up a large number of clones needs Deceptive Evasion IMO.

Obvious weaknesses:

Mantras are very vulnerable to interrupts for several, obvious reasons. Keeping range, or at least keeping yourself standing and un-dazed/stunned when channeling mantras is key. Dazing before – or even during – the channeling should help.
The build lacks stealth, blocks and doesn’t have a lot going for it boon-wise. Staying near phantasms to keep up regen and pumping out heals with mantras is probably the only way to outlast a sturdy opponent.

Thoughts? The mantras are mostly an experiment right now, but I’d like to try and see how much good you can do with Restorative Mantras. It seems like an excellent trait in a smaller group that can stick to the same range and each other.

Does the tooltip on daze skills update with any of these? I’m guessing no?

I’ve been tempted by mesmer runes as well, but 0.33 secs of extra daze seems really weak compared to a lot of other 6-rune bonuses. Very niche.

Trying to beat them at their own game (stealth and mobility) is most likely going to fail. Thieves have far better and more reliable access to stealth than mesmers, even if they choose to focus on other traits. Assuming you survive the initial burst more or less intact, I think the best strategy is to be highly agressive whenever they stealth. Even if the backstab does not connect properly (i.e. hit you in the back) it still does a lot of damage (and stabby thieves usually have 100% crit chance from stealth trait) so you want to force them out of stealth before they get a a chance to hit you. If they make a stealth field, toss some sort of annoying field on top of it (boon strip might be good to negate stealth healing?)

Mesmer also has pretty decent access to block, protection and aegis to deal with stealth thieves but the main problem is that a lot of the trait/skills that grant these boons cycle between them randomly, so it’s hard to use them reliably.

What is the problem with elementalists exactly? I have only played one a little, so I’m not really sure what the problem is with the class. Engineer seems like a fair choice, their base weapons are just… kinda boring and they seem to rely on kits a lot. I feel like they may also be lacking some trait synergy but I’m probably just noob at engineer.

Crossplay.2067:

I think they should blink to surround the target when commanded to shatter but, once they get there, they have a one second charge up animation before they go boom simultaneously. This gives the person being attacked a chance to block or dodge while also giving mesmers a more reliable aoe.

While this seems like a really good idea on paper, it would also make it way too easy to dodge/block a shatter IMO. Part of the charm of shatters to me is that with careful positioning, you can surround the target with clones and get them into a position where the shatter is almost instant, not giving them time to react. It’s my understanding this is what “pro” shatterers do (I’m obviously not one of them :p)

The fact that clones attack at different ranges means that they will also reach their target at different times, again making it harder to dodge all of the hits.

With that said, I don’t shatter offensively much unless I have a clear advantage, because of the obvious problem of the clone reaching the target before it dies. I agree that something needs to happen with shatters, but I also kind of like the general way of how they work right now. The squishiness of the clones is the main problem IMO.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Keystone_Signet

Might be a cool idea to buff our somewhat meh signets. Probably OP with the new heal signet though.

How about swapping the conditions around so the first leap immobilizes and the second one cripples? I get that would mess with the whole leap → leap → swoosh swoosh idea but wouldn’t be a more effective chaser move that way?

A proper fix is just not going to happen at this time, the skill has been bugged since forever and has presumably been looked at several times. I just don’t think the magic fix we’re hoping for is going to happen, so it’s time to start thinking of other things this skill could do better than what it doesn’t do properly right now (and probably never will).

runeblade.7514:

Add a Block to replace staff 4 is just too OP on a mesmer. Staff already provides tons of sustain with a 6 second teleport alone.

Staff 4 is useful to me and doesn’t need change.

It it NOT a 6 second CD teleport, it is 10s untraited and only 6s with very specific trait combos that are not common. Most staff users will have 8 or 10s CD on Staff #2.

OK, so staff #4 is useful to you? How? When? As I said, I only see Chaos Armor (in general, not just the skill) making a difference if you are hit with super-quick low-damage auto attack and the other person don’t really know what they’re doing. And even then, the conditions it applies are too random.

Ision.3207:

I notice that many classes run Melandru Runes and Lemongrass/Poultry soup, but rarely see this set-up recommended for Thieves? Any specific reason(s)?

Probably because most thieves run pretty glassy builds, because this is the best way to take advantage of backstabbing – end the fight before it really gets started, or throw people into a panic when you suddenly appear and take away most of their health. Melnadru runes/soup offer 0 offensive buffs, and (most) thieves are all about offense.

I want to love Blinding Befuddlement, I really do.
But man, that 5s CD is killing it for me. Confusion damage in WvW/PvP was nerfed so hard that it’s useless if you can’t stack it, and stack it at just the right time so it doesn’t go to waste
Add in the fact that you can’t reliably apply blind through anything but The Prestige (long CD), Magic Bullet (long-ish CD, may not blind the target you want blinded if fighting multiple opponents) and Signet of Midnight (long CD, bad passive synergy), and I just can’t find a reason to fit it into any build outside some sort of 100% glamour focused cheese.

Also, I’m not sure I understand the sword. I get that there’s not a lot of mainhand options, but I’d probably stick with the scepter as long as you have low power and crit damage. Scepter block is so much more useful than anything the sword brings to the table in a cond build.