How bout reducing the HP on some of the bosses? The fights are just way too long due to the break-bar mechanics (e.g. grawl shaman (stone shields interrupts break bar braking) or the ice elemental in dredge at +60 and above). The fights are BORING when they are that long.
Thank god I had over 200 infused rings so I just kept selecting the same name ring until one worked. These stupid little bug type things are so annoying Anet as I hold on to my growing stack of fractal chests till you fix the “reduced RNG” loot bug.
OR if you have a ton of fractal relics and don’t want to spend the silver for extractor tools just buy the +5 for +7 conversion (in my case for 2 armor sets and all the regular slot infusions on weaps (incl. underwater and ascended breather), jewelry, and back piece, it will run you around 5k regular fractal relics. No big deal when you have 10s of thousands of them.
It’s not the work I’m complaining about, but the fact the amount of events and things to do seem a bit low compared to the other maps and using that for grinding masteries is sort of oxymoronic.
Fractal weapon collection doesn’t recognize all the skins I’ve gotten prior to the HoT release despite the same skins showing up in my wardrobe or even on equipped toons….bug?
You can trait for more “initial robustness” in your illusions and that is only for certain situations (like vet karka farming). But most situations illusions are shatter fodder and you can consider yourself lucky if they get one attack off.
I use mimic with feedback bubble when vet karka farming both soloing and in zerg. I agree that the mimic duration is a bit too long.
Rng should be set up two ways. First tiered based upon player gameplay time vs the present magic find % as an example (substitute desired gameplay duration time):
1) <1000 hrs – RNG as is
2) <2000 hrs – all drops go up one level (blues become greens, greens/rares, rares/exotics)
3) <3000 hrs – drops go up another level
The second part is that the collection system influences the loot drop to avoid redundant drops.
Dump the clone generation and restore torment stacks back.
I went with a vampiric heal minion master on my necro and managed to solo my way through the Orr maze and take on the boss in the middle before the changes. Now, with the new minion AI the maze was a rofl stomp. OMG it is so good!
Welcome to the horrible RNG of this game! You only got 4 (I got 6). Oh and I got so many duplicate fractal skins, while hoping to get those I don’t have. It’s a shame a game where there exists the concept of collections can’t use that information to influence the loot drops to avoid redundancy.
It’s sad how I misuse the scepter #2 block as a delay waiting for the CD expiration for weapon swap to try to keep that 3rd phantasm up.
I’ll be controversial and say unlike other classes, mesmer requires more cerebral input to their play. For example, you are much better off relying more on your phantasms for dps if you are solo’ing Vet Karka since they evade so much. Adapt your style to the situation in hand. Mesmer’s have broad capabilities that mimic (sic) the other classes making them more of the jack-of-all trades in the game so you have to adapt more to the combat situation.
Replace “slow” with stun or chill.
Stun > chill > slow
Try using shatter when solo’ing vet karka and you will discover it doesn’t work well (I found you rely more on the phantasms to keep the karka busy while you pew-pew from afar, since karka have so many evades).
A good solo test is to go against veteran karka with their variety of attacks and massively annoying evade combat. Chronomancer didn’t really improve my kill times but it did improve survivability (which to be honest I don’t think the mesmer needs).
Reaper on the other hand is a monster and had no issues solo’ing 2 vet karka at the same time.
Not bothering with this event for the following reasons:
1) Mobs involved with event should drop loot. Kill a champ and no champ loot, WTF Anet! Better off farming in Silverwastes. Take a hint Anet when you see participation of this event drop dramatically. Also, world boss event mobs should drop loot.
2) Bloom drop rate failure continues. Also, the bloom drops should occurs per vine event and not ala your stack methods. If HoT does this same thing you will lose many customers.
Slows in PvE are essentially meaningless (which negates Mesmer effectiveness yet again), since Anet developers realized how lame confusion was because of slow NPC dps.
Instead of slow replace it with stun and maybe mesmers would be more effective.
Let me throw out this proposal. Dump MF altogether and link drops by tier and amount of time played. Only thing not to change is precursor drop rate. Should this be implemented account bound or character bound?
As an example, where first color reference is what drops now in game by RNG.
Played under 1k hrs – RNG is the same as it is now in game
Played 2k hrs – Blue drops now are green drops, green/yellow, yellow/exotic, exotic/ascended
Played 3k hrs – Blue drops now are yellow, green/exotic, exotic/ascended
Played 5k hrs – minimum drop exotics, what was green on up is ascended (which now becomes salvageable).
Think about it Anet!
Unlike most I only played with the new skills and traits in Southsun, solo tackling big vet karka. I feel they are best NPC to test such things out due to their variety of attacks and abilities and I wanted to not spoil my surprise of the new maps.
Chromancer – well casting is a bit slow, effects (dps and animations) are great, but was disappointed a bit with gravity well levitate. If any mob or boss is in well when it expires the levitate should work even against defiance (I really wanted to see the big karka float :-). Pull should be part of the gravity well (why not steal the guard pull trap mechanics, to work around the issues you hit?).
Reaper – OMG its awesome. I solo’d 2 big vet karka with no problems. Wish I could do that with my mesmer (if only our vitality regen was restored back the way it was…hint).
Dragonhunter – had no issues just using bow and traps. Was disappointed with the bow AOE animation and dps though.
Tempest I didn’t play since my ele experience is pretty newb with it.
I wish they would replace slow by either stun or chill instead. Slow doesn’t seem to hold mobs in wells enough.
CS needs to be longer in duration (even a second would make a big difference). I found I had about a 30% success rate of trying to do what I wanted like Messiah.
Slow should be replaced by either chill or stun. Slow is inadequate with wells. Also, the levitate doesn’t work against defiance. I found when applying it on the big vet karka in Southsun levitate doesn’t work. Levitate should have no counter if you are in the well when it times out.
I tried the reaper against the big vet karka and found that overall in survivability and dps it is pretty kitten good. I even had no issues against 2 big vets at a time. Note: I did trait for more stability and that helps a lot.
Quick impressions in old map PVE environment. I tried the new Mesmer, Necro, and Guard skills on big Vet Karkas in Southsun as a test. I find they are the best to see how various combat skills and traits work concerning survivability and speed of the kill. I play mesmer most so much of my discussion is on that. To be honest I was surprised how good Necro reaper is!
1) Mesmer still has to rely on shatter illusions way too much for adequate dps. The new chromancer skills are interesting and provide for more shattering. The wells in combination with slow don’t work as well as they should. Slow should be replace by chill or stun to hold mobs in the wells better. The new skills are pretty although casting seem slow to me. Was disappointed that levitate when the timer expires doesn’t work against those big karka (levitate should work even against defiance). Survivability was improved but to be honest I’d forego that since mesmer survive pretty well and rather see more damage output.
2) Necro reaper is awesome. Survivability and proper traited with stability had no issues against big vet Karka. I wouldn’t change a thing. I even had no issues against 2 big vet karka which shocked me.
3) Guard was interesting as I restricted myself to bow (no weapon swap) and traps. Had no issue taking on a Karka vet and I would say that you did a good job on those utilities. The trap effects are awesome! The bow AOE shot though is disappointing in animation and dps-wise.
A good way to benchmark your mesmer traits/skill set is to solo tackle one of the big vet karkas. How fast you get them down vs. survivability will really show you what’s good.
I’ve run Civ 6 under both OS sides and again Win7 handling of fans does seem to be more aggressive. Win7 bootcamp though works just fine with GW2 even though there is more fan noise than normal.
Lol, downed Tequatl with double HP with 13 min left on his window. Funny watching Teq’s HP bar melt.
What I don’t like is the discrepancy between the loot tables of dungeons vs. fractals. Fractals you have to work 3x as much to get less loot. Anet needs to totally revamp the loot drops to reflect actual work it takes to do the runs. Tequatl ver. 2.0 requires coordination of PCs to have victory for descent (but boring loot). Triple Trouble loot table should be 3x what it is (reason why no one does it anymore). The marionette fight was a very fun interesting fight (best I felt in the game). But all these illustrate the same MMO mentality of how fights are designed in these games.
SOAPBOX time: I wish MMOs would incorporate battle tactics at the individual NPC level so how they interact in groups would be unpredictable. Why aren’t mobs smart enough to know not to run blindly around a corner to a waiting stacked group of PCs? It amazes me how the AI of MMOs is sorely lacking on NPC mob strategies. Most of the AI goes to the mechanics of the fight requiring PCs to learn the process to win and once done it becomes rote. It’s like you apply a backward chaining AI methodology to a scheduling problem when a simple hill climber method works so much better.
I wish MMOs would make individuals in mobs have different battle sense and the combination of the NPC mob group results in more unpredictable fights, not an overall mechanic people learn to exploit weaknesses. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the world boss would consider zerg composition and change it’s tactics based on that. This is pretty easy to do, why Anet and others have not incorporated this capability in their games escapes me.
Also, the other thing I don’t understand is the fact being in combat slows you down. It should be just the opposite. It’s probably Anet’s way to compensate for the dodge mechanic.
(edited by curtegg.5216)
Impressions of beta:
1) Combat actions seemed sluggish, several times it took multiple key hits to activate utilities.
2) Wyren fight was stupid for revenant with lack of range weapons (so much easier to range).
3) BUG, every time Wyren flew passed and lay flame down all PCs engaged in battle lost their character textures (reverted to baseline texture).
4) Masteries need work.
a) Allow change of masteries after selection (like traits).
b) I liked how the masteries were laid out but not selecting them using a increment button (should allow user to just click directly on mastery at the level he chooses like traits – e.g. If I have 3 masteries points and I select the 3rd one in a specific row all up to the third should select).
5) Need further info/help on the swapping legends related to the threshold bar. The flow of combat is not obvious and the bar is more distracting than thief initiatives or adrenaline bars of warriors (the bar progress from middle overly complicates it).
6) One quest done with Larenthir was confusing and the flamethrower did not allow aiming with number one action (was random in how it pointed). That event was unable to complete because of the ineffectiveness of the flamethrower number 1 action. Also, the husks never seem to take damage on the HP bars but after some hits would go back in ground. This questline needs rework. Other quests were okay.
I wished they allowed you to purchase the Fractal Tonic with 10k relics or 2 stacks of pristine relics. Now, that would be nice, considering all the 100s of fractals I ran not seeing more than 4 chests and only gotten 6 of the skins (not counting the dups).
kitten your RNG Anet and MF.
Had the following issues when I reran the story on 2 of my alts. I first solo’d the story on my Mesmer. Then on my two alts the following occurred while they were rerunning the story with a party.
1) My warrior alt progressed through the story normally till we finished Camp Resolve battles, but then did not advance to the Mystery cave. The party was kind enough to rerun that story part again (which is a bit too long). From that point on the rest of the story progressed normally and I got my second head piece.
2) My guardian then reran the story with another party and progressed normally through the story to the very end cinematic (post dragon cup’de grace), when just before the final part and your banner of upcoming Rose of Thorns, got kicked out to silverwastes and the story part completely reset and now my guardian has to start ALL OVER AGAIN!
Please fix the story not progressing normally when you rerun it.
The new leveling system sucks, so I use my new character for (named appropriately, “Bearer of Rings”) is to simply hold my 250+ ascended rings gotten from the paltry drops in fractal runs. Anet’s stupid RNG really sucks because it should account for prior run drops!
If you really want to improve the game given now you have collections and track what the player has already gotten from drops then use that information to influence future loot drops! Is that so hard now?
Presently, I only have 2 legendary weapons. Meteorlogicus (used with my torment set) and Minstrel (used a lot).
However, for GS I would suggest instead of any legendary since the mesmer auto-attack doesn’t exploit legendaries effects much, you should go for the Chiroptophobia! I have mine skinned on an ascended GS. Best, GS for a mesmer, hands down. During auto-attack the bats literally spin outward from the sword and the best part is your clones with their GS also generate bats.
I hate the zone event one, because you spend way to much time chasing stars in the map and the zerg gets the star done by the time you get there.
Mesmer down skills mimic their actual up skills. We have the spread of capabilities like the other classes, but are the masters of none.
If Anet really want it to be a Wintersday month, then how bout upping the loot drop on better loot by 100x (which is still extremely a low chance) for that month, instead of loading us down with crap.
New dailies suck, period. Jump around more for low level content is just Anet’s way to balance their servers with a cheap trick. With the old dailies you usually get more than 5 done running either snowridge or coil in 15-20 min and get a lot more loot.
This demonstrates why Anet’s use of simple low static fixed percentage drop rates is so old-school. In fractals it should be based upon the tier level of the fractal you run. Higher tiers have higher dropped percentages (1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50) per item type (weapon, armor, ring).
In fact, the more you play the more you be rewarded. It surprises me how much the developers worry so much about economy when their approach to drops is so much like communistic based economies of equating all participants rewards as being an equaled low fix percentage. Anet should change the drop formula to be based upon player hours in game (simple example would be that every 1000 hrs in game time would double your chances). I would think they would have a more “expanded” population baseline of daily players.
Power stacking and the fire one are the best combo. Once you have 25 power stacks and since mesmers typically run with 50% plus precision with that flame/burning AOE you will be putting out some good numbers with coverage.
Too bad Anet doesn’t separate how PVP and PVE react to condi damage (PvP keep condi stack limit), PVE remove the limit.
Wish Anet would put as much into bug fixing as they do those cinematics.
The old mimic was so useful against Lupicus. The new mimic I will never use.
I have 8 80 toons and I play my Mesmer 95% of the time. Sure we don’t excel at high dps, but we are fun to play. I solo the Silverwastes Gold bosses every so often when there is no one around (which is rare) and it takes forever, but you can solo them. Even the legendaries are solo-able, if you don’t get adds on you – it is a grueling long fight (I hate those veggie dog packs). I run 4/4/0/0/6 in silver wastes with GS, and Sc/F. Sometimes I run with my slow tormented rune gear other times with my rampager gear with traveler runes (either gear works for me).
Okay, it is a condition from the Living story, but a duration of 10s of minutes? Stupid mechanic, because it is easily defeated by logging back to character selection screen to purge it and come back in.
What’s the point Anet? Dumb.
I did an experiment with my mesmer. Running either a rabid torment set (no passive speed) and a rampager set (with trav. runes), with sword/sword and scepter/focus I could not take down the champ husk guy. However, sceptor/focus and staff or GS I got him down solo. Melee is not a good thing in this zone unless it is short and you have a good escape.
I will say I’m having fun running torment and stacking it with clone detonations and running the mobs around to death.
Cat tonic keeps a warm spot in my bag for JPs.
To be honest Anet’s RNG implementation is pretty crappy as a static fix tiny percentage drop. They should have implemented a sliding scale based upon the number of runs you did not only in fractals and dungeons but on the world bosses as well.
After creating such an amazing game, it’s sad their RNG implementation is so simplistic.
Archeage implemented mounts right (the only thing I like about their game besides the intense crafting). They have animation that supports you mounting your ride from all sides and you can perform combat on your mount. Anet’s last story zone with its woefully inadequate single waypoint screams for mounts.