Guild Wars 2

As an alt…I rolled another mesmer lol. Different race for different looks. Mesmer is just so fun to play.
That being said, my other alt warrior is a refreshing change every now and then. Using the sword/warhorn build it’s fantastic to have all that mobility and perma swift after playing a few hours on crawl speed with mesmer.

Well actually giants can be easily solo’d. Their attack pattern is quite simple and if you time your dodge right you can kill them without taking a single hit. (Stay close to him and dodge when his foot is in the highest position just before his stomp) It does take a long time though.
The real problem is like you said, the reward is not worth the trouble. Why would a group bother killing a boss monster if it only gives white/blue items and negligible karma/experience? It was fun killing them the first few times, but after the novelty wears off it’s simply not worth the time and effort.

They really need to bump up the rewards…or make it more consequential so that maybe if not dealt with the boss will come attack captial towns or such. Though that will annoy a fair amount of people. So more rewards. If they gave at least one guaranteed rare per 24 hours or so it may help the lack of people challenging them.

I like to think of it as another goal to grind for; an alternative to legendaries. If you want it, you can get it. Eventually. Under a few months. No RNG, no gambling with mystic forge. It diminishes the rarity and bragging factor of owning one, but a realistic goal is worth far more striving for.

Stately armor. It says so in the drop-down menu on the link you provided too. You get it from heart karma vendors from mid-level areas.

Yes! I’ll even say it’s great.

After the patch I bought a rare scepter and torch for my 80 mes, and tested around orr. It was horrible. I retraited everything for it and had geared for condition damage from my staff setup, and even so it was sad. The occasional 4k confusion from cry of frustration/confusing images combo was fun, but hardly worth it compared to what you could do with any other weapon in that time.

A few days later, because I love mesmers so much I rolled another one for my alt. I completely ignored scepter until level 20 or so, when a green one dropped and I thought to myself what the hey, all weapons suck at this level, why not give it a go.

Wow. It is fantastic. In these lower levels you do not have any cooldown reduction traits for other weapons until tier 2 unlocks at level 40, save sword – that forces you to melee with your squishy low level mesmer and does not work for offhand skills(bug?).

No cooldown reductions for everything. No illusionary elasticity for extra bounces with greatswords and staves. No reflections for focus. No bleed on crit for your illusions. No deceptive evasion. All locked until level 40 and higher. Forget torch.

Scepter fills all these gaps, especially paired with offhand sword. #1 generates clones fast enough with the patch buff, #2 gives block and high damage counter attack/blind. #3 does great direct damage and with the cry of frustration combo it does great confusion damage(equal to about 6~8 #1 hits from what I’ve seen). #4 Another block. #5 iswordsman does good damage and has decent survivability for a phantasm with its jumping in and out attacks.

2 blocks (works nicely with retaliatory shield trait) + 2 dodges + ranged ensure great survivability. Decent damage from one skill and a nice phantasm. Low cooldowns that you don’t necessarily have to trait for. With this setup I even soloed a group event boss 3 levels higher than me without a problem.

Before I tried it I thought of getting to the mid levels as a chore and tried to speed through it as fast as possible. Now it’s become a breeze. I imagine when our more advanced traits start pouring in I’ll no doubt switch, but until then I’m having a jolly good time doing our dreaded low levels as a mesmer.

Dual swords is great!
iswordsmen do great sustained damage and have nice survivability with them jumping in and out of AoE attacks. Leap and switch has a nice side effect as a stun breaker or a makeshift teleport + immobilise for those pesky runaway mobs. Riposte is a great block that you can use to interupt as well, and sword#1 applies vulnerability and rips off boons – I believe your clones apply vulnerability too so you can pull your weight in boss fights.

I used to run around sword/sword with full berserker oriented gear, and had a blast. I read all the complaints about mesmers not doing enough pve damage in forums and thought “huh?” as a ploughed through normal pve content solo without a problem.

…Then I hit orr. And suddenly that staff and greatsword started to look really appealing. With putrifiers pulling you all over the place and abominations/gorillas knocking you down every second, being ranged does have its advantages. Especially for a light armor class. Not to mention you lose a lot of dps dodging and kiting attacks – the main reason I slowly switched to greatsword and staff. The thing is even if you have berserker gear the mobs there have quite high health and the glass cannon approach doesn’t work too well because your target will still be alive after your normal attack rotation.

Personally I found it quite tough. You need to time your dodges/block and blurred frenzy perfectly. Which is fun really, if that’s what you are into. I highly recommend you take Illusionary Persona, the grandmaster skill in Illusions trait so that you can hit f3 and f4 immediately when you need it.

Lots of low level people have completed the memoirs. Yesterday I even saw a level 6 charr in sparkfly fen getting his last page. He was getting one-shot a lot though.

But yes, I’ve seen some high level guys run up to a downed player, then after getting close enough to see their level, they just back off and stand idle refusing to res that poor low level guy just trying to get a nice back piece. Maybe it’s because low level players draw aggro from a billion km radius. Some may find that annoying.

However once in a while someone nice will come around, so have patience and wait until enough people appear and follow them in or keep trying. Not like the repair costs are staggering at lower levels.

Well…if you don’t want to make sense, go engineer. I love how my nature-loving flowery sylvari prances around in her distinctive child-like animations and clothes, and then upon meeting a random animal suddenly pulls out a flame thrower and burns everything on sight.

While smiling.

coglin.1496:

Well yeah. Several of us have pointed out repeatedly that all the other profession sub forums had threads with each claiming they received all of the aggro all of the time.

I have a sneaking suspicion there wasn’t an engineer or guardian nearby when they experienced this.

coglin.1496:

ddoi.9264:

It simply doesn’t matter. Heck, sometimes I even pull aggro off other engineers(lolz).

This would indicate that it is less an issue with the profession as a whole, and more likely something more specific.

That’s what I thought too, but then what is that specific characteristic? I’m really curious. Race? Gender? Power/Condition damage/Support skills focus? AOE skills?
Also personally when playing other classes this kind of extreme aggro simply doesn’t happen. Except guardian.

Yep, I’m always the #1/#2 target of any mob in the entire game. Sometimes the mob is engaged with another player already but as soon as i shoot it once it rushes towards me.

Honestly, I’m really getting sick of this. DE’s, stationary turrets, whatever; everyone else gets to sit back, relax, do damage and get tons of loot while i’m kiting/dodging around like a headless chicken just to survive and hardly get any damage done in the process. I love the engineer class and a challenge every now and then is nice but if the only thing my game experience consists of is running around in circles all the time and adjusting camera angles so that my attacks do not get cancelled, I simply cannot find it enjoyable.

Boss events are the worst because you can only avoid their attack so much. I actually use up the downed limit because as soon as someone ressurrects me the boss instantly abondons its current target and rushes towards me yet again. Repair bill + no gold medal + no loot.

The only time I’ve seen where I’m not the only visible enemy in the mob’s eyes is when there’s a guardian around. They seem to be the #1 aggro class. But this is also only temporary because as soon as the guardian moves out of range or I step closer to the mob than the guardian I’m instantly the new target.

To test this out I tried:
- being a low level player in high level area
- being a high level player in low level area
- even level area
- use pistol+shield
- use rifle
- use pistol/pistol
- use any kit
- spec defensively
- spec glass cannon
- attacking mob first
- attacking mob after everyone else already did
- not attacking at all(in this case any newly spawned mobs go for me)

It simply doesn’t matter. Heck, sometimes I even pull aggro off other engineers(lolz).

It seems to be slightly dependant on what weapon you are using though. My warrior hardly gets any aggro until i swap to my longbow and suddenly it’s the engineer experience all over again with all the mobs rushing to me and only me.

I don’t understand why anet can’t just make the aggro random so that any player in the vicinity can take the aggro regardless of class or what weapon you are using.