Guild Wars 2

As posted in another thread:

It is a much larger loss than you think. With cooldowns of 12 seconds on your two weapon sets a phantasm mesmer would use this rotation:
phantasm #1
swap weapon
phantasm #2
wait 12 seconds… phantasm #2
swap weapon
phantasm #1
wait 12 seconds… phantasm #1
swap weapon
phantasm #2
over and over…
The result was 2 phantasms every 12 seconds.

Using the same weapon swap logic we now get 2 phantasms every 16 seconds, or a 33% nerf in phantasms per second.

Under the new logic you will be waiting for the 48 second mark in a fight to unleash your third salvo of phantasms, previously it took just 36 seconds. Make no mistake, this is a huge nerf to phantasm builds.

I once did a lot of maths to come to the conclusion that is is absolutely essential for a phantasm build to have both the weapon trait AND illusionist’s celerity in order to maximise phantasms per second. For this reason I only ever used 10/30/0/25/5 with sw/sw + sw/pi, or 0/20/20/25/5 with sw/sw and staff.

Shatter vs phantasm was an even tossup prior to this. Those extra 4-6 seconds on the phantasms make this a nobrainer for me, it’s back to shatter I go. If shatter is nerfed next patch to complete the nerfing of every single decent mesmer spec I’ll swap mains.

I would have preferred a damage nerf due to target swapping and the increased hp per second the enemy would have to chew through if they decided to kill the phantasms (which in turn gave more retaliation damage back to them).

Don’t forget you also lose the cooldown buff to things like staff #2, greatsword #2 and sword #3. Not to mention decoy.

Phantasm spec almost requires signet of illusions now, but shatter spec is free to take something more useful.

Finally, anet said they do not balance around 1v1.

Shatter > phantasm by far for all modes of gameplay if this change goes through, and I’ve been a phantasm fan almost my whole lvl 80 life whether it be roaming, zerging, spvping or pveing, even through the confusion era.

If they nerf shatter and blurred frenzy next, we’ll have nothing left.

At least there’s a decent reason to go 30 in chaos rather than 20 if you were going more defensively than offensively since prismatic understanding got buffed.

Oh wait shatter spec without 20 in duelling is terrible, nevermind.

0/20/0/0/30. Enjoy your 20 points of spec freedom.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

@fadeaway: You’re definitely right. The question is, would you have rathered this or a flat damage nerf?

The 1v1 masses have been roaring for a nerf to phantasms, so Anet had to do something. That 12 second difference is nuts though… but, on the brightside, Phantasms should be lasting longer with Signet of Illusions working properly.

I would have preferred a damage nerf due to target swapping and the increased hp per second the enemy would have to chew through if they decided to kill the phantasms (which in turn gave more retaliation damage back to them).

Don’t forget you also lose the cooldown buff to things like staff #2, greatsword #2 and sword #3. Not to mention decoy.

Phantasm spec almost requires signet of illusions now, but shatter spec is free to take something more useful.

Finally, anet said they do not balance around 1v1.

Shatter > phantasm by far for all modes of gameplay if this change goes through, and I’ve been a phantasm fan almost my whole lvl 80 life whether it be roaming, zerging, spvping or pveing, even through the confusion era.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Its a really painful nerf, but more in line with other classes. Its not like we’re officially broken because we have to wait 2-6 seconds longer for some of our skills… but it does put increased importance on our other weapon-traits.

It is a much larger loss than you think. With cooldowns of 12 seconds on your two weapon sets a phantasm mesmer would use this rotation:
phantasm #1
swap weapon
phantasm #2
wait 12 seconds… phantasm #2
swap weapon
phantasm #1
wait 12 seconds… phantasm #1
swap weapon
phantasm #2
over and over…

The result was 2 phantasms every 12 seconds.
Using the same weapon swap logic we now get 2 phantasms every 16 seconds, or a 33% nerf in phantasms per second. Under the new logic you will be waiting for the 48 second mark in a fight to unleash your third salvo of phantasms, previously it took just 36 seconds. Make no mistake, this is a huge nerf to phantasm builds.

I once did a lot of maths to come to the conclusion that is is absolutely essential for a phantasm build to have both the weapon trait AND illusionist’s celerity in order to maximise phantasms per second. For this reason I only ever used 10/30/0/25/5 with sw/sw + sw/pi, or 0/20/20/25/5 with sw/sw and staff.

Shatter vs phantasm was an even tossup prior to this. Those extra 4-6 seconds on the phantasms make this a nobrainer for me, it’s back to shatter I go. If shatter is nerfed next patch to complete the nerfing of every single decent mesmer spec I’ll swap mains.

RIP confusion/condition.
RIP phantasm builds.
RIP build diversity.

x/x/x/x/30 = mesmer spec.

Replace ‘For great justice!’ with one of several options.
Replace mantra words with something of your choosing.
Guardian/warrior/ranger shouts.
Elemental attunement cries.

I would pay for these audio changes (I would also pay for skill animation changes such as the color of mesmer abilities).

Anyone else?

A great video to throw at people who say “but mine hits 6k it can’t be broken!!”, thanks.

Unfortunately, anet don’t care.

Wait, you guys are still trying to pvp with warriors?

Demosthene.2195:

Viking Jorun.5413:

No. I like having a source of fury other than signet of rage and fgj. It makes for a great combo with axe #5 and allows traits like Rending Strikes to properly function and stack a ton of bleeds/vulnerability.

If leaked patch notes are to be believed, Warriors will have permanent swiftness from crits and permanent fury from immobilize (longbow, cripple —> leg specialist --> immobilize) without Signet of Rage and FGJ even equipped on their bar. Flat 25% movement bonus for melee weapons will also help.

I’m seeking a solution that will make this skill any less useless once the patch hits Live, and hopefully a one that will make OH Axe useful in PvP, not just in PvE or niche WvW builds.

I have no idea why you would pick those traits.

My gs #4 sometimes does less dmg than my gs #1 on jade maw’s tentacles.

^Title.

Would be nice to get some comments from anet before everyone starts freaking out.

Obviously fake.

A great place to get this bug to show itself is jade maw (fotm).
My auto attack often does more dmg than the izerker phantasm on the tentacles.

Keep this stomping tip quiet… but if you wait for a downed mesmer to raise his hands and start casting #2 before hitting the stomp, they will actually come out of stealth before the stomp ends – meaning you can blink to them and finish it. You have to time it RIGHT before they go invis though.

Pyroatheist.9031:

In a 50vs50 zerg fight, what can any single person do to make a difference?

Some random notes here, not especially aimed at you because you know what you’re doing

Reflects scale well. Feedback, medic’s feedback, temporal curtain.
Retaliation scales with the size of the enemy.
Illusions stop aoes damaging friendlies.
Phantasms with inspiration line provide incredible retaliation damage.
Don’t die – any massive dps you do as a glass cannon is completely offset when you die easily and give a free rally to multiple enemies (survivability ftw).
Veil!
Chaos storm scales great!
Imbued diversion is an oddly good trait for shatter mesmers in zergs.

aka force multipliers… which mesmers have loads of!

Does mantra of pain proc altruism runes? I didn’t think it did but I’m asking anyway.

Power all the way.
Confusion is terrible now.

Jackums.3496:

The award for worst customer service goes to ANet.

Did you play tera EU?

4 is powerful because 5 is weak. Focus is fine.

My clones seem to be stealing my might stacks from mirror blade (#2) now.
Anyone else noticing this?

One more nail in greatsword’s coffin along with the izerker bug..

Nretep.2564:

Unfortunately confusion sucks.

Fixed.

I don’t know if that makes up for the low dps of staff #1 though, Pyro. But the massive warlock crits are definitely something to use staff for it’s great fun in pve.

Keen to get some thoughts on this.
Lately I’ve been getting incredibly annoyed at greatsword when in my time of requiring burst dmg, I pop the phantasm only to watch him bug out and hit for rubbish damage.
At least with the scepter we could grab an offhand sword/pistol phantasm.
What do you think?

In pve, if you only ever use one weapon… make it the sword.
For pvp.. sword fir killing, staff for surviving.

So basically the standard shatter build with some altered trait choices which severely harm your usefulness?

Neither of the 15 percent phant dmg traits, phant fury taken despite this. 25 points in illusions but not illusionary persona or compounding power? Traiting for confusion duration in pve?

Condition damage gear in pve to round it off? I’m not a fan, sorry. I think you’ve missed the main strengths of a mesmer. There are far better builds for difficult pve content.

When they add new gear, I think they should also add new currencies. Otherwise everyone is afraid to spend stuff like laurels or badges after they have grabbed the gear they want.

20/20/0/25/5
Gs and sword/focus
Zerker gear
Signet of inspiration, feedback, time warp.

If you don’t want to bother providing reflects via focus, go straight shatter(illusion) instead of inspiration.

Your clones are not a massive part of your damage, your sword is.

I’ve seen him do it before

What I mean by natural cleave is the effect caused when you hit multiple enemies in front of you every time you swing your sword. What this means is that bunching up enemies (using movement, bottlenecks in terrain or focus pulls) and then unleashing sword swings is usually the way to maximise your pve dmg whether you’re in a dungeon or soloing.

Sword does more damage in pve due to natural cleave btw.

Fantastic stuff as always Osi. Your whole guild seem really on the ball.
I notice after you use mind wrack you often pop cry of frustration as well even though you have no illusions up. Is this basically for the illusionary persona – something (1 hit) is better than nothing?

Try s/s and s/p instead of the greatsword. The phantasm hits way harder and it has more defensive utils.

Great stuff dude, loved the commentary. Thanks for slowing it down at crucial points as well, helped a lot.

Dunno how you can stand not having swiftness though, would drive me crazy.

While this thread has a red post in it, while it remains a place of testing after each patch to check if any progress has been made, and while it serves the purpose of informing less knowledgeable players about the bug, this thread will be allowed to live and will provide good visibility for all devs.

If it turns into a bump and whine fest, the heavy handed mods will lock and/or move it.

I suggest we keep it as the former

I’m going to have to check my gear did not have runes on before I messed with it.
Wouldn’t want anet to ban me for haxing.

My cats woke me up at 4am today by running around and fighting. I thought I could shatter them to get rid of them.

Flintbrow.7985:

“Flintbrow:
Why do you take debilitating dissipation?”

Explosions, I kite away from them. And phantasmal fury is canceled-out by Vengeful images or vice versa correct? So, if you want to go into Insp., picking up
Phantasmal fury would be wasted, no?

Phantasmal fury (duelling line) grants fury, 20% crit chance, to your phantasms.
Vengeful images (inspiration line) grants retalliation to your phantasms.

So there’s no reason you can’t have both

In terms of debilitating dissipation vs 9% reduced damage taken.. I prefer the reduced damage taken.

Banhammers incoming.

If you’re using staff and sword/focus/sword, I can’t see any improvement on your 10/20/10/25/5 build unless you turn it into 0/20/20/25/5 – and that’s just a decision based around dps vs survivability.

Full phantasm traits and several conditions on the target is verrrrry fun to watch though as a staff mesmer!

Flintbrow:
Why do you take debilitating dissipation?
Applies Weakness (3 sec), 3x Bleed (5 sec) or 3x Vulnerability (5 sec) at random when your clones die.
The weakness and vulnerability will last few fractions of a second against bosses, so you have 33% chance of getting something useful out of it.

If you’re phantasm spec (as opposed to shattering) I’d say the 9% less damage taken trait is far better.
Also in terms of gear – if you’re going to be taking knight gear and some crit damage gear, make your trinkets the crit dmg gear and leave your regular gear/weapons as knight. Far more efficient because the ascended trinkets give more crit damage than they would have given in raw stats, and weapons/armor for example give less crit damage than they would have given in stats.

Anyone got any opinions on the two duelling traits? My picks are phantasmal fury and blademaster. Do many people prefer deceptive evasion? Why?

Yeah that’s the spec I meant. 0/20/20/25/5. You wouldn’t opt for 10/20/20/15/5 instead because the 10 points in domination can get you the same thing in inspiration plus an extra major trait. After that you just need to take a good look at the chaos line to figure out if you want another 15% phantasm damage or not.

I alter between 20/20/0/25/5, and 0/20/20/25/5 depending on my mood. The first spec uses greatsword & sword/focus, and the second spec uses staff & sword/focus. I wouldn’t recommend switching to staff unless you need a ranged attack or your group is nicely bunched up and could do with some aegis ticks, or when you’re about to use chaos armor and signet of inspiration for some bonus protection. It’s a dps loss overall compared to sword.

Don’t forget focus is amazing for bunch mobs up. Lay a temporal curtain by a wall, start casting a warden, blow up the wall to pull the mobs into one cluster… the warden spawns and you follow up with sword #3->#2 to root them all in place and make them eat a whole warden cycle, blurred frenzy and then a mind wrack. Really amazing when you have other guardians or warriors in your group with cleave, a 100b will chew through all mob groups in this situation.

I don’t particularly like taking points out of inspiration and putting them into illusions because I find 15% of just 2-3 phantasm attacks (swordsman, warlock or duelist), less if you manage to get warden placed nicely, to be a higher damage increase than the 33% increased mind wrack once every ~10 seconds in a single target scenario. Sure it’ll get multiplied in an aoe scenario but one swing of your sword is likely to do more aoe damage than the extra shatter from illusionary persona. There’s honestly not much else in the illusion line which excites me besides the 45 sec cd 4sec invuln.

Oh, and I prefer phantasmal fury + blademaster to deceptive evasion. I don’t get why everyone loves that trait.

One other possibility btw and this is debated often – is dropping the 5 from the end of inspiration and putting it in illusions for compounding power. Personally I take 15% phantasm damage over 9% personal damage even though the 9% would be ideal for sword cleaving activities because you also need to drop phantasmal fury for it. I’d estimate the total damage loss to the phantasms to be over 25% because of this, and I don’t think that’s worth it.

In your first build… why do you pick 10 in domination for +100 power and +15% phantasm damage when you could put it in inspiration for +100 vitality, +15% phantasm damage AND a major trait of your choice?

Illusionary elasticity is not so useful because your staff attack is going to be a small fraction of your damage. I’d take those points out of your second build and find somewhere else for them.

Is there a reason you don’t want to use focus for pve? It’s very good, especially with the reflect trait.

Thank you as always for your detailed replies =)

3770k at 4ghz, 16gb memory, 7850 amd gpu, 512gb ssd. Inside a nice water cooled antec 902. 23 inch ips monitor.
The worst part of my rig is the razer keyboard. Honestly terrible piece of kit.

No issues with any part of the game, runs flawlessly.

And I use sweetfx. It is beautiful.

You should also check out a post I made last October.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/Toughness-Power-theory-numbers/first#post652269
Came to pretty much the same conclusion as the above link… power > all.
The question you then have to ask is “well I’ve got all the power I can possibly get… do I still want more damage? If so… how much of other areas am I willing to give up?”.

Nowadays the answer to that question is “I am happy to give up my vitality, because I die less” and so power and toughness are your primary efficiency stats.. This is why you see many people rocking knight/cavalier gear in wvw, because it’s a good mix of power, toughness, and prec/crit dmg. In hardcore speedruns people sacrifice the toughness as well for full zerker.

It goes the other way in wvw though, because the amount of damage you need is precisely equal to the amount of damage requires to kill someone. Aka deal more damage than they can heal over time, and prevent them from escaping either by cc or burst. After you hit that number, you tend to increase your survivability. There’s no point killing someone in 2 seconds instead of 20 seconds if you will also be eating mud afterwards. If the kill is coming – be patient and keep yourself healthy for the next one.

In terms of efficiency though, I load up on power, then toughness, then crit & crit dmg. Knight weapons, helm, chest, legs. Zerker shoulders, gloves, boots. Cavalier trinkets with maybe a zerker amulet thrown in (the 8% crit dmg on trinkets is a really efficient use of stats).

Hey Osikitty =)
I notice your latest group/support build is the first one where you have given up your beloved staff.
Was this a tough decision?
Would you ever drop the staff from your small group and roaming builds? Or is it just that good?

If you have 15 in inspiration, why wouldn’t you take the +15% more phantasm damage trait (plus a free-pick) for 10 points? Why did you opt instead to put them in duelling?

0/20/20/0/15/5 is an awesome starting block imo.
Staff is an incredible defensive option, and you get 9% dmg reduction, 250 toughness, and 20% cooldown reduction from 20 points in chaos? Sold!
Perma retal/regen from inspiration is insane. You’ll see in all his vids that retal ticking away for a really decent amount every time someone clips the phantasms.
Duelling offers good stats and the first choices – if your other weaponset is sw/sw you could pick the blademaster trait, or you could pick the pistol set if you prefer that. Phantasmal fury is a solid pick. I’m not a huge fan of clone on dodge when your phants have <11 sec cooldowns and phase leap is on a ~5 sec cooldown. (I prefer phantasmal fury/blademaster).

With regards to his latest vids and the adaptation of the pistol power build..
I’m not sure why Grimms chose to put the extra 10 points into duelling when they could have gone into domination for a similar personal damage boost plus an additional 15% phantasm damage – or even better an additional 15% phantasm damage, 2k hp and your pick of an inspiration trait. Perhaps he could comment for me.

Something I’d like to see you try though Grimms is to take those 20 in chaos and put them in domination/inspiration for a 10/30/0/25/5 build. Take your usual scepter/pistol sword/sword and watch those phantasm numbers fly. The damage is insane.

I know it’s possible, and I know people try to do it in pvp. It’s fairly easy to pull off really, just cast sw#3, focus #5 and then immediately leap/immob.

Most people stunbreak/blink/dodge etc out of it, and if they don’t they usually only take a few ticks of the warden’s damage before they dodge or run away. It’s only effective against bad players, and even then it does questionable damage before they move away.

If you’re in a 1v1 or a 1vX with a non-shatter spec, you’re far better off with pistol or sword in your offhand.

It’s a shame focus sucks for roaming, solo and small groups unless you’re using a shatter build. The phantasm just doesn’t do enough damage otherwise due to it being stationary.

I end up feeling naked without the reflect temporal curtain in big fights, and naked without a better offhand when I run into a group of 2-3 I might otherwise be able to handle if I had my staff+sw/sw setup.

Phant builds have been around forever. Nothing new.
I feel about as cheap as hgh engis, bm rangers, x/d eles, old backstab thieves, bunker guards… so basically everyone else with a clue. No I don’t feel cheap. I spent months playing a warrior. Did anyone else feel cheap while they stomped me? Doubt it. Play to win guys. Plus I have a couple of phant builds I settled on purely by myself and before all the hype, so I’m happy with that.

Which phant weapons do you prefer? Sw/sw and sw/pi for me, 10/30/0/25/5. Although 0/20/20/25/5 works surprisingly well as well, especially in wvw (swap sw/pi for staff).