Phantasm build that relies on keeping 3 phantasms out for max dps Scepter is a horrible choice. Auto attack will override your 3rd phantasm and so will the Scepter 2 block. Better run no mainhand than run a Scepter.
For open world PvE, sword/sword/greatsword. If you can deal with 100% melee then sword/sword/pistol. Both 25/30/0/0/15. Get a set of speed runes for movement boost so you can throw out the focus.
According to my tests, 3 phantasms vs 0 phantasms:
25/30/0/0/15 – 59% loss (3 mantra)
10/30/0/20/10 – 58% loss (3 mantra)
10/30/0/20/10 – 63% loss (0 mantra)
10/20/0/25/15 – 65% loss
The only way a mesmer will do more damage than 3 phantasms is when you stack scholar runes, force/night sigil, slaying potions, and similar damage modifiers that do not apply to your Illusions.
Let’s say Alpha has 405’000 HP. Everyone deals 6000 DpS but you. The “weak” mesmer goes for it’s 3000 DpS without phants (since they die). Now you cast TW and Alpha dies at exact 10 sec. Everyone did 9000 DpS and you did 4500 becuse of TW. In this scenario TW itself dealt 135’000 damage, the Mesmer alone did 30’000 wich is 165’000 damage = 33% of the damage the party does was yours.
1st Alpha – 481,719 health (he escapes at 50% health)
2nd Alpha – 722,578 health (he escapes at 25% health)
3rd Alpha – 963,438 health
I managed to kill 1st Alpha in 120 seconds with my mesmer (video). This means that I averaged out to 4,014 DPS. My blurred frenzies were averaging to roughly 4k so I can assume that without proper party buffs I was at 50% of my DPS (my BF usually does 8k to 10k). This means a fully buffed a mesmer with 3 phantasms will be doing 8k DPS. A mesmer without 3 phantasms will be losing 50% to 70% of his DPS depending on the build.
A proper zerk party will be doing 30k to 40k DPS. This means a 3 phantasm mesmer will be responsible for 20% to 25% of total DPS under ideal conditions (rarely happens). Without any phantasms you’re contributing only 10% to 15% of total DPS (much more realistic).
Unbuffed mesmer with 3 swordsmans does exactly same dps as unbuffed axe/mace warrior. Unbuffed pure mantra dps build with 3 swordsmans will do 13% more dps than an unbuffed phantasm heavy build also with 3 swordsmans.
The reason mesmer kills veteran giant the slowest is because other classes have much better burst. Mesmers need at least 5 seconds wind up time to reach our max dps.
No no, I’m sure phantasms will still work and get affected by ferocity basic stat. I fear just like Sigil of Accuracy that modifies Critical Chance directly instead of Precision stat gets ignored by phantasms the new items that affect Critical Damage directly instead of Ferocity will start getting ignored as well.
I fear our phantasms will start using Ferocity stat instead of Critical Damage just like precision, which means all flat Critical Damage modifiers (not Ferocity modifiers) from food/etc once again will get ignored by our phantasms.
I did a pug run with 3warriors/1ele/1mes last night. Everyone was zerk geared (I checked). Our party DPS was averaging around 15k/sec – 20k/sec. Then, the other day we did a proper guildie run consisting of 1war/1ele/1mes/1ranger/1thief. Our DPS was consistently ticking at 35k/sec to 45k/sec. As soon as we dropped TW and FGS’s that dps went off the charts.
Being a zerk does not mean you’ll be dishing out mad deeps without trying. It all comes down to you knowing how play your stupid class. Of course, warrior is the easiest to play reasonably well (axe 111111111111) which is exactly why they’re the most popular profession in pug “speedruns”.
Bugs aside I like the moving warden. Quite often in PvE mobs are stationary but walk to you if los’d or pushed by players with melee attacks. Moving warden does become a problem if the enemy is constantly moving as well. How about giving warden or even all our phantasms in general superspeed buff?
Funny you should mention the 0/30/0/25/15 build since I tested that too. It was within 1% of the 10/20/0/25/15 non-mantra counterpart. You lose higher feedback dps but gain freedom of utility with the non mantra build.
I test every build under same ideal conditions in hotm vs the indestructible golem. I attack it for 15 minutes and record dps with the gw2dps app.
Alpha’s cone attack now hurts even if completely inside him. There are still cases when you avoid the attack. Will have to investigate the modified attack to know for sure.
In one way this does punish stacking (if two cones somehow connect then poof goes half my eles health), yet at the same time further promotes higher dps and fgs usage to kill Alpha before he kills you. The ones who will feel the change the most are pugs who are zerks but do not know how to pull off proper high dps output. Organized dps parties will not notice the difference, except maybe now you will be procing the if-over-90%-health bonuses less frequently than desired.
Warden reflects do not show up in my combat log which only makes sense if those reflected projectiles becomes phantasm’s projectiles. Those reflected with curtain / feedback do show up in combat log which means those reflected projectiles became mine.
AFAIK the only phantasm boosting traits in fact are the Empowered Illusions and Phantasmal Strength, which should buff warden’s reflects.
What’s with this fascination with 30/30/0/0/10? Drop 5 from Domination and get 20% faster illusion summons with 25/30/0/0/15. The 25pt minor trait is the main reason to go that much into that line.
The only way is to force their hands. Make videos, make it public and well known. ANet will have no choice. Really, there is no other way. I personally have recorded and sent arenanet video showing exactly what the exploits are and suggested how to fix them. To this day NONE of them are patched.
I checked videos play history and the ones I sent to anet have been watched ONCE on the day I sent it in and have not been touched ever since. It’s been months now. I’ve lost my faith in getting exploits patched peacefully.
Or you know, just keep it quiet and keep exploiting for your own gain… -.-
If that is the case then Phantasmal Fury should be slotted 100% of the time when running in a party. And here I thought that I could take blade training with x/15/x/x/x builds if party provided fury for me, guess not… XD
Only base stats inherit (with phantasms/clones, I don’t know about those other ones). That means no % damage, no crit chance (including fury), no slaying potions etc.
Funny you should mention that as I was just about to test that for myself. Maybe I can save myself some time if you know…
If I get buffed with fury, phantasms ignore it?
If phantasm is externally buffed (not through trait), does he utilize it?
In a 5 man party most skills are limited to 5 people, the owner and 4 other people in the party (I think). Does that mean that Phantasms are out of luck when it comes to fury in dungeons and I -have- to equip Phantasmal Fury anyways?
As I mentioned in the video description, the asura gate does not really port you. That’s just some simple video stitching in the OP. You however -can- get to the aquarium if you want to, as shown in this [video]
The tunnel I blinked into is part of an actual path. It’s right after 1st alpha encounter accessible by all 3 paths. Not sure why would anyone want to blink back onto intended route but yeah, any ground targeted teleport skill will get you there. Just aim on the floor below the glass.
ok ok, don’t kill me now, just wanted to see what will happen and how easy will it be… XD
To those who don’t know, this champion wolf is unique because he has a leap attack with no visual tells that will hits so hard it will one-shot most berserker geared characters. It’s pretty scary to be on the receiving end of that skill.
How to get access to various “hidden” objects of interest inside CoE map. You won’t gain anything worthwhile with this so it’s quite harmless. Just figured regular coe runners might find this entertaining.
For clarification: if you have 0-2 clones out and you dodge, you will summon a clone.
If you have 3 clones out and you dodge, nothing will happen.
Good to hear. Might want to try and convey the information a bit more clearly next time.
Oddly enough I found that he presented the change in the video quite clear. He did blurb out initially and made it look as if there will be no clone production if -any- clones are out but then he did clarify it quite specifically “if you’re full clones we are not going to create anymore”, aka if you got 3 illusions up then no clones will be spawned.
He did mention DE “cheesing it” which probably referred to blackwater builds and “disrupting flow of the gameplay” which probably referred to phantasm builds where dodging would kill the 3rd phantasm you had out. From what I foresee this is a win-win for most of us, especially with the phantasm builds where I can slot in DE to help get the full effect of Compounding Power without hurting my phantasms. The only major downside I see is the inability to force clone death and related traits with a dodge.
Still though, after hearing him talk about mesmer and how they work, the initial impression I got was that he does NOT play mesmer and does NOT understand how they work well enough to be in charge of balancing us. We’re doomed
Ok guys I found out part of what they are doing to address the dominance of the Zerker meta.
PvE: Are there any plans to make condition builds more viable in PvE?
”Yes you should see some creatures targeted around weakness to condition in some of the early builds next year.” ~Isaiah Cartwright
I don’t know, sorrow. Hammer guardians suffer a lot from this. Blasting light fields is almost useless, yet that’s all they ever get to do. I’d rather ignore my own symbol field and blast my buddy’s fire field.
Often I prefer to run a class that relies/promotes combo fields and blasts. If I go in a party and there is a hammer guardian or a guardian in general, most of the time I swap to a different class/playstyle altogether because dealing with fields is too much of a hassle. Perma light field is hurting not only the guardian but everyone running with him. I suggest changing guardian hammer auto-attack to a symbol that is NOT a combo field. This would be a major change and deserves a thread of it’s own.
I’ve lost count of times where someone ruins my combos because they dropped another combo field on top of mine. I suggest that combo fields that I drop have higher priority over ally combo fields when I am the one executing the blast finisher.
- Fiery Rush is allowed only if it is used normally – not against a wall and not concentrated to a single point with a teleport skill. GS’s Whirlwind against a wall is ok.
I never really got this distinction, is rush less legit cause it does more damage? Or is there another reason?
Basically, yes. It does absurd amount of damage in just a few seconds compared to any other skill in the game. The only thing I can think of that could be considered from the same “class” are mesmer feedback (or reflects in general) and mimic skills. The difference is those skills are reactive and pull off insane damage only in a very few situations while Fiery Rush can be applied to just about every encounter in the game. That’s when it starts all to come down to who can prestack might and press 4 better rather than who can pull off the best skill rotation for best dps with their native weapons.
For “anything goes” speed runs fgs and exploits are welcome. I only suggest disallowing them for the legit runs.
A few suggestions for legit speed runs.
- No special consumables. No pets, no environmental weapons or utilities. Only food and potions are ok.
- Fiery Rush is allowed only if it is used normally – not against a wall and not concentrated to a single point with a teleport skill. GS’s Whirlwind against a wall is ok.
- Do events in order. Most obvious example is CoE – causing Spire to revive/port by pre-killing Alpha is out of the question.
- Mesmer portals are allowed only if the mesmer got to the portal exit location without using any terrain / event exploits.
Break 100b by moving. I usually hit forward to break the channel and then dodge immediately after. Also, break gs rush by swapping weapons. Works every time.
I was in a guild. Every time I ask guildies to run something they already ran it, doing something else, or are so bad that I’d rather solo than carry their pvt kittens.
I did a test few months ago. Summoned 3 phantasms and walked away 1200+ units. Then had a guard Empower both me and phantasms separately. Empower phantasms = same damage. Empower me = phantasms hit harder as expected with the might stacks. Might stacks changed my base stats so that could explain the increase in damage and if it’s true then I can assume that phantasms simply ignored their own might stacks.
Stability boon I just re-tested and I was wrong. I was fighting veteran giant and my phantasms avoided his knockback just as I used stability mantra which lead me to previous conclusion. It probably was a simple case where the summoned phantasms were right on the outside of his knockback radius.
Anyways, I’m not here to push my ideas without reason. I’d much rather have a good discussion and then re-evaluate my suggestions. I do believe that there should be some mechanic to help phantasms survive encounters where one hit means they’re dead.
The reason for my suggestion was to address situations where majority of PvE bosses hit so hard that our phantasms die in one shot. Phantasms don’t have to execute the actual dodge animation and instead can be given a distorted or an out-of-phase buff where they can’t be damaged nor can they deal damage during the time-frame of our dodge.
Phantasms already use their mesmer owner buffs such as might/stability/etc so adding such a buff should be much easier than coding an actual dodge mechanic.
I would like our phantasms to dodge/evade at the same time we dodge. What are downsides or problems with such behavior? Why would ANet avoid implementing it?
EDIT: instead of phantasms dodging, I’d prefer them to simply get a distorted or out-of-phase buff during mesmers dodge duration.
will you be self sustaining or relying on environmental weapons
….
There are plenty jack-of-all-trades builds but mesmers start to shine when we specialize. Answering differently to any of the above will change your “perfect build”, be it simply swapping traits or completely reallocating trait points and utilites. A while back I listed different no-mantra/sword-pistol builds that I wanted to compare. I ended up with a list of 9 different builds. I think ANet overdid it with mesmer build diversity. Only if they paid that much attention to the bugs they introduced for our class…
most of the groups that specify “full zerker or kick” are usually a couple bad people who need to be carried so they specifically look for full zerker people who they assume can play in full zerker gear and if they cant, they kick them.
I run coe daily and always advertise or join “zerks only” parties. I always check everyone’s health from my side and ~30% of the players that participate in these runs are lying. When I confront them about their gear/build most of the time they keep quiet and ignore me or start making excuses.
What’s worse, are in parties where everyone is zerk most of the time we have trouble reaching 20k+ party dps because most of them either run a bad build or straight up don’t know how to properly play their own class. And this is why I would highly prefer to advertise “zerk wars only” because it’s extremely easy to play a zerk war and still be somewhat competitive.
I’m slowly losing my patience with the people who use the LFG tool.
