Showing Posts For mikelevins.4639:
How does Imbued Diversion help you stack Confusion?
I get that you stack confusion on shatters through the minor trait #5, but specifically imbued diversion, how does that do it better?
It’s the Runes. Superior Runes of Perplexity stack 10 seconds of Confusion on interrupt. The AOE daze from Imbued Diversion is not guaranteed to interrupt, of course, but in practice I’ve found that it very often does.
I’m a fan of keenlam’s clone spammer and of Natsu Dragneel’s Blackwater Mesmer. I’m also my guild’s build mechanic; I spend a good deal of time tinkering with builds for various purposes.
While I was working on a build for a guild member, I stumbled across this:
It worked well in initial testing, and it’s been serving me extremely well for some days now.
The basic tactics are similar to the other clone-spamming builds. It doesn’t have Deceptive Evasion, and a veteran of the various clone-spamming builds will likely miss it at first, as I did.
On the other hand, it does spawn clones pretty rapidly anyway—for one thing, Phase Retreat’s cooldown is just 6 seconds, and the numerous vanishes tend to confuse targeting pretty effectively (besides providing ready access to Prismatic Understsanding, of course).
One difference in tactics is that I use Blind and Imbued Diversion pretty aggressively in order to stack a lot of Confusion very rapidly. That’s been the source of a lot of my good results in WvW. It’s not unusual to see an opponent hovering up around 20 stacks of Confusion.
If you enjoy clone-spamming builds and want to try something a little different that still has that general flavor, give it a go. If you see ways to make it stronger, please feel free to speak up.
Just wanted to pop by and mention that we had our first all-hands session tonight on SoS, and although only 5 of us made it tonight, we had a great time. The welcome from SoS players was warm and wonderful and the action was great.
If you saw the five white Charr in purple armor, that was us. We followed commaqnders some, did some roaming, and did some repair and improvement work. We’ll be getting used to the new environment this week, and we have two members assigned to coordinate with TeamSpeak and the main commanders.
Thanks for everything and we’ll see you again soon!
xg has begun the move to SoS; thanks for the info and encouragement, all. We’ll be poking around in a sort of unorganized way this weekend, as folks get moved over, and expect to return to our regular weekly schedule by the following weekend.
@Chris:
Thanks for the response. The whole xg team is very encouraged, and I’m seeing a lot of enthusiasm for a move to Sea of Sorrows. We still have to agree on details, but barring unforeseen disaster, I expect we’ll make the move pretty soon.
Explorers’ Guild [xg] is a small (about 36 members total; seven active currently in GW2), old (founded in 1974) friends-and-family gaming guild. We’re considering a transfer to a new server, and Sea of Sorrows looks pretty attractive.
xg holds weekly scheduled all-hands gaming sessions, plus daily sessions with smaller groups. We emphasize WvW, small teams that play together week after week, and experimenting with lineups and tactics. Currently, our main team is working with a focus on siege engineering and siege support.
We’re North American players in all NA time zones. Our full group sessions run from 10 PM to 1 AM Eastern. Our smaller-group sessions run every day of the week, any time from about 2PM Eastern to around 4AM Eastern.
The xg group especially enjoys Mesmer and Engineer play.
I’d be glad to hear any thoughts that Sea of Sorrows players might have about how our style of play might fit in the Sea of Sorrows community.
Thanks.
Rope dart or meteor hammer.
1200 range, traitable to 1500 (hey, it’s a magic rope!)
keenlam,
I continue to enjoy the build. I’ve tried all the variations posted here, and they’re all appealing in various ways. I’ve also tried some variations of my own, some of which have worked very well for me.
My gaming group runs a lot of WvW, and the Focus is extremely useful in that setting. It means giving up the advantages of other offhands, but the added mobility and snaring tactics make up for those losses in the WvW setting.
We also worked out a variation of your build that works the same way, but which offers a little more utility for large-scale siege warfare. Basically, we give up the points in Domination to gain ten more in Chaos. Besides the added Toughness and boon duration, that gets us Chaos X, which means more Phase Retreats more often. That’s more clones, and more escapes when kiting zergs around. It’s also more Chaos Storms, and Chaos Storm is your friend in WvW.
Of course, we give up the cripple effect, but in WvW we tend to run with a Focus anyway, and Temporal Curtain gives us cripple on-demand.
In addition, we swap in some glamours on the utility bar to give us more AOE options in siege warfare than just Chaos Storm. Chaos Storm is great with this build, there’s no doubt about it; but add in some combination of Mimic, Null Field, and Feedback, and the loot bags stack up even faster.
For small-group and solo roaming, I think some version of your original build is generally better, but when you know you’re going to be in a lot of siege battles, our variant offers more options against the enemy zerg.
keenlam,
I fairly often run builds without the staff, and I can see the advantages of the alternative setup your proposing. I’m not done exploring the possibilities of this build with the staff, yet, though. I’ve been experimenting with it in WvW and it seems like there are more possibilities left to discover.
It’s called “keenlam’s Clone Spammer” on our build list ;-)
keenlam, I’m liking the build. I usually play shatter, but this is a nice change of pace. After some time spent with it in WvW in roaming and in siege battles, I made a few modifications to better suit my style.
I find that I prefer the Torch to the Pistol. Yes the phantasm is weaker, and I lose the excellent crowd control, but the vanish is very helpful for me tactically, and the AOE burn is a minor pleasure, too.
I also carry a Focus for the swiftness and for those cases where I simply must pull someone off something.
Decoy works great and I always like it, but in this build I prefer the precise positioning of Blink. I feel like I have plenty of clones available even without Decoy, and if I want to disappear, nine times out of ten all I really need to do is Blink behind my target.
I found runes of the Undead to be a reasonable (and really cheap) alternative to your recommendations.
I swapped out the Carrion Pieces for Rabid, gaining some extra Toughness. Between that and the clone uptime providing lots of decoys, I find my sturdiness against bursty enemies to be fairly good.
I dropped the Lemongrass Poultry Soup in favor of Tropical Mousse. I run some other builds where the reduced condition-duration food is my favorite choice, but in this build I found that my best defenses against conditions were the 3 in 4 chance that an enemy will stack his conditions on the wrong target, together with the always-nice heals from Ether Feast. If things get really conditiony, the build provides enough clone uptime that I feel comfortable swapping in Null Field to replace Mirror Images.
Coming from mostly running shatter builds (I do also run some other builds as well), this one is a really interesting change. It has quite a different feel in combat. Shatter feels like fencing; this build feels more methodical, like chess—or even Poker. I’ve won a few fights by bluffing! If I stand there and look like a clone, instead of moving like a player, enemies will sometimes assume that I am a clone, and attack one of my clones instead! And if they call my bluff, well, that’s what the extra toughness and Phase Retreat are for.
Thanks for this. It’s fun, and a nice change of pace. I’m still getting the feel of it, and making plenty of mistakes, but I’ve had some pretty good zerg-surfing and 1vX experiences already, and I feel like the build has a pretty roomy skill cap.
My gaming group runs a couple of all-Mesmer teams, and my variation of your build is going on our list of recommended builds.
Just another player reporting frequent disconnects and lag problems in the game. It’s a new problem for me, as well.
My LAN connection is wireless, using WPA security.
Running PingPlotter produces interesting results: it traces from my network to NCSoft’s 64.25.X.X network, but always shows 100% packet loss before reaching the specific address reported by the in-game /ip command. When I say “always”, I mean that in a dozen or so tests, I see 100% packet loss every time on the 64.25.×.x network, even when I can move my character around and interact with things. I assume that’s because the host that reports the ip address and the hosts that provide the character-related services are different.
As a representative example, here’s the tail end of a trace made just now, while my character was able to interact with things (the IP reported by the /ip command was 64.25.33.33):
4.49.197.34
64.25.32.9
64.25.32.26
64.25.32.82
Destination Address Unreachable 100% packet loss
I can sometimes play for up to fifteen or twenty minutes, but at other times I lose connection to the game within three to five minutes of connecting. An explorable-mode dungeon run last night was pretty painful; I lost count of how many times I disconnected overall, but I remember it was more than a dozen times in a single boss fight.
Obviously, that’s going to be a bit of a deterrent to continued play, which is a shame, because I do love this game.