Guild Wars 2

Go mesmer. Go at least 10 into illusions to pick up confusing cry (causes cry of frustration to inflict both confusion (2 stacks per shatter) and retaliation on yourself for a good amount of time, like 3 or 5 secs per shatter. Going 30 into illusions gives you more good traits such as persona to make this even more effective.

One issue is that retal damage is power based while cofusion damage is condition damage based so I’d probably go more with a power-shatter build set up, probably with soliders gear and maybe a few rabid or dire pieces. Using a torch will give you a phantasm that causes retal/confuse, and using perplexity runes will give you tons more confusion. It would probably be best to specilize in one or the other. Confusion w/perplexity is still strong after the nerf, and I’ve heard of a few viable retaliation builds on the mesmer forums but I don’t know them off the top of my head.

ehhh I feel like we have enough confusion to control our enemies by making them not attack or use a cleanse without the runes of perplexity. Control is the real point of confusion for me, especially since after the nerf it can’t melt good and tanky players as much as it used to.

Traveler runes are probably the best choice simply for the movement speed and other minor bonuses. That 25% is such a quality of life improvement its worth every piece of gold to buy.

Okay, so condition builds are a bit bad for general pve in dungeons but if you’re deaset on that route here is my advice. For pve replace dire with rabid, and throw 20-30 points into dueling and pick up a pistol over torch (more of a defensive pvp weapon imo). With 3 iDuelists out, you’ll be able to stack a lot of bleeds on a single target and rather consistently (move 20 from dom to dueling). In general, rabid with maybe a few dire pieces makes you tanky enough to do all you need to do, and I view the clone generation/bleed uptime from dueling to be invaluable for condition builds.

Also if you do go dungeons signet of midnight is a waste. Without feedback in that slot, you’ll miss out on a lot of useful utility. Blink is enough of a stunbreaker.

For wvw this build is passable, but in my opinion, unless you’re really really good or a warrior/thief, playing around interrupts is difficult to master and risky to play, especially when going for traits like imbued diversion or halting strike takes away traits that make you harder to kill.

Well I hate to burst your bubble but do you really want a weapon set as horrid as the Thief P/P set? sure it looks cool, but it sucks so bad.

Hey Phloww my advice is relatively straigtforward. Gear wise as a hybrid you’re probably solid offensively, maybe just a tad squishy but not overly so.

Trait wise, I’d take Chaotic Dampening over iDefense, even though it was bugged fix, the staff cooldowns and toughness are so much more helpful than extra situational facetanking strength. You’ll be able to phase retreat away from enemies more often, which is a better way to nullify damage. Other than that I’d just suggest taking more mantras if you go 30 in dueling for them. Why take signet of midnight when you can get a stunbreak through mantra of concentration? For your traits its a far superior setup, and even without traits, blink outclasses that signet imo. Also I’d even suggest the mantra heal to frontload your DPS even more. Besides that it might be cool seeing if you can take the healing mantra trait by giving something up, especially if you do invest more heavily in mantras (like a 0/30/20/20/0 build or something like that). Especially since the trats you tookfrom domination/illusions aren’t the best. Like I’d take phantasm damage over signet CDs, and Compounding Power is actually fine, but it may allow for more utility if you went into inspiration, just a thought.

Ehh to be honest as a condition thief ascended apothecary or dire/rabid stats should be good! I use exotic settlers too, the healing power is really nice with all the stealth/SoM regeneration.

yeah… I think its just that the bimbos at my school are all downloading iOS7, so maybe tomorrow it’ll be better

I’m lagging too badly to kill the Toad King and I need 2 more King Toad weapons. I managed to beat him once before when I wasn’t lagging but right now my internet sitaution makes it impossible to kill the boss. Most of my dodges over the shockwaves dont evade the damage so even if I can make it across the lilypads, which is about 25% of the time, I just die anyway and cant get him down below 50.

I just need someone to run me through the zone 1-3 twice so I can get my weapons. Whisper me or reply to this if you want to help!

Hmm I’ll play around with both trait set ups when I get a chance. I really like the whole lockdown concept idea as an alternative to the PU condition build I generally play.

I’m also not sure how strong such a build would be for wvw roaming, I’ll stick to my normal build for that. but for spvp the interrupt builds would be really cool imo.

Not sure whether to go for staff or GS. Staff would give me more defense and an AoE daze with chaos storm, while GS just gives the bursty iZerker, and the knockback is a decent interrupt to. For utilities, I’ll use mantra of distraction, and probably arcane thievery and blink.

Moa Morph is an interrupt right?

I want to experiment with an spvp interrupt build for mesmers. I don’t know which would be better, chaotic interruption for immobolize and chill, or confounding suggestions to proc stuns for 50% of my dazes.

I will be using sword/pistol and either staff or GS. Probably 20/20/30 or 30/20/20.

Well the typical shatter build, 20/20/0/0/30 or 0/20/20/0/30 has poorish condition removal for the current state of the game. That may change in the future, and it would be cool to see a build that could work with shattered conditions, but going 30 into inspiration would make the mesmer give up so many other things.

Maybe shatter will be more popular after next months patch but don’t count on it. I kinda always found the mindwrack burst to be sorta underwhelming compared to phantasm or even condition. Shatter is also much harder to play as the people who use it well need to poop out clones and shatter whenever the enemy is vulnerable.

Colesy since you clearly love GS mesmer so much, make Sunrise!

Lol that was sarcasm.

How exactly are they changing pistol number 2?

Vince Ste Marie.2081:

To the OP: This sounds like a latency issue.

To the rest of the thread: I think this whole thing is a case of people reading way too far into a light-hearted comment about eagles and justice.

Shortcut Worm can be used as a shortcut in Tribulation Mode. Shortcut Eagle cannot.

it was a latency issue! thanks for clarifying!

I think we daggers would be interesting. The auttoattack would be a single target close-melee high damage 3 part chain, kinda like necro or thief dagger.

The mainhand could contain a whirl-evade skill that makes a clone and does damage, and some sort of PbAoE burst skill. The Offhand dagger could have the downed state phantasmal rogue. The last skill on the offhand I think should be some sort of skill that either steals boons or applies stealth. I think these components in some combination would make a great dagger set!

Look I didn’t want to get rude Ayrilana, but you’re a close minded fool if you don’t at least try this shortcut out for yourself to see if and how it works.

Many people on this forum including myself have posted saying that that the shortcut does ideed work. Its just rather lag punishing, but on a computer with good interet speed simply hug the left wall of the worm and its extremely easy for moderatley skilled people.

If you don’t bother to try this shortcut after making such bold remarks, then you’re making yourself only look more misguided and uninformed.

Ayrilana.1396:

Charming Rogue.8071:

A dev actually stated that the wurm shortcut IS supposed to work in TM, but the Eagle shortcut isn’t. The Eagle won’t allow shortcuts because he’s an “eagle of justice, and taking a shortcut isn’t very justice-y”.

No they didn’t.

I’d read that thread again. If one shortcut is not allowable, why would you think the other would be? Silence is not a yes. The dev even indirectly stated that it wasn’t further in the post.

Ayriliana I’ve made it through the shortcut, it works perfectly well if you can get through it. I just died many times due to lag when bouncing (too much motion) kept porting me into the spikes. If youre such a skeptic still, do it yourself and you’d know if you got through to the end that the shortcut does indeed work.

There are also youtube videos too.

The eagle shortcut doesn’t work. I think thats because they couldn’t find a way to booby trap it as much as the wurm one.

kaikalii.4198:

Sorry, but crippling dissipation and debilitating dissipation only work when your enemy kills a clone, not when a clone dies from being overwritten by another. Because of this, there is not reason to “clone spam”. You don’t need to make clones any faster than they are destroyed.

This is untrue. I tested this on golems with scepter autoattack. its very much applies the condition(s).

Well to help you optimize, I don’t know why youre running sword/sword on a condition clone death build, other than for the fact it looks cool.

a much more useful choice would be staff or simply changing the offhand to torch, other than that, while the trait distribution provides clone uptime, it may not be the best way to spend your traits but its not too bad imo, just not something I would think of.

Stat wise, itsa waste to use the iduelist with carrion, you’d get so much more bleeding out of rabid.

You also have 0 condition removal which will make free kills to necromancers and many engineers and general group spam fights. I don’t really like your runes much, so I’d change them to krait/afflicted or undead or something like that.

Well tribulation mode for world 1 is pretty reasonable other than some gamebreaking lag issues if you’re connection sucks.

Tribulation mode for world 2 means that those storm wizards skins are simply a far off dream with the amount of time I have to play.

I’m bumping this since no one has anything to say about this issue apparently.

trooper.2650:

K U T M.4539:

Can’t really give it a full overview atm, but “Phantasmal Strength” is more beneficial in phantasm power builds than condi builds.

This is something I will take in to consideration. But this build already allow me to get phantasmal haste and fury… missing out on p. strength seems a waste. The build is already lacking in power and the iduelist is suffering from this. Ok, he gives good bleedings, but why deny him a 15% more damage? Lets face it… the only damaging conditions are bleeding (we have plenty of that), poison (random from Chaos storm every 35sec ), torment (if I take tormenting runes ok… otherwise meh..) and confusion (again meh and don’t ask me to get Perplexity )

We also get burning from staff clones, and torch if you opt to use it (a more defensive choice than pistol imo, but pistol gives mroe condition pressureif you don’t spec for boons/stealth). And the torment from the scepter block is not a joke at all. Pistol offhand is best used in a perplexity rune build. I typically run traveler runes for mobility/durations with a blackwater spec for roaming or a glamour spec for zerging, I’m not very original. Simply move the 5 points from inspiration to illusion for imbued diversion, and tag on perplexity runes. You’ll have the interrupt from pistol, and AoE interrupts from chaos storm (a daze) and the diversion shatter. I’d also reccomend moving the remaining 20 from inspiration to chaos for chaotic dampening or bountiful interruption if you do go that route (the ten point trait should be clone death or fall-chaos storm), for better utility from interrupts or simply better staff clone/skill generation.

As far as your utilities go, arcane thievery is very hard to land in my opinion. Use nullfield instead, and you can even combo it with your duelist to stack a bit more confusion. For zergs you could even move the 20 from chaos or dueling for dazzling glamours for even more confusion, but for roaming/smallgroup/spvp stick with the other traits. Also consider use the mantra daze, mantra condi cleanse, signet of domination, blink/decoy in the other slots for reasons that should be obvious!

I hope this helps!

I’ve been having bad lag issues lately.

I spend a whopping 2 hours in trib mode 1-2 to get to the 2nd last checkpoint, die and go to moto’s hell.

I go to click use infinite continue coin, but the the diaologue screen buttons are frozen and dont work.

The time runs out and I lose all the progress on that zone for 2 hours.

Its bad enough that my lag makes bouncing/lilypads other hell and I’m in school and barely have the time to get the other 3 toad king weapons I want but this is just insane design. Either change moto’s hell to not limit your time until youre booted for being unable to react, or let use go back to checkpoints after we leave so our kittening progress isn’t lost, which is a nightmare for casual gamers.

Yeah guys don’t troll me cuz I used a shortcut. And yeah I have like 18-20FPS so whenever I bounce around instant death mechanics, I tend to die midair due to lag alone. And I did get through the worm from luck alone and it worked fine. I know not to take the eagle, but w2 seems impossible for trib mode for 2-2/3

I’m trying to do trib mode through the wurm, and I keep getting instakilled for no reason and I’m not even near a spike trap or green blob. It could just be lag spikes, but these random deaths for no reason need to go.

None of them. The legendary grind literally burnt my friends out and they quit soon after getting their legendaries.

I gave up on meteorlogicus and now I’m switching focus to the tribulation mode skins, the best look for asura imo

Well feel free to roam however you wish, its really cool that you have bifrost and I understand you’d want to show it off dawdler so go ahead, I just feel like 2 ranged weapons on one set is bad unless its condition damage focused hahaha.

While the cripple from izerker helps track targets down, I find that blink/sword leap combo is enough to track them, as is my offhand phantasm if its duelist haha. Unless they either dodge or are an x/D or D/P thief that can stealth indefinitely on its on or off your clones, in which close neither weapon would help track it down much better than any other.

I just feel like your own surviability is more important than chasing someone running away, and without staff you can be an easy target for most melee classes. And if youre outnumbered when roaming by yourself or with 1 or 2 others, the staff is even more important and useful their. One v One Greatsword can be strong, but one v ones as we all know aren’t always common.

How does alt-tab help?

I can’t get past them at the end. what in the name of miya must I do. I’ll be sad if I never get the recolored skins since I have no blue backpiece to match the normal ones with :/

Dawdler.8521:

nearlight.3064:

From an offensive point of view I see your point, but if you get jumped using a greatsword instead of staff, or (scepter/torch or sword/x), you have little active defense other than the #5 knockback, which is on too long of a cooldown to do much good. Then you’re forced to swap too sword since in melee range the autoattack is garbage, and #2 is pointless, #3 is almost a joke with how it roots you. It is a very strong phantasm, I’ll give you that.

Sword/pistol or focus even is a far greater and more useful burst weapon than GS in both shatter and phantasm specs, and the evade frames are very strong.

Staff, even in a power build is amazing for its fast clone generation. Phase retreating when you get jumped can port you out of an enemies burst very easily on a low cooldown. Lets not forget that thieves simply melt in chaos storm due to chill and interrupts, and is the same size as shadow refuge!

Lastly we have scepter/torch, which I use as a condition mesmer in pvp. Besides the block/torment spike, the stealth especially when traited is just very strong.

Sorry to sound rude or harsh but mesmer greatsword is only one step up from a longbow ranger, its only good for sniping when you have a mob around you that gives you the range you need to actually make use of it. Most classes will close the gap ASAP and fight melee or mid range. On my scepter/torch/staff condition build I’ve never lost to a mesmer using a GS.

… And I was only ever arguing the greatsword from an offensive burst point of view (call it “sniping” if you want), not to mention I noted that you never open with it, you use something with quick evasive skills like the staff when running about.

Also, conditions. OP in a world of berserkers without any condition removal. We know that. The thread poster is clearly not a condition user since he’s berserker with a touch of toughness. Different builds, different weapons and tactics. I dont recommend a scepter/torch for a build that’s based on burst. With scepter/torch you’d probably get pummeled by a condition Mesmer just as fast if it was a greatsword

Condition damage or not let me make one thing clear for power mesmer builds. If you run a shatter build, staff and sword/focus/pistol is a far superior choice over GS due to its mobility and fast clone generation.

To be honest if you run a phantasm build, which is more of a pve/spvp thing due to being OP 1v1 and our best pve DPS (but not with GS in pve ironically), GS will probably work fine, as the phantasm is strong, but you’ll have to switch right away to use your 2nd phantasm and deal with the fact the enemy has probably gap closed by then. I’ll give it that niche use outside of the obvious zerg environment where anything can work really and range can be maintained.

Haha I didn’t read his build so I didn’t see his zerker disposition, and tbh zerker on anyclass, other than thief is way to squishy for wvw, especially roaming where you cant depend on others to soak up hits.

Also dawdler, not trying to sound rude but are you suggesting staff/GS on the same build at the same time? Because that idea will limit a mesmers effectiveness more than anything else as the two weapons don’t have a logical reason to work together. You’ll need a sword for shatter/phant or scpeter for condition on the other set for their melee defensive/burst capabilities. And yes scepter 2/3 is “condition burst”.

Well in dungeons people will get mad at you if you knock mobs away from 100blades, pistolwhip, etc with GS #5 so In most cases its utility is questionable.

Also most of the time you wont be at 900-1200 range, but feel free to use it If you do need that range. The main disadvantage is having extra access to better single target DPS phantasms on the same set, since while iZerker is pretty nice in a pvp phantbuild, its recharge time in pve and habit of getting killed faster than phantasms thats stay back from the boss a bit more (swordsman/duelist).

Since giving up on a legendary, I decided I want a full set okitteng Toad and Storm Wizard Weapons (along with the backpieces), which will look awesome with my appropriately dyed asura light T3 chest.

I bought an infinite continue coin, and just finished all the world one achievements. How quickly do you think it will make to a run of tribulation mode in world 1 and world 2? I need to do the world 2 achievements first, but then after that I want to spend 3-10 days to farm up a weapon set (green for pve) (yellow for wvw) since I use radically different builds for each.

Also even after the various nerfs, glamour confusion builds are still probably our best zerg builds. The amount of pink numbers you can get is insane, and you can probably out damage a GS power build with glamour confusion due to the sheer amount of people it hits as opposed to 3-5 targets.

For a power build GS would be better for zergs, but I still dislike its level of AoE, its almost as awkward as necro axe/focus “AoE”.

Well greatsword offers little active defense despite its great phantasm, so outside of initating combat/zergs where nothing you do really matters, staff is far superior.

Staff works great either on condition builds or defensive yet bursty shatter builds, which gives us the surivability we need to not be free loot bags in wvw.

Since giving up on a legendary for now due to my inability to farm due to college and teh macroeconomy, I thought I could spare the 26 gold to get an infinte continue coin and get storm wizard sets, so I’m happy with my decision as I’m so bad at SAB I’d run out of real continue coins for sure.

The condition rebalance (ie nerf) mainly for necros is coming october 6th! So we should be fine when that patch hits up. I hope they just nerf necros, since I think conditions in general on engi/mesmer/war/thief is fine right now.

Uhhh Try Giver’s weapons, for duration, precision and vitality, which is as close as you’ll get.

Giver armor just gives boon duration and other random stats. I don’t think the duration % on either is particularly that great but I can’t remember real numbers.

You only really need 50% condition duration, the rest will either get cleasned sometimes or simply be wasted as it only damages once per second on tick I believe. At that point stacking on more condi damage with rabid or dire will help you much more.

If you think we have no combo finishers, try playing necromancer. One of the reasons I left that class was besides being boringly stupid OP in pvp, there was no cleave in pve, and the only combo finishers were on staff, a weapon with almost worthless use in power builds. They only have blast finisher on staff 4, bone minion/fleshwurm active sacrifice abilites, and a 20% staff auto porjectile finisher, which is so awful!

Mesmers are fine in regards to finishers, actually having 2 easy to use leaps is amazingly great, sure a better blast finish would be nice, but we have enough projectile and even whirls to be “balanced” in that regards.

If you want finishers play S/D ele,you can have up to 6 blasts in one set, even more with lightning hammer auttoattacks.

Well at least we don’t need to devote an offhand or utility slot to speed abilities like the other classes, so we shouldn’t complain if we elect to use this rune.

Dawdler.8521:

nearlight.3064:

Greatsword will get you killed if you use it outside of a zerg.

Lulwat?

You have to eloborate on that. The greatsword is the best burst weapon a Mesmer has and the only long range weapon with pressure (ie consistent high damage attacks). Its excellent at nailing runners, ie half the work when solo. Incidently its also one of the best weapons against roaming thieves that love to pop their stupid house. Is it an ideal weapon in any situation? Certainly not, the other has their uses. But it wont get you killed just because its a greatsword. People dying with a greatsword will die just as good with a scepter or sword.

From an offensive point of view I see your point, but if you get jumped using a greatsword instead of staff, or (scepter/torch or sword/x), you have little active defense other than the #5 knockback, which is on too long of a cooldown to do much good. Then you’re forced to swap too sword since in melee range the autoattack is garbage, and #2 is pointless, #3 is almost a joke with how it roots you. It is a very strong phantasm, I’ll give you that.

Sword/pistol or focus even is a far greater and more useful burst weapon than GS in both shatter and phantasm specs, and the evade frames are very strong.

Staff, even in a power build is amazing for its fast clone generation. Phase retreating when you get jumped can port you out of an enemies burst very easily on a low cooldown. Lets not forget that thieves simply melt in chaos storm due to chill and interrupts, and is the same size as shadow refuge!

Lastly we have scepter/torch, which I use as a condition mesmer in pvp. Besides the block/torment spike, the stealth especially when traited is just very strong.

Sorry to sound rude or harsh but mesmer greatsword is only one step up from a longbow ranger, its only good for sniping when you have a mob around you that gives you the range you need to actually make use of it. Most classes will close the gap ASAP and fight melee or mid range. On my scepter/torch/staff condition build I’ve never lost to a mesmer using a GS.

Greatsword will get you killed if you use it outside of a zerg.

Sigh, If only speculators hadn’t made these runes kinda expensive.

I’ll get a set after getting T3, SAB related gemstore purchases. It’ll eork wonders for my WvW condition set, which would boost myeffectiveness even moreso than perplexity since the movement speed in some form really is a must, and its overall boosts are better than centaur runes for more builds lol.

Thieves are excellent roamers, especially P/D or D/P builds.
Condition mesmers are also great roamers, and elementalists, despite the nerfs are still pretty effective as well.

Thank you so much!

I usually miss livesteams. Where can I see the livestream about the state of the game earlier? Is it on youtube anywhere? Thanks

@Metallus colesy did say to switch the offhand based on what situation you enter, so if you fight a mobile boss that you don’t need to pull with curtain, then its would be better to do sword/sword and sword/pistol

Ross Biddle.2367:

Hmm, +25% movement speed on a x6 rune set, or amazing focus skills + 33% swiftness boon on a high duration (20-24s).

Yeah, one’s far inferior to the other.

except not everyone takes focus offhand, all the others have various uses, so this rune is excellent.

Pyroatheist.9031:

So uh….how on earth did you guys lay your hands on full sets of dire already?

Hahaha well I run CoE almost daily. I didn’t buy the armor though since I want the thingy for meteorlogicus. But I could buy most of a set if I wanted one.

My Asura mesmer needs fashionable condition gear. T2 is fugly as kitten, T1 is kinda ok. T3 is beautiful but I hate the helm and prolly wouldn’t get more than the chest/legs. My other choices are transmuting CoE light armor (kinda a waste of stats right there) and some order of whispers pieces.

What do you guys suggest so I look kitten as kitten?

I’m considering a dire build, however I feel like always having 20 points in dueling in every single build has lead me to become reliant on vigor when playing mesmer, and deceptive evasion to a lesser extent. In this build would you shatter your clones often?

If so, maybe take vigorous revelation over mender’s purity, but if not the condition removal is probably best.

I tested a 20/0/30/20/0 build in spvp with a carrion amulet to simulate dire gear kinda, and even without the extra toughness, I was still incredibly hard to kill. My only issue was I lacked the extra dodges and bleeds dueling would provide, but I still think this build is very viable, but just takes more patience than 20/20/30, since you really need to land the scepter/torch’s conditions to kill things.