Guild Wars 2

SilverWF.4789:

Yeah, another example of the “experienced” player, discussing about balance
Also, all Ranger traps (with trapper runes) are reveal you when it deals damage, mean – instantly! (…)

• I also didn’t mention how playrer using SR are susceptible to loosing their stealth due to knockbacks The Table shows the maximum possible amount of stealth-uptime in percentage gained through actively used skills on the user-side, so of course outside-factors like people walking through your traps aren’t included.
• If you think that someone wouldn’t think of that … i don’t even know what to think of that. ‘Naive’ would be a good word i guess, but given your tone it could be worse as well. (i own both a thief and a ranger, and i thought exactly of that problem when i considered using a trap-build on the latter, but i also saw how – even with the occasional interruption by ticking damage, my stealth uptime would be still high – you don’t have to throw your traps directly onto your opponent whenever you use them )

While thief has 2 traps without damage – for an “occasion” you are forgot to include trapper runes as thieves stealth source too.

• I don’t know if it is your reading comprehension, but you may want to look at the table again. Specifically the part dealing with Thief-Stealth and Trapper runes… Seriously, if you’re sarcastically throwing around the word “expert” (which i neihter did, nor would call myself anyway), please take your time and READ what someone write BEFORE you complain. Thanks in advance :p

Jim Hunter.6821:

No offence but this is kind of pointless when you include the weapon skills for ranger and mesmer but not thief and engi.

Well, i put the table to good use so far, so i can’t claim it to be “pointless” for myself (it covers plenty of configurations already).

Of course, the thing about not including the Initiative/Combo skills is debateable. Everyone must decide for him/herself what to think of hit, however, here’s my train o fthought which led to me not including it:) :
For the Thief, all Weapon-based Stealthskills are Initiative-Based. Now, you could go and just define their cooldown as “Time the thief needs to regenerate the amount of Initiative lost due to the skills activation”, but comparing that kind of “Cooldown” to traditional, static Cooldowns is already borderline dangerous. Initiative is shared among skills, and using a stealth-skill based on initiative will influence the avaiability of other skills. The Same cannot be said for the standart-Skills the other classes utilize.
Also people could argue how a thief could manipulate his initiative (using traited signets for once), which is something way too complicated to put it into the simple shape that the rest of this stealth-table has (given how simple the non-initiative-stealth skills are).

I could of course add them that way into the table (and i know people in the Forum love to compare ini-skills to normal skills that way), but that would feign a kind of equality which simply doesn’t exist.

Now don’t get me wrong, as i’am absolutely convinced that the Thief has the highest stealth-uptime among classes due to his Weaponskills, but i simply cannot put them into the same table as regular duration/cooldown skills due to their nature.

I will update the post though if the length lets me do it, and add them to it with a BIG WARNING how they are to be interpreted, if you’re so adamant that it’s important.

To the Combo aspect: Well, this is a whole other Box to open. For the Thieves #5#2 i did not show them due to their nature as initiative-skills, but for non-initiative combos of the engineer, the reason is a different one.

Let’s see: to get Stealth (beside Tossing the Elixir) an Engineer has to utilize Smoke Fields and Combo Finisher. For Smoke Fields that would be:

• Smoke Bomb (Bomb Kit)
• Smoke Bomb (Trait)
• Smoke Screen (Turret)
• Toss Elixir U

the only optionions directly fitting into the table would be the Smoke Bomb (Kit) and Smoke Screen, since they’re just normal skills. The Trait isn’t actively triggered by the Engineer, and thus fails out of the equation. I would have to do some heavy interpretation (since they don’t act like normal, static skills) before i could incorporate it into the Table, and the same goes for RNG-Toss Elixir U – if i were to add them, i would either (again) feign precision where there simply is none, or i would give a description about how i interpreted them (to include them within the table), and risk making that part of the table worthless anyway to people disagreeing with the interpretation. Also keep in mind how the table includes active, controled ways to gain stealth – and neither RNG, nor the requirement of an enemy hitting you(which requires active behavior from another person, unlike for example Cloak And Dagger or Hunter Shot, which do require an enemy, but no active action from him) fits the bill

But thats only about the Smoke-Field skills. The Combos themselves are even more annoying: The engineer has one leap-finisher and numerous explosion finishers, all with different Cooldowns to look at. However, each of them requires a smoke-Field as prerequisite, and looking at the table, we could -at most- see two (namely Smoke Bomb and Smoke Screen). I could of course List any Combo of Smoke-Field-Skill and Finisher-Skill, but that comes with a problem regarding the term ‘stealth uptime percentage’: in-game, the usage of one Combo would directly affect another, since the smoke-Field used in the first won’t be avaiable for the second one -after all, both share the same prerequisite.
If i were to calculate the stealth-uptime-percentage over a very, very large but set timeframe (imagine the timeframe tending to infinity), normal,non-combo skills wouldn’t become a problem, since they could be used independantly from each other (in a sense that using one skill doesn’t impede on your ability to use the others afterwards), but this is not the case for Stealh gained through the use of Combo-Skills, so i don’t really want to take them into the table

shadowpass.4236:

HARDOFREADING.7298:

It’s simple.
What class has the highest Auto Attack Damage?
How high is the margin of difference between the classes?
The Devs know the answers to these 2 questions…They just don’t care.

What class has the highest access to stealth?
How high is the margin of difference between the classes?

What class has the highest access to hard cc?
How high is the margin of difference between the classes?

What class has the highest access to healing + sustain damage?
How high is the margin of difference between the classes?

What class has the highest access to teleports/gap closers?
How high is the margin of difference between the classes?

Lol.

Rangers are good at range.
Thieves are good at hit and run/burst.
Warriors/Elementalists/Engineers are good at sustain.
Guardians are good at sustain/burst.
Necromancers are good at sustained damage/hard cc.

On the matter of stealth: some time ago i created an Overview regarding the different classes stealth capabilities. I did not bother taking thief Weaponskills into consideration (P#5+D#2 or D#5), because they are too hard to judge just by their relative cooldowns (time needed to regenerate their cost in initiative), and thus don’t fit that well into the List.

potential Stealth capabilities for utility and weaponskills with Cooldowns

percentage is rounded! (e.g. 8.23% is rounded to 8%,12.5% to 13% and so on…)

if multiple values are traitable,

Skillname: As|Bs, Cs|Ds -> AC%|AD%|BC%|BD%

R A N G E R:

• Hunters Shot: 3s, 12s|10s -> 25%|30%

With Runes of the Trapper

• Flame Trap: 3s, 15s|12s -> 20%|25%
• Frost Trap: 3s, 30s|24s -> 10%|13%
• Spike Trap: 3s, 25s|20s -> 12%|15%
• Viper’s Nest: 3s, 20s|16s -> 15%|19%

E N G I N E E R:

• Toss Elixir S: 5s, 60s|57s|54s|51s|48s|45s|42s -> 8%|9%|9%|10%|10%|11%|12%

T H I E F:

• Hide in Shadows: 3s|4s, 30s -> 10%|13%
• Blinding Power: 3s|4s, 40s|32s -> 8%|9%|10%|13%
• Shadow Refuge: 15s|20s, 60s|48s -> 25%|31%|33%|42%

With Runes of the Trapper

• Ambush: 3s|4s, 35s|28s -> 9%|11%|11%|14%
• Needle Trap: 3s|4s, 30s|24s -> 10%|13%|13%|17%
• Tripwire: 3s|4s, 30s|24s -> 10%|13%|13%|17%
• Shadow Trap: 3s|4s, 45s|36s -> 7%|8%|9%|11%

M E S M E R:

• The Prestige: 3s|4s, 30s|24s -> 10%|13%|13%|17%
• Decoy: 3s|4s, 40s|32s -> 8%|9%|10%|13%
• Veil: 2s|3s, 90s|72s -> 2%|3%|3%|4%
• Mass Invisibility: 5s|6s, 90s -> 6%|7%

When in-Fight, general percentage of stealth-uptime itself isn’t neccessarily the most important factor. Shadow Refugee for example has the highest possible relative uptime (42%), but you would have to sit in stealth for the whole (kittenly long) duration, and the rather high Cooldown prevents you from using it often (which limits the numbers of situations where you can use it during a fight). Mass Invisibility grants you (speaking of non-PU) 5 seconds of stealth, but in a fight the 90s Cooldown almost turns it into a one-usage-joker, and it’s commonly used either as last resort when things go wrong, or to initiate an ambush. Perfect are Skills, that got a high percentage of stealth-uptime combined with a low Cooldown – having access to it more frequently allows for far more flexibility in using it. In that Sense, the Ranger actually got one of the best stealth skills in the game – Hunters Shot, with a 25-30% uptime on a really low Cooldown, and while it does require hitting a target, doing so is (at least for me) incredibly easy. Take Stealth-Trappers into Consideration, and the Ranger becomes – at least Stealthwise – a direct Rival to PU Mesmers. If you compare any Longbow-using Ranger to a standart-Shattermesmer (equipped with Decoy and Mass Invis), he will have double the uptime of Stealth during a ~90s timeframe, and has to miss 5 shots just to get down onto the Mesmers Level of Stealth.

I would write something to your other points as well, but i’am probably nearing the word limit again for this one, so i will leave it as it is for now

Bolbo Baggins.8594:

Do you know what you get then? A furry Norn Body with a Cat head :-) Its a feline creature, not a human like. And it would have the run and jump physics of a human (or Norn). In my opinion, leave it as it is.

But the upright-standing charr were introduced long before the norn, so one could argue that Norn would be non-Furry Charr with human heads (just kidding here)

In GW1, Charr assumed different poses depending on their class:
The rather “savage” Classes (Warrior, Ranger, Necromancer) had a hunched pose,
whereas the more “sophisticated” ones (Elementalist, Monk, Mesmer, Ritualist) stood upright.

OP

This could be so easily solved by making char actually stand upright and running on fours out of combat, then again in combat, some kind of more natural stance.

While i like the idea of upright-standing charr, i don’t think enforcing it on every charr in the game would be a good idea, since there are more than enough ppl who like the more animalistic stance. It would be nice though if there were an Option to choose from the two variants

Making foes “invisible” (to their allies) sounds really mesmer-y; a nice and very interesting concept if i might say so – after all, the Mesmer should be the Master of Illusions and Confusion, and what’s more confusing than letting someone think his allies disappeared all of a sudden?

Although there are two problems:

• Many players (especially on the Warrior/Guardian/Elementalist side) hate encountering stealth (“lol you hiding in stealth like a pu*** go learn play a class that requires real skill like my warrior11!!”). And offensive stealth to allies might be even more of a reason for them to QQ than defensive stealth on their foes themselves.
  (Even i can see how it would annoy me, seeing as it would make helping someone that gets ganked harder)
• The more important problem would be with the game itself. If you ever invited a stealth-capable foe into your party, you will know that he is always visible to you, even when he’s stealthed. Now, i don’t know why it works like that (intended or not?), but if it is the result of a side effect from the way stealth was implemented, it would be a problem for your version of Mass Invisbility – unless the devs decide to rework the way stealth works within groups, and i don’t think they would do that much work just to change a single spell.

-on the general state of mass invis- :

Okay, the current Mass Invisibility is pretty Decent for an Elite Spell. 90s is a nice Cooldown, and 1200 Range makes stealthing allies possible even after engaging hostile partys (when players and illusions are rather spread out a bit than cuddled together). Just like Timebubble it was probably Designed with Illusions in Mind (Quickness for the Mesmer himself isn’t too useful, since non-Phantasm Mesmer Weaponskills tend to be rather weak, so we get Quickness for both us and our Illusions, albeit in a limited area for balancing reasons), and the 10 Target limit was most likely intended to stealth both your party and your illusions.

But yeah, the further you reduce the scale of confrontation, the less impressive becomes Mass Invisibility as a stealth skill compared to both ‘Shadow Refuge’ and ‘Toss Elixir S’. I would go as far as to say that MI is even inferior to those two when you’re roaming alone:

• Both Shadow Refuge and Mass Invisibility can be countered in some way. For Shadow Refuge, it’s the approx. 2 seconds of Time that you musn’t leave the circle after casting the spell (otherwise you get revealed), for Mass Invisibility it’s the 1¾s long, extremly well telegraphed casting time itself.
• However: Shadow Refuge stealths you pretty much the instant you enter it, making you unsusceptible to any targeted Attacks, meaning it can be countered only by either untargeted knockbacks/pulls/Fear, or Hardcore-AoE bombing the SR. And all of those measures can simply be avoided by dodging within the SR.
  A Mesmer casting Mass Invis on the other hand is still targetable, and thus susceptible to any ablity interrupting the cast, and unlike the Thief in SR he can’t simply dodge to avoid attacks coming his way, since it would interrupt the cast.
• The stealth Duration of Shadow Refuge will trump out the one from Mass invis by far. You can easily use it to (for example) sneak past a larger zerg with a group of 5 people, while Mass Invis won’t give you nearly enough stealth to do so.
• ‘Toss Elixir S’ is basically Mass Invis with restricted Range, 5 Target limit, literally no casting time, a far lower Cooldown, and can even be traited in multiple ways. For self-stealth purposes, it’s far superior to Mass Invis in every way.

Of course, balancing Skills with only (roamers/small scale partys) in mind isn’t what should be done, but i think Mass Invisibility could be boosted somewhat in that department without making it Overpowered.

What would be if Mass Invis applied 5 seconds revelead to enemies in range when it was succcesfully cast? Of course this should be avoidable through block/invul/evade/doge (unlike ‘Sic Em’), and i think with 1¾s time and the very obvious animation to do so it would still give more than enough counterplay, not to mention the 90s cooldown

Superior Rune of the Carver
(1) +25 Vitality
(2) +10% damage while using an Arrowcart.
(3) +50 Vitality
(4) +400 toughness while using an Arrowcart
(5) +100 Vitality
(6) -20% recharge on Arrowcart skills.

Superior Rune of the Zergling
(1) +25 Toughness
(2) +35 Vitality; -10% incoming Damage while wearing heavy armor.
(3) +50 Toughness
(4) +65 Vitality; -15% incoming Damage while using a Staff or a Hammer.
(5) +100 Toughness
(6) -20% Condition Duration applied to you; Remove a condition and gain Stability for 5 seconds when using an Autoattack. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)

Superior Rune of the Warrirunner
(1) +10% Swiftness Duration
(2) -10% Condition Duration applied to you.
(3) +15% Swiftness Duration
(4) -15% Condition Duration applied to you; -20% recharge on Movement skills.
(5) +20% Swiftness Duration
(6) -20% Condition Duration applied to you; Shout “It’s Landspeed!” and gain Super Speed for 3 seconds when using a Movement skill. (Cooldown: 5 seconds)

Superior Rune of the Veilbot
(1) +25 Toughness
(2) -10% recharge on ‘Veil’.
(3) +50 Vitality
(4) -15% recharge on ‘Veil’; ‘Veil’ now applies one additional second of stealth to allies.
(5) +100 Toughness
(6) -20% recharge on ‘Veil’; ‘Veil’ now applies 3 Seconds of Stability to allies.

Superior Rune of the Karmatrainer
(1) +25 Vitality
(2) +10% damage to Doors when using a Weapon skill; -10% damage against Guards, Lords or Supervisors.
(3) +50 Toughness
(4) +15% damage to Doors when using a Weapon skill; -15% damage against Guards, Lords or Supervisors.
(5) +100 Vitality
(6) +20% damage to Doors when using a Weapon skill; 50% chance to apply two stacks of ‘Structural Vulnerability’ for 10 seconds when you hit a Door. (Cooldown: 20 seconds)

The skill is fairly good; i would rank it 3rd (with Thief being 2nd and Elementalist being 1st) overall. But yes, the random Teleport is totally annoying, and i can’t even count the times when it put me directly to the edge of a Towers Wall in WvW (which – for a glassy Mesmer – seriously sucks as a place to be downed), or into some random Elementalists AoEs.

Cufufalating.8479:

Idk, it’s a pretty decent #2. It’s not vulnerable to stability / invulnable / stealth stomps and it’s not vulnerable to blink / shadowstep stomps like the thief #2 is.
(…)

You’re right with most of this, but the skill is in fact very much vulnerable to stealth stomps when it comes to Roaming-Encounters. To use Deception, one needs a selectable target first – however, if your only Target in 900 range just decided to go stealth on you, you’re pretty much left with no chance whatsoever to prevent the incoming stomp.

That means every Thief running Dagger offhand will be able to easily finish you off without resistence (unless he royally messes up) just by choosing that particular Offhand Weapon, and doesn’t even have to sacrifice his utility to do so. Even if he wasn’t running Dagger offhand, he could use D/P (which – granted – also easily finishes off other, nonranger classes as well due to the blind), or simply use one of his stealth utilities – hell, maybe even just traps, if he got the right runeset. Point being: Thieves have so many ways to get stealth, that stomps are pretty much garanted in 1vs1 encounters.

Rangers have a high uptime with stealthtraps (again, runeset needed) and Longbow as well, but their pets are in range most of the time, so that’s almost never an issue (unless the pet is a certain cat :P). Hostile Mesmers are a similar case, although they can shatter their clones before utilizing stealth (requires either no clones, clones near Target and at least one Shatterskill off cooldown, or just Distortion off Cooldown), which is in fact what i do to any Mesmer that i down when i get the chance. Engineers slotting Elixir S (which isn’t exactly uncommon in WvW) will also always finish you off.

Given the number of stealth-capable Roamers, that can be quite a problem

I think it would be nice if Deception would at least still stealth you when you don’t select a target (whithout the clone-generating and Teleporting part, making it act like Decoy in that regard).

Khalic.3561:

I don’t think he meant inside the jumping puzzle, considering it’s a cavern and you wouldn’t be able to fire out. He probably meant the large, and very high up, platform just before the puzzle.

He probably did. However, said platform seems to be pretty far away from whatever place those shots are coming from, if ming’s and Wraith’s screenshots are anything to go by

Edit: messed up the server-name censoring… too lazy to change it now though :p

I love such players.

- Actually i don’t. But i love how most of them turn their status to offline (or is that the ignore list?) like little cowards while they insult you or accuse you of cheating after they got their rear ends handed to themselves

kaikalii.4198:

Neptune.2570:

kaikalii.4198:

I’ll start. PU shatter mesmer.

PU shatter?
How does one go both 30 into choas and illusions and still generate enough clones for a shatter build without DE o.o?

In the title I am proposing a scenario in which we have 16 trait points to use rather than 14. With 16, you could go 0/4/6/0/6, taking DE, PU, and IP/

So you would forgo ‘Mental Torment’ with it’s +20% Bonus on Shatterdamage? Or are you speaking of Condishatter?

Leveling my second Guardian for a change of scene, I had an inspiration. I realized that I was not dodging or blocking effectively 98% of the time.

The two heavy classes in this game are really forgiving, even when played fully offensive, and even more so when walking around in PvE (exluding onehit-Attacks from bosses, which would kill any character in one hit anyway). When i walk around in PvE (which mostly happens if i help someone out), observing the Guardians and Warriors in the enviroment, i rarely see them dodge or using any active defense at all. That’s not surprising, given the huge passive defense (even with his “small health pool”, a guadian is much tankier than a mesmer) these classes bring with them – they can live through most encounters without dodging once, even in mlee range against mobs 3-5 levels above them. This can quickly become a problem, if a player starts off with either a Warior or a Guardian, and never learns to make use of their active defense (including dodges), just to get plummeled when they finally enter a PvP area (either structured PvP or WvW).

After some practice, my (then) 5th level newbie Mesmer was able to go toe-to-toe with a level 8 Ettin and drop it without taking any damage.

This may seem trivial to experienced players but I wish someone had pointed it out to me a year or more ago.

You probably don’t give a kitten about it, but in my book this lands you a lot of bonus points. I’am always happy if someone tries learning how to use ‘active defenses’ (dodges, invuls, blocks, etc. activated by player input), and it’s nice of you to try and arise awareness for it amongst beginers

However, there is something that’s bothering me:

III Conclusion;

a. Correctly timed, Dodge and Block are incredibly powerful. A newly rolled 2nd level
Mesmer could withstand the attack of a pimped out 80 warrior with a legendary
weapon with sufficient skill.

Coming from a WvW Dueling perspective i can safely say that at least most glassy Mesmers i’ve met there are very proficient in using ‘active defense’ (in comparison, many players that never used anything other than PU Condi Builds tend to fall apart kinda quickly if you tell them to try a Shatter once, but ofc that depends on the individual case).

However, as much active defense as we have, it won’t be nearly enough for a lvl 2 Mesmer (which doesn’t have access to either traitlines nor traits) to withstand a pimped out lvl 80 Warrior (let alone a lvl 80 Warrior clad in greenies), unless said Warrior is.. well… abyssmal in terms of player skill. Like really, really blackhole-level-abyssmal (or simply inexperienced if it comes to dueling)

You must know, a Warrior has so many hard hitting attacks and deadly CC-Moves, that he can easily make you run out of dodges by simply spamming all of his numerous significant Attacks in a row. He is faster than you, has greater passive defenses (except if you’re running a tanky PU build), more powerful Attacks, and very low Cooldowns on his abilites. And his active defenses aren’t much worse than those of our Mesmer either.

But let me tell you something about the Mesmer’s two blocks first. The thing is, there is a small delay between your opponent triggering your block and your character hitting him with the counterspell. During that delay you’re not allowed to do anything which would interrupt a normal cast (like dodging), otherwise the countereffect wouldn’t trigger at all. This also means, that a Warrior hitting your block can simply dodge afterwards to avoid the incoming counter, or hit you with a fast follow up attack, which turns your block in a waste of time/cooldown. A prominent Example would be a Mace Warrior – he could hit your block with his Autoattack, and follow up with a ‘Pommel Bash’, effectively stunning you while interrupting your counter – now you’re dazed for a second, and more vulnerable to him than before the block. Greatsword AA + ‘Whirlwind-Attack’ would be another example where trying to block a Warrior is actually more dangerous than dodging the strike altogether. And even if said Warrior doesn’t use your blocks against you, he can totally hardcounter your blocks by using Signet of Might, which will even be buffed with the upcoming patch.

Staff #2 and Sword #2 (especially the latter) are actually quite useful, but you still have to outplay the Warrior if you’re using them on a glassy build, since the numerous SigAttacks by the Warrior are simply too much to be reliably counterable, if the Warrior actually doesn’t mess up. Also consider, that Sword#2 is usually part of a Damage-Spike – you may not want to ‘waste’ it using it defensively, since it gives the (even as zerker) ‘tanky’ warrior only more time to heal.

Fighting good Warriors isn’t as easy as you imagine, even if you’re timing your active defenses perfectly

Esplen.3940:

:/ I meant the top right of your screenshot… where it tells you to meet your friends…?

Really, you guys are all mesmers and this blind…? Where’s the thief in this thread spamming smoke field?

Haha, i indeed didn’t notice that. Not surprising though, i’am a WvW Duelist, not a PvEer. In Fact, despite playing almost two years, i haven’t done much of my personal Story at all, because

• my current System sucks in terms of graphics (have to play at lowest settings, and the Resolution you’re seeing was an exception to get a better view during the test – it would be far lower, usually) – and that takes much away from the immersion. Don’t want to ruin my personal story through graphics
• i’am mostly in WvW, and rarely enter PvE for something different than JP’s or worldbosses/dungeons – whenever i’am in need for some gold.
• Living Story never interested me much. I totally ignored Flame&Frost, did a little when the nightmare tower got introduced, and just started a few of the quests because i was interested in the new area. Turns out that Dry Top reduces my Framerate to 4-8fps when nothing special happens.

As you can see, the top right corner of my screen isn’t all to much of importance to me :p

Esplen.3940:

Nonono, I’m referring to the screenshot.

cause i didn’t bother “censoring” the chat? Thought my guildis wouldn’t mind, seeing as there is nothing intimate written. Guess i will update it though

usually running shatter mesmer, and i’am quite wary of retal – mostly when fighting guardians. Using Sword #2 (which in most builds makes up a large part of my burst) generally tends to hurt me more than my target, and even with boon rip it’s quite hard to get all the boons down before initializing the burst – even if the guard is inmobilized, one Symbol of Wrath would be enough to turn a potential Burst either into a waste of Time and Cooldowns, or into a death trap – because one GS#2 alone usually is enough to eat at least 70% of my hp, and kiting someone with a leap and/or teleport and good access to swiftness isn’t exactly easy.

Doesn’t look different for Mes GS#1 either; the autoattack will barely damage your foe compared to the retaliation damage you receive, so you cannot even use it to counter your opponents regeneration in between bursts :P

To the question at hand: would it stop me from attacking? Well, always depends on the situation: i don’t have problems if the damage done by me doesn’t get “outclassed” (exaggerating here) by my foes passive retaliation, which normally means that i don’t mind low-armor foes with retaliation. At the same time i also don’t care too much about retal on high-armor, but otherwise weak opponents.
However, if i see a Guardian fight (an offensively traited guardian doesn’t exactly qualify as “lowe armor target”), i usually think twice about dueling them. Celestial Guards with retal are a nono; the only way that i would fight them is when they actually ask me for it

You are actually right about that range – when i saw your OP, i didn’t want to believe it (i know – through multiple tests – that the range of GS#1 was about 1300 units for some time, but didn’t test it recently).

So naturally i instantly went online and testet it for myself – and you’re spot on with your observations.

I went to queensdale with my little engi, which has – due to traits – exactly 1500 range on her grenade skills; targeted the second practise-dummy to the right, and walked backwards until i was at the limit of being out-of-range, making a screenshot to mark the position. I then relogged on my mes, moved to the same position, and attacked – see the results:

edit: didn’t censor the chat, re-uploaded the new pic.

kaida.9487:

I stopped playing GW2 because of continuous nerf of what I think is the better class/profession I have played in an MMO.

I agree, Mesmers are certainly unique, which is part of the reason why i like them so much. And yes, Mesmers have been nerfed time and time again, most often in a undeserved way.

Now that they buff us an unusable weapon that is the scepter, please left us enjoy it a little.

Scepter is in no way an “unusable” weapon. It’s next to useless for Power-based-builds, but actually quite good for Condition-Based ones. It got a defensive Block (Illusionary Counter) on a low Cooldown giving 5 Units of Torment uppon triggering, whereas Confusing Images is useful in Confusion application and following the movement of stealthed foes through channeling, even if just in a limited way. The only thing not particulary useful was the Autoattack, and it’s still enough of a good weapon to be used by tons of passive-play-PU Condimesmers all over the Guild-Wars-World…

Next to buff is the phantam torch please.

Yes, that would be nice. But then please not in yet another condition-boosting way. They could also change Torch #4 to make it a bit more powerful Powerwise (it’s kittening exploding, common! there has to be some more Powerdamage to it!), or let it (speaking of #4 again) remove a condition the moment it explodes (so that you don’t always have to trait it in order to get at least some Condition removal – it also wouldn’t be as strong as the condiremove uppon activation as caused by the Trait, since the conditions would stay for another 3 seconds on you after activation).

Trolls, go home to complain in another place.

I hope you really mean trolls instead of generally players who complain about these changes. Mainly because i dislike the Scepter buff, and don’t think it to be ‘fantastic’ at all. I don’t know how long you haven’t playing Guild Wars anymore, but Condi Mesmers have not been weak for a long time now, and i cannot really remember any gamebreaking nerf to Condimesmers (except the Confusion nerf in the early Stages of gw2) at all as opposed to Powermesmers (especially Shatter). Seeing how the changes to Scepter not only don’t do too much for the currently underused Powerbuilds, but instead buffs the more braindead and passive PU-condiMesmer specs out there (which are already in a very good place), i cannot understand why someone would come to the conclusion of this being a good change – unless that someone actually ‘plays’ PU-condi or something similar defensive and error-forgiving condi-based.

Also about 90% of all the mesmers i’am meeting in WvW are playing PU atm, most of them PU condi. This change will not only make some other mesmers switch to PU condi (if they haven’t already), but may even lead to non-mesmers creating alt-mesmers just to faceroll others with appropiate PU condi-builds as well – meaning there will be even more PU condimesmers polluting the Roaming/Duelling scene in WvW (both in a relative and absolute way)

Just one thing about Torment on Scepter AA…

#revertScepterChanges2014

nicknamenick.2437:

zaxon.6819:

i agree with pindown being more telegraphed.. so heres the deal.. ill trade you ileap for pindown.. and we will call it a day.

these arguments are so bad.

But sure and now place it on my GS so i can have a 100% 100b all the time just like you can with blurred frenzy

Mesmer Sword has the second-weakest Sword AA in the Game (Powerwise), and if you actually take the Warrior’s Sword’s bleeding application (even on builds with 0 conditiondamage) in mind, it may become the actual weakest Sword AA in the Game.

Blurred fency has a damage-coeffcient of (2.4). In Comparison, the Warrior’s Greatsword has (5.5) on 100b, (2.8) on Whirlwind Attack, (1.7) on Rush and and (1.5) on Blade Trail ( giving the blade hits two times); Arcing Slice (although never really used) has a modifier of (1.3). 100blades alone outdamages Blurred Fency by far , and if you forced your opponent to dodge twice (which isn’t hard as warrior, giving the sheer amount of hard-hitting attacks), and used 100b mid-melee range, you would have already outdamaged Blurred Fency by the time your opponent got out of your attacking-cone – And you don’t even have to use inmob for that. In case you actually inmobilize your foe, a full Blurred Fency will not even down Soft Targets in one Swoop – but 100blades certainly does.

Neither Sword AA nor Blurred Fency will put too much pressure on your foe; And by the way – Mesmer mainhand Sword is already a weaker, more gimmicky Version of Thief S/P 2-3 + a weaker AA. And i can tell you, my thief can use #2->#3 much more often than my mesmer and hits way harder while doing so (even the Shadowstepping part itself) – initiative may have been a problem in the past, but ever since the buff to it’s regenerationspeed i can use it far more often without pushing myself into a corner (S/P was way harder to play back then)…

To your Pindown: this spell had 6 stacks of bleeding for 12 seconds at base stats (mind blown!) PLUS inmobilize; and no, ¾seconds is not “overly telegraphed” at all – many classes have ¾s spells which are telegraphed just as well while not having nearly the strength of a pin down. And don’t even try coming with a “strafing” argument; the pin-down-shot doesn’t move slow at all, and the 50% Movementspeed reduction in-combat will make strafing impossible unless the warrior fires it at 1000-1200 range.
Actually i don’t even know why i’am explaining this, since i’am not sure what the inmobilize on pin down (a ranged set) has to do with iLeap, which is used on a melee set – a Sword wiedling Mesmer is slower than any Sword or Greatsword wielding Warrior, can’t take as much damage, doesn’t do as much damage with it, and does not nearly have so many ways to counter movement-impairing conditions via traits as a warrior can, so why is it so hard to understand that inmobilize is actually very important to melee Mesmers?

Of course i hope that there will be a delay between spawning the clone and teleporting (look at focus #4, it takes a second as well until the pull can be used), because no matter how much Swordmesmer need it – instant inmobilize would just be silly.

Damage buff for GS.. why? wassnt it already strong? (…)

GS#3 has never been a high-damage skills, and it won’t be one after the buff either. And no, if you want to know it exactly: GS itself is not “already Strong”. iBerserk is a weak (lower coefficient) and double-telegraphed version of Whirlwind Attack, #5 does unnoticeable damage, #2 is kind of okay, but has the same damage as Blade Trail (which is the weakest non-AA on Warrior GS), and the Autoattack is barely noticeable when used against Zerkerwarriors – use it against PVT Warrs, and you won’t even get past the Regeneration given by Healing Signet (and this is coming from someone running full zerker; so my MesGS won’t get much stronger than it is).

AA torment!?!?? what??!?!??!?!?!?!?! are you sick ANET???

I main mesmer and i fully agree with this. If you’re looking into the mesmer Subforum, you will see even more Mesmermainers hating this change. It will make the most stupid, most braindead and most passive Condispec even more overpowered than it already is right now – this will undoubtly lead to a mass of bad players “jumping on the train”, creating an alt mesmer and terrorizing WvW with their newfound holy grail…

Anyone got an Idea how we could make the devs see how terrible their decision was ?

Well – if you’re ignoring the ‘N’ in ‘GWEN’, the most essential WvW classes in zergs would be Guardians (Blue tag), Warriors (Yellow tag), Elementalists (Red tag) and Veil Bots (Purple tag).

Oh, the irony…
- just image every player with their class specific color tagging up. Everything would be Yellow/Blue, with a few red dots in between and a maximum of 1-2 purple tags within the masses

Miku Lawrence.6329:

MSFone.3026:

IE working plus whatever condi buffs are coming to scepter will make our arguably strongest spec (condi PU) even stronger. Fine with me but does condi PU need help? The QQ will be intense. Of course that is what I’ll be running if this is fixed lol. IE won’t be fixed though

How in hell is PU related to condition damage? Hint : You don’t need to run PU to run condition spec.

He never said that PU and condition damage were related to each other; he was merely speaking of condi-PU being our ‘arguably strongest spec’; and tbh i can see his point. Condi PU already is the easiest-to-play configuration out there for mesmer and pretty strong (i would even go one step further calling it braindead cheese and OP, but everyone views this differently), and surely didn’t need any further buffs. Ofc the condibuff to scepter will benefit non-PU condibuilds as well, but thats not the point he was trying to make here

Don’t worry, that seems to be normal. When encountering a Turret engi, i thought “well, focus may suck as weapon against mobile targets, but the damage isn’t bad against stationary ones, and the Blocks would prevent it from hitting anything, right?” and equipped my focus, only to run into the same problem as you. Unfortunately i cannot say if this is due to the turrets being turrets, or simply due to iWarden being broken as a whole

I would love it if our focus-phantasm would get a projectile-blocking (or reflecting if traited) version of the WarriorsWhirling Axe move, instead of it’s current version of Whirling Defense. It would allow for movement during the Attack, and make it less useless than it’s now, although it’s movementspeed in-Attack should probably be reduced by 33%, lest we have more raging Warriors complaining about someone else being better at something than themselves (see standard-Warrior reaction to the thieves stolen skill).

But right now? The Cooldown is pretty high for what it does at the moment; 25s untraited!? Really!? Right now it’s not really viable for Phantasm Builds (unless you intend to fight rooted enemies… and even then it probably won’t work), Shatterbuilds cannot really use Fokus as a whole (the Phants cooldown is too high to use it as (*) shatterfodder, and the possible interrupt on TC doesn’t justify having only one useful skill), condibuilds.. well, focus doesn’t really give anything to condibuilds either, so the only builds capable of effectively using a fokus would be Interrupt/Lockdown Variants, and then mostly due to TC, and not because of iWarden…

pls, a-net, fix that kitten Warden

(*)edit: hat to insert this, because the ‘as’ + ‘shatterfodder’ was combined into ‘kittenerfodder’ by our smart automatical censoring service

PvE/WvW: Traveller. Don’t mind the loss in offensive power that much if it means that i don’t move around like a slug :O

cheshader.5081:

I hope we still will be able to play Mesmer after the feature patch.

The Future

patch notes, September 9, 2014

• (…)
• Fixed a bug, which allowed players to choose the ‘mesmer’ profession.
• Existing characters of the Mesmer profession got deleted. Players, who owned
  a Mesmer, and are also able to proof they didn’t exploit the above mentioned bug intentionally, can contact the support and request for compensation. The support then may give them the option to create a new character from a heavy profession of choice, which will retain the level of their previously deleted Mesmer.
• (…)

Even if the entirety of WvW-Commanders doesn’t buy them, there will be more than enough PvE Commanders doing it instead. Or PvE Farmers and Tradepost-Players, who don’t know what to do with their massive amount of money. I mean, not too long ago (meaning: before the introduction of guild missions, farmtrains, and revamped World Bosses), when there was no need for commanders in PvE – and showing of a commander-tag in PvE was like screaming “hey, i got too much money and thought you all would be impressed by my shiny blue tag, even though i’ve never set my foot on a WvW map to support my Server” - it still didn’t stop PvEPlayers from buying it just for showing off; And that was during a time where it was frowned upon (at least on my Server). Since currently using a commander tag in PvE is generally seen as legit (see coordianation of guild missions, Major World bosses like the 3 Wurms, Templeevents, and.. Champion-Farmtrains) i wouldn’t be surprised if there were even more PvE players to buy the new Tag + new Colors just for the sake of ‘having it’, if not only to be able to show it off to others

So even if the entirety of WvW (which is bound to be much smaller than the PvE Fraction) collectively avoided buying a special-color-tag, it still wouldn’t make enough of a difference for A-PvECareBear-net to change it’s mind

Well bad news for you. Why? Because the Dev’s would love you to main a Warrior

Other than that y, i really want to see what they did to our mantras; especially to MoP – maybe i can find a usage for it now, something other than using it against abyssmal-played thieves for fun

Kadj.6725:

Sigh. I shouldn’t say this, because I like this bug, but I got bad news: This is a bug that should be fixed. Why?

In PvE/WvW, you can abuse the exact same bug and fire off a racial transformation skill(Avatar of Melandru, most norn things, MAYBE asura’s power suit? Maybe Charrzooka?)… For AoMelandru at least, the end result is a clone with extremely high HP and power that fires off every single skill that form has.

Soooo… yeah. Also, if the asuran power suit and charrzooka happen to work, I would also like to see a video of what happens if someone does it with WvW siege, especially siege golems and trebuchets… and traps, actually.

I like tinkering with things like these. I like it a lot. Already tried it with Siege-Golems to see if it works, and you don’t have to worry: it doesn’t. The Powersuit should work (already saw it from a fellow mesmer), but i have my doubts about the charrzooka (bundles/temporary weapons, no matter wether they were generated by a skill or an Item, generally don’t translate into clones).

As you already observed, clones simply copy your abilites upon creation, if your character used a transformation (be it by tonic or by skill; doesn’t matter. It has to be a “real” Transformation though; The Grenth-Elite skill humans have for example isn’t really a transformation, but rather an Aura in terms of game mechanics). Use a costume brawl tonic, and the clone will have costume brawl skills.

The most dangerous Variant (due to the simple reproducabebility) are clones created by …

Regarding Melandrus Avatar: The OP thing about those clones are primaly their “rooting” ability (which works pretty much like the Oakhearts, except that it also stacks bleeding), as well as their ability to create Waterfields/ heal allies. The direct-damage coming from them is almost negible, and will be lower than the damage caused by a staff-clones AA on a Powerbuild (y, i mean the damage done by the random procs of Burn and Bleeding, when the clone has no condition damage).

One day i found some other WvWers which would do further tests with me, mainly fooling around with clone-generation upon reflection, the lack of a clone limit for non-mesmers, and the combination of both with the usage of tonics or transformations.

At some point we also tried creating Norn-Form-Clones, just for the heck of it.
The reassuring Part first: It’s highly unlikely that a Norn-Mesmer will be able to abuse this, because even Mirror-Blade will already have reached it’s maximum range before the casting time of any Norn-Transformation is finished.
The only way i currently know to create those clones is, to make your opponent use a long lasting reflect before he/she initiates Transformation (f.e. hostile Guardian using reflect Wall, or a hostile Mesmer using Reaction), and throw your Mirrorblade into the Reflection, after he/she successfully transformed. Meaning: you won’t be able to create a clone for yourself, but if you’re really unlucky in a fight, you may give your opponent a clone-Norn-Form instead… and believe me, you don’t want that. Why? For some reason they are stupidly Overpowered. When our little Testparty experimented on this, we tried it first with the SnowLeo-Transformation (me being the Mirrorblading Mesmer, another Guardian from another Server readying his reflect & form). As a full glass cannon i’am used to see large Numbers when get hit. What i certainly didn’t excpect were hits in the Killshot-damage range… i even made some screenshots, had to look through two folders a’ 1000 screenshots though before i found them:

MSFone.3026:

But the aesthetics!!!! Honestly though the aesthetics actually do count for a lot with me lol.

kitten right! Which other class has purple Butterflies, cool sound effects, Laser-Rays-of-Death-(when-it-hits-for-serveral-hours) and shiny chaos-armor bubbles

Now that i think of it, our GS Laser-Of-Minor-Death sounded much better in the past. One update (i think somewhen last year) accidentally changed the on-hit soundeffect to what it is today; if i remember correctly, there even was a thread in the Bug-Forum about this, with some dev stating they knew about it and were going to revert the change. Ha! I’am still waiting!

> For maximum Mesmer Shinyness see this 40-50 player Mesmer-only Zerg!

(it also shows how uneffective a pure mesmerzerg is in comparison to some #1-pressing Heavys, although the whole action was meant for fun, so they weren’t seriously trying to archieve anything.)

One Note Chord.5031:

Navi.7142:

The question is: Will they fix the existing bugs?

Of course not. They will, however, break iwarden further.

wait – is that even physically possible!?

I understand buffing Scepter, but pushing it even more into the Condition Line? It’s not like it was that bad for Condition Builds before (one easily abuseable block on a short cooldown with pretty strong application of torment, and a channeled Spell for Confusion) – i really hoped they would do something to give it some Power-Up, to make it viable for Powerbuilds as well, but i guess we will see even More PU Condis with Scepter now (<sarcasm> thanks for buffing mesmer condis further, a-net ! </sarcasm>)

Can’t imagine anything regarding their “improvements” of traits/utilites/weapons/illusions though. Probably “improvements” to make them less much of a threat towards non-mesmers :P I just hope they actually improved some of the traits/utilities/weapons for active builds, instead of further buffing things which encourage passive play.

The awesome changes to offensive Mantras sound Awesome, as long as it doesn’t lead to a new wave of Tripple-Mantra-Ultra-Heal-Phantasm-Builds in WvW. WvW is already being swarmed by PU Condi- and Phantasmmesmers, i don’t really want the few remaining Shatters or Lockdown players to switch

To Mimic: It was pretty much a niche spell, but i liked that it was “one of it’s kind”. Sure, the fact that projectiles actually hit you the first time really sucks (good luck catching a killshot! Wanna have Bolas? cope with 5s inmob then! Want to catch that stunning projectile? Well bad luck, because the stun interrupts the routine!), and the inability to stop the cast for 4 seconds (except through wasting a dodge|weaponswitch) made it subpar when fighting Conditionbunkers. Still, it had one of the most amazing SFXes in the Game (chaos shield bubble thingy and awesome pose, kitten yes!); i hope they somehow recycled it for the new version of mimic. The Effect seems nice and fit’s the name, although it’s also a bit simplistic. A bad feeling tells me there will be fixed times for the boons copyied, but that is probably just the evil realist in me coming through (-_-)*

Hopes? What is this “hopes” you speak of? Is it something to eat?

> Engaging Pessimist Realist-Mode…
> Reducing Seriousness to 80%…

In all seriousness, i don’t have any hopes whatsoever. A-net made it clear again and again over time that they don’t give a kitten about the Mesmer profession: If anything they will nerf it further (or be fixing Bugs in case they bring the mesmer some – god no! – advantages!), seeing how probably every developer in existence mained, currently mains, will main, and will forever have excusively mained a Warrior, plays (read: somehow manages to die on) a Warrior, buffs the Warrior, and twinks on a guardian... who am i kidding here: twinks on another Warrior. In case you’re wondering why i think that Devs playing Warriors may be the reason for our classes sad state – take a look at the Warrior Subsection on this Forum, where arguably the most “Teefa ndm esmer OP PLZ nERF EM!!!1!!”-like Topics and Posts originate from (in case they appear in the WvW-Discussion or Balancing Section, click on the poster’s history, and try to discern what his/her main class is. You won’t be surprised in most cases…). Hell, i know quite some Warrior-mainers from my friendslist who cannot cope with mesmer clones (“clonespam”) or claiming that shatter anihilates any Warrior build, no matter how good the Warrior outplays the Mesmer…

If we’re lucky, the devs decide that they want to fix one of our serveral broken skills, forget it, and leave it untouched. If we’re less lucky, they decide to fix one of our broken skills, touch it, and… a-net-fix it (read: break it on a magnitude even higher than before).

Maybe, just maybe, they’re actually nerfing something actually nerf-worthy, such as Prismatic Understanding. While i realize, that PU isn’t that much of a problem, since most of the current cheesebuilds from other classes can cope quite well with it, i would regardless like seeing it nerfed – on one hand because that way the current sorry state of the mesmer class may become more visible to the devs, and on the other hand because PU not only leads to cheesy and pretty facerolly builds (played it for quite some time at the beginning as mesmer, and… omg…), but also to the bad Image that our class has amongst the general playerbase (ever got accused of being a “dirty PU user” despite not having a single point in Chaos? yeah, the flood of players overly using PU caused this).

If hell freezes.. they may even buff Shatterbuilds! Maybe giving it some condiremoval, so that you aren’t pushed into running the cleansing Mantra with Torch against even badly played Condibunkers, although they would probably rather further nerf it, and buff more passive Phantasm, PU-Phantasm oder PU-Condibuilds. This way a dev could simply switch from his Warrior to his dusty Mesmer-alt, and still not die..to often

My human Mesmer, which was once a male. For some reason most of the human male light-armors looked (and still do) very Elementalist-y to me, and the few that didn’t unfortunately suffered from clipping with my shoulderpart-of-choice… so some day i thought ‘kitten it, you’re getting a complete makeover!’ and prompty changed his gender. Still glad that i did that; i even found armors which looked terribly ugly and bland on my male Mes to look actually acceptable/good on my then turned-female Mesmer. Sometimes i think a-net simply creates their human armors for female characters first, and awkwardly scales them afterwards to fit the more boxy anatomy of human males (-_-)

The reasons for why my mes looks like she does is summed up in a wall of text, so i will put it into a spoiler :P (if Ascalon had my Wall-of-Text instead of their puny ascalonian Wall, things would have turned out differently, i can tell!)

Sogradde.8016

Why would you make different colour tags unlockable by gold (and lots of it) instead of a WvW ability? One new colour per rank in “Rainbow Commanding” or whatever the hell you want to call it would make so much more sense.
WXP and Badges are the currencies of WvW not Gold.

10/10 Devon Carver, great trolling there.

Unfortunately A-net cares for the PvE crowd far more than for the WvW crowd, because they are far greater in Numbers, have more Gold, and are (though this is just a guess) more likely to buy more gold via gems (and in turn give a-net more $) than your average WvWer. Chances are good that PvE Commanders won’t complain too much about this change; after all PvEing is almost purely profitable – it’s not like PvEComs would have to spend their money for upgrading keeps, siege and food, and PvE-stuff is far more profitable than WvW-stuff anyway (i don’t count the Karmatrains in EotM as “WvW”), so they aren’t hit nearly as hard by this as your average WvW-Commander

Virtute.8251:

100g for each black lion vendor tab unlock. Can’t buy new skins until you unlock the vendor tab.

:D Why stop at that? We could make non-Commanders pay as well! Something like

• Players can now unlock the ability to see Commander Tags from allied Commanders.
  -unlocking the ability to see Blue Commander Tags costs 50g; unlocking the ability to see nonblue-Commander Tags then costs 25g for each color.
• Players can now unlock the ability to join Squads from Commanders.
  -unlocking the ability to join a blue Squad costs 30g; unlocking the ability to join nonblue-squads then costs 15g for each color.

Maybe i should try to get a job at Nexon…

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

Scoundrel.2139:

LFG Tool:

Advertise your party: 35s

Please be careful what you wish for. NCSoft reads these forums.

Don’t worry, the only officials visiting the WvW-Discussion Subforum are the moderators, and then only to delete “Matchup Threads” or threads that dare complain about hacking/exploiting in WvW

Did anyone bother looking at the chinese version of gw2 ? They have to unlock literally everything by gold or gems, no matter how basic the feature seems. A-net probably knows that they can’t enforce that kitten on their non-chinese playerbase without triggering a massive loss of customers, but it makes me wonder:

Are those horrid prices for colored tags a test to determine how far they can push us around without losing players?

i really hope that more players will continue with their protests against this kitten, because no matter how much i like fluffy little kittens, i just don’t want this game to gradually degenerate into somthing resembling the chinese gw2 version. Don’t let them think it’s okay, who knows what they are coming up with in the future if we let them get away with this now :/

I guess he hit you with some other Attack first (AA maybe?), and used Mace #3 directly afterwards? One Stupid thing regarding Illusionary Counter and Illusionary Riposte is, that their effect comes with a delay of ½ to ¾ seconds after your opponent triggered the block. During that time you are not allowed to dodge or do anything else, because it would actually interrupt your blocking-skill’s effect. It also means that your opponent can trigger your block, follow up with a fast attack, and still dodge to avoid your countereffect.

In Case of a Mace using Warrior, this means that he can trigger your block by using AA (or any Attack for that matter), and quickly follow up with his pretty-much-insta-cast mace #3, which stuns you, thus interrupting your skill’s countereffect.

So in case you measured them coming consistently through your blocks by waiting for your countereffects to happen, then i can assure you that it wasn’t a bug, but simply part of the crappy mechanics both Illusionary Counter and Illusionary Riposte suffer from.

If they actually completly circumvented your Block (meaning no Blocking message turned up whatsoever), then you actually found a Bug – at least as long as your Warrior Opponent didn’t use his Signet of Might, ofc.

arcticface.5372:

I personally believe that the obsidian sanctum should be a non-pvp area.

There is a problem with this though – right now the Obsidian Sanctum is the only place where WvWers (or PvEers), which don’t like the building limitations of classical PvP (or the PvP-Balance itself), can actually have duels without impacting their server’s overall WvW performance in a negative way. This is even more so the case for GvGs, which where the original reason for adding the Arena-Structure within OS.

arcticface.5372:

Majority of people go there to do the amazingly difficult jumping puzzle that i for 1 adore and try to do daily. However some people do not believe my philosophy and kill randomly. Imagine you are level 1 again and you heard of a cool jumping puzzle in WvW, not knowing where to go you wander around until you find someone with the patience to show you the way (this is usually what i do).

same here. I never Attack players there unless i’am attacked, and even if i get attacked, i will usually try to discern if my attacker is a troll (which means he’s going to die. often.) or just an trigger happy uplevel not understanding that attacking a duelist on lvl 80 isn’t the brightest thing to do (in which case i add them to the group and warn them, explaining that most players would and will easily kill them if they do this). Why should i anyway? I mean, there is nothing to gain: Killing people won’t give my Server any advantage, the Badges of Honor and Blueprints they gain through the chest are negible, and the terrain gives a pretty unfair disatvantage to classes heavily relying on LoS, while giving huge advantages to other classes in terms of trolling – so most of the time i couldn’t even feel good about killing someone there (it’s practically as dirty and skill-absent as a PvP Situation can get).

arcticface.5372:

The next day you come back to get your loot again, but this time there is someone else this person is waiting at the chest to kill anyone who comes near. Lacking the skills and experience to kill this person you die and have to restart only to find he is still there and die again.

As i said, i can relate to that. Sure, objectively speaking those gankers have every right to do what they do; This is a PvP Area after all, and i will accept that – that doesn’t mean i have to like it though. During the last Months there seems to be a huge increase in what i would consider “cheesy” builds (very effective without requiring appropiate effort on part of the player); this is noticable in the Arena while dueling, but somewhat counterbalanced by the “cheese vs. cheese” situations. This is not the case for "Troll vs. [PvEplayer or WvWZergling] " situations. Espcially the main-PvE players probably won’t be running around with cheesy PvP builds, and find themselves at a severe disatvantage at both build and experience when facing the standart-troll utilizing some facerolly cheesebuild in combination with terrain advantages.

kmaeropa.3986:

What’s with people not wanting a challenge or worst yet, not understanding that something is supposed to be a challenge?

Killing badly prepared players with cheesy builds, using build-specific terrain advantages isn’t a challenge at all. It’s no challenge for the troll as he usually has everything laid out for him in such a situation, and a onesided beating for whatever poor nonCheese-nonPvPer is on the receiving end. This holds true especially when the attacked player is bad at jumping – most dedicated trolls will do the jumps while sleeping, and simply get back to the former player before he can put a meaningfull distance between himself and the troll.

kmaeropa.3986:

As you learned to do the jumping puzzle, you must learn to defeat a worthy opponent.

Let’s see:

• On one Hand we usually got the harmless PvEr (or Zergling) not fitted for 1vs1 Situations – i fail to see how those can be counted as “worthy opponents”. They’re more like lambs on their way into a slaughterhouse.
• On the other Hand we got the troll. In my experience (and i’am in OS pretty much every day) most of them run top-notch-cheese. Which also isn’t exactly what i would call a “worthy” opponent. More something along the lines of “can’t PvP for my life, need a build to carry the burden”. Sure, there are many trolls that just suck so badly at PvPing, that they still manage to lose despite using their cheese and terrain advantages (PU Condi Mesmer and perpl Engi losing against a duo of PvErs with inappropiate builds for vs-player combat!? how does that even work!?), but the only option to see them as “worthy” opponents would be to join the cheese-train – at least temporary.

@BurrTheKing

first of all: thank you for that response – not only for the information, but also for the way you wrote it (you’re actually explaining things instead of just reacting in a mean way like some people do).

phirefox…duelists, especially dedicated duelists, are not the people to ask about game balance.
(…)
The game is not and should not be balanced around 1v1 because it is a team game.

That’s true, and it is probably too hard to balance all classes to be equally skilled in Duelling/small scale roaming/Zerging and normal PvEing at the same time anyway – as a duelist this still annoys me somewhat, but you’re still right in this point (1vs1ing is kind of a niche, and it would suck to destroy groupplay-balance to set it right)

They say they “main” Warrior but seem to spend a large amount of time on their Thief/Mesmer. Sure that’s a bit of a strawman but in my experience T/Me players say they play Warrior and roll face on it in order to make their arguments seem more legitimate. There was someone who talked crap about Warrior on a daily basis who ended posting their PvP stats and had hardly played ANY PvP at all.

This is very plausible, i just don’t really have the possibility to see if someone really plays a warrior as a main or just pretends to – i have to apologize here, i wrote it as if those players surely were main-Warriors, which is stupid of course since i can’t know that for sure. I won’t change that part in my post though, since i don’t like masking my own mistakes by editing them out (i will put a footnote in there though).

Warriors are certainly strong at that but right now having a condi Necro and Engi can melt your average Hambow if they aren’t terrible. In WvW balance is even less relevant because food and other buffs exist.

Again, this is true – but then again, i’am not a friend of condimancers or condispamming (especially perplexity) engineers either :P

They post threads with “suggestions” to “balance” Warriors that include making Heal Sig worse than it was pre-buff, nerfing CI, Nerfing Berserk Stance, Nerfing traits hardly anybody actually use, etc.

I think healing Signet was actually underpowered before the buff – and on non-tanky Warrior builds, it still isn’t OP right now. The only issue i have with it comes, if it is coupled with tanky gear and blocks or stuns on top of adrenalin health – only the combination of all those together is what makes the signet look OP (at least i think so), but i have honestly no idea how one could solve this – simply nerfing the signet would only screw the non-tanky Warriors using it, and that can’t be a sign of good balancing.

I’ve seen MM Necros calling the class passive and D/P Thieves calling it “cheese.”

haha, those are awesome

They also post totally false info or exaggerate the effectiveness of traits like Adrenal Health. More recently they constantly bring up the high base stats but ignore the mechanics they don’t have.

ye, for some reason there are still people thinking that adrenalin health triggers once every second (as opposed to once every three seconds as it does) – i usually step in and correct them though, if i see someone claiming this. Concerning the high base stats – well, they are helpful. Of course high base stats alone won’t make anyone invincible, it’s just a nice boost to have, and basically allow one to spec (statwise) into offensive lines while retaining the (stat induced) survivability, that other classes have to gain through traits/equipment first. Regarding the Mechanics that the Warrior lacks: sure, a Warrior doesn’t have stealth, shadowsteps or quick-invul (like mes sword#2 – i won’t mention clones since they don’t really strike me as an advantage), they can kind of make up for that though with a possibility for double endure pain (one traited and one on utility), blocks (sword, mace, shield) and a few conventional gapclosers – even though the latter can’t compare to shadowsteps in fight situations. That being said, it’s not easy to say which skills are “better”, since it’s kind of build and situation dependend

-Nero

Simon.3794:

i dont know why would you post this, everyone that is not some ridiculous noob, hj hero or wvw random pvdoors know that right now the fotm is necro and engi, and thief keep dominate everyone with zerkers(well maybe not, but we will see when the meta settle) and hambow is still strong as well, but that’s it.

and just ignore randoms like phirefox.2568, non of he said make sense or even show that he plays the class even a bit, don’t ever try to argue with someone that only plays one class or two and pretend like they know everything, especially not some pro scout that don’t fight and zerg, it only makes you dumber.

actually i’am a duelist in OS, not a zergling. You can ask lavra for that if you want, he was (or is? i don’t know anymore since i switched to abaddon recently) a duelist on Dzagonur (@lavra: i’am Nero A. :P). I got a Thief, a Mesmer, an engineer, a Warrior and A Ranger, so no, i’am not just playing one or two classes.

So please tell me, which of my points don’t make sense, and please give me an explanation as to what exactly leads to them being wrong. Thanks in advance!

Well, Warriors are a bit over the top. High damage Modifiers on all their weaponskills, relatively low average cooldowns amongst their weaponsets, insane access to Hard CC, useful utilitys, best base survivability (there is no such a thing as a Warrior “glass cannon” – the glass part isn’t even true if you’re running fullzerk as a warrior, at least not from the perspektive of light-armor-roamers), tons of blocks/active defense, they’re also among the best on case of mobility (cough landspeed – and don’t go and tell me that Sword or Greatsword are soo bad, because they’re actually good if you compare them to other classes weapons), among the best in terms of condition removal, high base-uptime for any condition-applications, easy access to might and fury (and even vigor when traited properly), optional near-immunity to movement impairing conditions and of course the banner of rezzing doom (for WvW zerging and/or roaming in small teams).

The Warrior is also a class, which can allow itself to trait defensively, and still get a nice damage output (as opposed to other classes).

Most duelists i met so far told me that they think the warrior to be quite OP; on the other side, most of the ones that don’t share this sentiment often main a warrior *(see footnote) themselves, and play their secondary characters – if anything – as thieves, Condibunker or PU mesmers. That being said, i don’t think that every build a Warrior has is OP – still, it’s hard to find a build which isn’t at least slightly above-average.

Regarding thieves and PU mesmers – yeah, i agree that those should be turned down as well. As a former Thief player currently maining a mesmer, i think that both – the ridicoulusly no-risk-backstab/stealthspam and the PU cheese – should be brought down to acceptable levels (played PU for a while, but i wouldn’t touch it with a stick now – way too facerolly), and i can’t stand the condispam meta as well (yes, Condibunker builds out there, i’am looking at you!).
Nowadays all you meet when roaming/dueling is (no particular order)
- perplexity Engineer
- PU Hybrid or Condimesmer
- Condimancer
- Condibunker Warrior
- D/P power- or P/D condithief
- Regen-Condibunker Ranger
- Powerbased Warriors
- Mediguardians
- some D/D eles

while i said “no particular order”, the condition variants still greatly outweight the power-based ones, with the exception of Powerbased Warriors and thieves (which are – in my experience – still far less in numbers than Condibuildusers, but still much more prevalent than other Powerbuilds, including mediguards)
——————————-
footnote

• i can’t say for sure if those players really mained a warrior, or just stated it to look more credible, just as Burr mentioned a few posts after this one, so better don’t take this as a fact

Well, if i had to choose the most nasty condition-based build, i would actually name two of them, which kinda tie in my opinion. My choice is very specific though, since i’am one of the few roaming exo-fullzerker oldschool-shattermesmers left (OK burst, a survivability almost as bad as a fullzerker ranger, and little sustained damage – shortly: not really viable in the current meta full of cheesebuilds), that refuse to abuse PU or play cheesy condibuilds – tried it some time ago, but stopped playing it since it striked me as way too “facerolly”… still got the gear though, just in case i grow weak and succumb to the dark side. So, as such a mesmer specifically there are two Condition-Based builds that annoy me especially much – and while i hate pretty much every condition-based build out there, those two take a special place in my heart

The Mace/Sword | Sword/Shield Perplexity-Distracting Strikes Condiwarrior (either as Bunker or nonbunker version). While this build doesn’t really qualify as a Condition-Burster (MSword bleeds and OSword torment), it’s so kitten annoying to fight while it literally doesnt require any effort on part of it’s user at all. If anything, i would call it the King of Condicheese The huge Armor and Healthpool shrug my Attacks of as nonexistent; in fact, My autoattack won’t be noticable against the healing signet’s regeneration (despite running full zerker), iZerker will barely bring it from 100% to 90% hp, and a full crit 4x shatterburst will take out between 20%-30% of his health at best. Whenever you’re Stunned, he can use that time to passive-regenerate any damage, and the 3 blocks on his set help even further with that. The worst part though is, that the user of such a build doesn’t even have to play his stuns right – if you’re lucky, you you don’t get interrupted, which still means that you’re going to get tons of bleeding from 1Hsword spam, and if you’re unlucky… well, 9 stacks confusion per interrupt is not nice, especially not if they come so often, coupled with random 3-stacks once in a while. If you used up all your Condiremoval (since you are spammed to death by them), you won’t be able to attack him until the removal is up again – which means further regeneration on his part. So as the epitome of passive play, i would give this build one of the two first places Please note, that there are builds which can cope much easier with this (Conditransfer necro), so fighting it might be less annoying than this post suggests.

The Pistol/Dagger Condithief would be the second first place to mention, though mostly because it combines two aspects, which i don’t like when playing a mesmer:
It’s a thief – the perfect counter to Mesmers (which are heavily target-dependend) – i mained one for a year (my first character), and actually switched to playing a mesmer for that very reason, since i wanted to see what it is like to switch the perspectives for a change. In case of the P/D thief, he has an offhand Dagger, which grants the Thief free access to stealth – not even a shatter mesmer could kill it’s clones frequently enough to prevent that, and CnDing dumb AI clones is pretty easy too. Also in case of more glassy Power Thieves, a common tactic would be to await their Backstabs (or somehow get them into melee range), and burst them as soon as they are visible – hoping that you can down them or at least pressure them to mess up. This isn’t an option with P/D thieves – as oposed to normal power-based-thieves, a P/D thief doesn’t have to give up his defense in favor of offensive strength. He can of course invest into the Power/Condiduration line to make his poisons more effective (if he intends on using them), but that would still leave plenty of points to spend in the toughness and vita attribute-lines – because unlike other classes, they don’t have any important on-crit conditraits on their precision traitline. Trying to kill something which has bunker-like stats, potentially up to 6 evades chained after another, and is stealthed and thus unable to be attacked by your targeted spells while it isn’t evading things.. well… “fun” looks different. I probably would manage not to die against them in time if i played some (passive play) mantra-phantasm build (those are nearly immune to conditions), but i would not be able to kill them either if they decided to flee the scene

Oh my… TLtR again, i guess. Really have knack for writing long blocky posts o_ô

Sublimatio.6981:

Don’t you agree the Fiery Dragon Sword aura should be toned down to the level of Jormag’s Breath aura? When Fiery sword is stowed, the flames are so big it seem’s unnatural and overwhelming. I hope some day it will be fixed.

Edit: reading the feedback, I suggest toning down the aura when it’s stowed, and being the same as it’s now when wielded.

Wow, finally! Can’t believe there is someone who actually shares my opinion regarding this sword – most players i’ve met so far seem to like overloaded flashy SFX’s (“the more the better”), and if i look at the answers you got so far, this seems to be the case here as well. I don’t particulary care about the fiery dragons sword’s length while it’s drawn – but i absolutely dislike it in it’s stowed form. Most of my characters are Human, and “can’t” (rather because i don’t want) use like 95% of all the 1H Swords in the game, because most of them are so kitten long that they sink into the ground while my characters are walking/standing around – it looks kinda “goofy” in my opinion. Unfortunately, the fiery Dragon Sword is part of those 95% – and it wouldn’t even have to be :/ When i first came across the Jormag Sword, i was like “woah! why can’t my fiery Dragon sword be like that!?”, since it had the perfect length for me – then i noticed, that it wasn’t the fiery dragon sword itself, but rather the fiery effect that added too much to it’s length. Just as you, i’am going to invest into a firebringer now (it doesn’t sink into the ground, and the “aura on draw” effect is nice) – though unlike you, the color doesn’t really bother me, since it reminds me a bit of a Demon-Zweihander Sword from the Gothic Series

That being said, they probably won’t change the FDS anyway, especially if so many ppl actually like the run-me-through-the-ground effect. At least they (flashy-streetlamp like characters) make it easier to distinguish them from other players in small skirmishes, so that i know who has to go down first – for the sake of my eyes :P

A change like this would need further adjustments. Just think what it would mean for rams. Should a server take a tower by using rams, said rams would continue existing for an hour at least, giving possible Opponents an easy way to get in without the need of spending supply at all. And the worst part: you can’t even prevent it, since there is no way to destroy your own siege weaponary (aside from Golems, of course)

DrEchocide.5217:

Substance E.4852:

Imagine how OP conditions would become if you could hit a player with 5 separate stacks of 15 bleeds each

They have made changes in the past specific for PvP/WvW and PvE seperately.

When was that, and what exactly did they change? (i play gw2 since december 2012, so i wouldn’t know about any changes before that)

Because looking at the forum History, it rather seems like a-net splits the Game into
PvE/WvW and PvP balancingwise, and not into PvP/WvW and PvE. Just look at the Ferocity update, which will make the Condition-meta in WvW smallscale/roaming even more over the top than it already is, just because some PvE'ers were sad that some other PvE'ers wouldn’t want to play (passive-play) tankbuilds in Dungeons (i mean, what the kitten? Why would i care if someone does the content faster than me, especially if i choose to play some error-forgiving tanky build myself?).

Back on topic: While the limitation of Condition Stacks does make sense for play-vs-player encounter, i have to agree that it absolutely kittens Conditionplayers in PvE. Increasing the Count of Stacks per Condition on one Boss wouldn’t be much of a problem performance wise, but wouldn’t really solve the problem as well (50 stacks ob bleeding will still be inflicted within a few seconds). Having 25 Stacks of bleeding (for example) per Player would be better, but it would severely impact on the server’s performance, so it isn’t a solution either.
I really like MrBlueDragons idea, though. Converting the OverTime-Damage of applied conditions into direct damage seems to be a good idea (unless the Boss has condi-removal mechanics, which somehow wouldn’t fit the concept); the damage would have to be strongly reduced though, since Conditionbuilds not only have an above-average Damage/Skilluse ratio (which is usually balanced by the fact that it happens over time), but most of the time also more survivability (see dire gear).

The only “real” weakness i could think about would be the player behind the warrior. You just have to hope that said player uses some totally subpar build (which is hard to do as a Warrior, unless you are a beginner), constantly messes up or just grows overconfident (well, the latter one doesn’t apply to tanky Warrs, since they can be pretty much as careless as they want).

One could of course also see “Warriors” as Warriors weakness :p

ItsAdamParker.5192:

How exactly do you go about inviting an enemy to your party? Enemies have invited me but I never knew how they did it.

• select the enemy that you intend to speak with as your target
• if you are already in a party (or alone), and the enemy is alone: enter /invite into the chat window.
• if you are alone and your enemie is already in a party, try entering /join into the chat window.

Ofc you won’t be able to invite an enemie into a full party, just as you can’t send him a request to join his party if it is already full.

Since there isn’t any way for you to know wether your target already is in a party or not, just try both variants and see which one works.

Well, thieves are kind of mean as well, escpecially if they are the “stay-in-stealth-for-90%-of-the-time-and-press-#1—repeatedly-until-you-hit-something” sort of thieves For example, whenever i encounter some */Dagger Thief for on my Mesmer, i practically heave to rely on my opponent messing up, because they continuesly get free shots at me (my thief was my mainchar for months, so i got a feel for whenever a backstab is coming, but that doesn’t help for longer timespans since they can repeat the process that easily). If i somehow get to punish a thief for spamming #1 in stealth (through DE, which will be nerfed to prevent this -_-), he only has to survive any Burst for 4 seconds until he can easily stealth up again – and even as a glass thief, two dodges are more than enough for that.

Still, i very much agree with you there. Thieves are squishy at least when they trait for so much damage, which means that they can be easily killed if you hit them. But Warriors? The damage is incredible, and a full zerker Warriors still has the (non-stealth-)survivability that other classes get through mixed gear (i always have to grin if i get told by Warriors how squishy they are as zerkers…), just that it still does more damage than the latter. Even if you wear a mix of Soldier, Zerker and Kavalier as a Warrior, you will still do Damage comparable to other classes -even if they are equipped almost exclusively offensive -, all while having >21k HP and >3k armor.

I see you were hit by an Axe/Shield Warror. Let me tell you what an encounter with such a warrior means, if both are full zerkers (one being the warrior, the other being a light armor zerker): The damage by one chain of his axe-AA alone can already quite easily grow over 20k, and it doesn’t take him longer than 3½ Seconds of pressing #1 do this. The only Attack that comes near this DPS-Wise (looking at a greater timespan) would be the thieves backstab, which is considered a burst skill. And mind you, Eviscerate does 125% of a backstabs damage when executed under the same conditions, so your thief would be a onehit most of the time.
Also (regarding the autoattack) it’s important to keep in mind that the first 2 seconds of it’s chain (chop+full double chop) could already kill low-hp classes if it is a zerker-vs-zerker situation; this doesn’t work the other way around

I will leave this Screenshot here – the battlelog isn’t english, but i marked the Warriors attacks (should you not believe me, just type the highlighted attack-names in google translate or something). This screenshot is a bit older (no damage changes to axe since then, though), and the Situation was the following:
- Hostile Warrior, Elementalist, Thief
- Warrior had Swiftness, 3 Stacks Might and Fury
- I was playing a full Zerker-nonPU Mesmer
- the Warrior was the only one hitting me before i got downed

Hmmm, seems to work fine here in the lower EU tiers. There are plenty of duelists in OS whenever i go there

Though, the build diversity doesn’t seem to be that great. If i were to enlist the builds that i almost exclusively encounter there, it would be
- Perplexity Condition Engineer
- Dhuumfire Necromancer
- Dhuumfire Necromancer… with Perplexity !
- Longbow | Sword/Sword Warrior Condibunker
- PU Condition Mesmer
- PU Condition Mesmer… with Perplexity!
- Condition Mesmer (rarer, but still pretty often there)
- P/D Condition Thief
- D/P “Permastealth” Might-stacking Powerthief (wow, finally a Powerbuild)

or less often

- 3 Meditation Guardians
- D/D or Sc/X Elementalists, but they seem much rarer than the others mentioned

I’am always happy if i encounter something that isn’t part of the first list :P

morrolan.9608:

Shotty.1902:

Why is it that no one wants to seem to duel in OS anymore? I really want to dual legit players 1v1. There is not a real sense of 1v1 anywhere else in wvw.

Tried to recently only to be ganked by a group of Riot from BG.

Yeah, that behaviour is certainly annoying. Luckily we got almost always enough duelists within the arena to kill 1-5 trolls, should they ever dare interrupting duels, finishing downed participants, or just attacking people there without mutual agreement. It’s always nice to see how the duelists from two opposing servers then continue to beat the sh*** out of the trolls and avoiding “friendly fire” at the same time, while the Duelists allied to the trolls just stand there without interfering (+1 for “they had it coming” attitude!).

What i gathered from this topic so far…

skyz.7321:

Would like any red banner to provide specific reasoning as to why ONLY Warriors suffer from long and obvious attack animations.

I don’t know how you get the idea; The casting times of Warrior burstskills are quite low, actually, and their Cooldowns are in average even lower than the ones of other classes as well (this goes for every Warrior-Weaponset, and to some extend also for their non-banner utilitys). Not to mention the very good CC that Warriors have access to, which further help them in landing their Bursts.

Earthshaker – Obvious and slow overhead hammer leap

I must agree with you here, this is quite obvious, and should always be evaded/blocked if one has the option.

Kill Shot – 3 Second crouched down charge up animation

It’s 1¾ seconds, not more.

Eviscerate – Super obvious leap

There is nothing “Super obvious” in this Ability. To be “super obvious”, it would have to be used at least at it’s maximum distance, 300 units away from the target. Using this point blank makes it one of the worst telegraphed skills in the game, and the fact that Axe #1 damage over a short time already surpasses some other classes burst skills will increase the chance for your target not to have any dodges left to counter this self-aiming skill. Just to remind you – this skill has a damage modifier of 3.0 on level 3, which is actually more than a sucessfull backstab. In a fight between two very offensive geared players, this skill can very well enable a Warrior to kill any offensive geared Elementalist, Thief, Mesmer, and probably Engineers and Rangers as well in a single Strike, even if they are at full HP (even a Thief can’t do that to the Warrior with backstab).

Pin Down isn’t a Burst skill, or a class mechanic.

You’re right. It’s just either a veeeery usefull skill (For powerbuilds, since it has 3s inmobilize on a low Cooldown) or a downright broken skill (For conditionbuilds).
Having only ¼s Casttime with a projetile, which is so fast that you can’t sidestep it infight (your movement speed gets reduced, remember!), unless the Warrior is >900 Units away from you – of course you could still dodge it instead, if you got the endurance left. This doesn’t really apply to a point-blank shot though. And just look at what this Skill can do on a standard LB | Sw/Sw Conditionbuild: >18,3k bleeding Damage, 4¼ seconds inmobilize, can be traited to give you >10s of Fury as well if you hit something with it, and all this on a ¼s casttime-skill with a 25 (20)s Cooldown. If your opponent doesn’t have any Condiremoval when hit by this, it pretty much counts as a onehit kill – And it’s not rare to hit someone with this while his condiremoval is recharging, since your Longbow gets two 100% Projectile-Combo finisher on it’s Autoattack (when traited, which should be the case anyway), which leads to a kittenload of bleeding stacks through traits and permaburn through F1, forcing the opponent to use his Conditionremoval quite often.

No other class (besides channeling skills like Barrage and Meteor Shower) suffer from long and obvious casting animations.

Again, Warrior bursts-animations aren’t generally longer than the ones from other classes. You should probably try out some other classes, and memorize their Bursts animations – you will see almost all of them are very well telegraphed, even the ones that are much weaker compared to the average Warrior-Burstskill.

Could you please justify why the Warrior receives this treatment and no one else?

Won’t comment any further on this.

Why does Mesmer have no obvious casting animation when they use their class mechanic, clone shatters? Each Shatter should have a different animation and sound.

The only way to land a Shatter instantly is to spawn your clones directly and very quickly ontop of the foe, meaning that you (currently) have to use a combination of telegraphed weaponskills and utilitys. Other than that it’s basically impossible to land a instant (untelegraphed) full shatter against something that has +25% speedbuff and knows how to kite, since the awfully slow clones move in strictly linear way. And Still, a full F1 Shatter by a Berserk Mesmer causes less Damage than a Berserk Warrior hitting with one AA chain of the mainhand-Axe.

Necromancer class mechanic ‘Death Shroud’ has that delicious and tasty Tainted Shackles skill. This skill is instant cast, it ignores block/blind/evade/stealth. It also probably targets through Invulnerability as well. Why does this skill escape the obvious and long casting animation justice?

Look at Riposte. Then at Tainted Shackles. Then right back at Riposte.

I don’t really care about the PvE part, i mainly see this from my standpoint as a duelist/roamer in WvW. And this 10% damage nerf to zerkers strikes me as devastating.

Passive-Play-Conditanks are not only incredible boring (and easy) to play, they are also (in most cases) stunningly superior to any powerbuild they come across. if you’re a tanky Powerbuild user, there is a high chance that your hits won’t even be noticed by a condition-tank opponent (vitality and toughness both counter powerdamage) – unfortunately this doesn’t count for the opposite direction, since a condition tank (dire) will still do insane damage to the powertank.

The Damage/Skilluse ratio (efficience of skills) is also much higher for the condition tank. One Scepter-Rotation from a dhumbfire-necro can hit for something over 7,5k in total (if dhumbfire actually triggers), Pin down can hit for a total of 18355 damage with one use (if specced that way), one use of Riposte can very well hit you for a total of 12672 damage, and Impale will (again in total) hit you with 8640-17280 damage.

All of that while having the same defenses as an equally tanky Powerbuild.

This enables them to play almost fully defensively, since they can lean back and stay on defensive as soon as they managed to land a few lucky hits on their target.The only downside to conditioners is the possibility to remove conditions before their usual lifespan – not that it would be much of a threat to a tanky conditionplayer, since applying conditions tends to be much easier than their removal, and the tankyness will usually mean that tehy can survive long enough to reapply them as well.

The only Way for a Powerbuilduser to kill any halfway-decent Conditiontank is, to spec as offensively as possible while taking as much conditionremoval as possible. You have to get at least to the point, where your Powerdamage leads to a higher average Dmg/skilluse ratio than the conditiondamage of your Condition-using opponent does – how much higher it has to be, obviously depends on how much greater his defense (this means more than the pure stat-differences) is compared to yours.
For most classes this means running zerker-gear at least to some degree, since missing it will usually result in a huge potential damage loss (especially compared to the gain in survivability) – too much in a fight against passive-play-conditiontanks. Of course this varies between different classes: Warriors for example have the highes Base HP (and armor) alongside fairly high damage-modifiers on their Attacks and easy access to perma-Fury – this means that they could easily swap some of their zerker gear for more defensive ones (running part soldier as an example) and still do enough damage to compete well against any Conditiontanks they run across. Now think of a Mesmer fighting a dire-Longbow-Sword/Sword Conditionwarrior. Even if the Mesmer runs a full-zerker set, he still only barely has the damage output to break through his opponents passive defense alone (thanks to the fairly low damage-modifiers). On the other Hand, the warrior could “oneshot” the mesmer by simply pressing #5 on his keyboard while wearing the longbow, if it doesn’t get avoided or removed by a condition-removal.

So even nerfing the overall damage of zerkers by 10% is already a punch in the face of every class, that can’t allow itself to mix it’s gear in response to Conditiontanks (not every Class has perma-Fury to compensate for a lack of precision, to name just one of multiple points), reducing it even further would be a disaster. But it doesn’t stop here – nerfing crit-damage itself will hit every single player relying on it, not just full zerkers.

The only ones not affected by this are Users of Condition-based-builds…