Guild Wars 2

rchu.8945:

thanks for the reply, if I go for the Clerics Exotic crafted set, what jewelry stats should I go for? I also notice how low my precision will be, should my jewelry items be more offense, like berserker stuff?

I imagine zephyr’s boon’s fury buff is doing a lot of heavy lifting on this one.

until you get your boon synergy, double dagger is indeed incredibly squishy.

until you reach lvl 20 you want to put your traits into water so you get perma-regen in water that over-hangs by about 8 seconds once you swap to another attunement.

once you reach 20, you get zephyr’s boon, which speeds up combat and lets you kite well enough to drop the water points until you can reach lvl 25 again.

once you reach this point, and you get toughness gear “Resilient” off the TP, you should feel more durable.

in the mean time, your dagger skills have enough combinations to either cc->burst damage or burst-sprint away from your opponents. (try mixing air-> fire —-> earth->water) … general rule air before fire, earth after fire, water when needed. The early levels really are about feeling out the combos of the weapons themselves before you’re given the boon synergy. It was very intelligent of ANet to do this, so most elementalists don’t end up crutching themselves on it.

The playstyle is very twitchy from my point of view (and I am a very twitchy person)… I sometimes get whiplash trying to move from updraft into burning speed→flame grab.

How do you reconcile the cripple on clone death vs lowered staff cooldowns, especially using a sword where you have sword 3 for a cripple if needed?

What would very much help mesmer is if all the traits that applied things on illusion death also applied them on shatter.

This would fix the biggest fundamental issue i’ve seen with mesmer so far:

we’re balanced around shatter, which requires power.

so we HAVE to have rampager stats if we want a condition build to keep up with everyone else.

I just recently started experimenting on my mesmer, and started using a 30/20/0/20/0 build centered around power and mantra support.

I took the grand master trait that adds a charge to mantras along with the standard mender’s purity and resotrative mantra’s talent.

I then slotted mantra of pain and mantra of restoration (restoration beats ether feast with this talent by a MILE).

Granted, this is NOT a “faux-trifecta” spec where you just spam heals, but what it does is add survivability through healing which also benefits the group.

Specifically, it’s something to use while running around trying to evade aoe or while “regrouping” in explorable modes when you wouldn’t be doing damage anyway, and when you get back into the action, you have a fully charged mantra of pain to unload on the boss.

it’s definitely a “jack of all trades master of none” spec, but seems to me a sensible tradeoff if you want to add survivability and group utility with minimal damage per minute cost.

so you might not heal the player that needs it most if your clones are all up

Except in most cases in which the party NEEDs the heals, your clones are long dead anyway.

It is partially a problem with the community. Instead of making up strategies and builds on their own, a lot of ppl want a ‘perfect rotation/build/cookie-cutters’ strategies despite the fact that trait respec is cheap so you can actually experiment.

Except this is not the case.

Problem One:

Mesmer traits are all over the place and don’t seem to have any apparent synergy beyond a very shallow level compared to other professions such as elementalists. I can only think of a handful of builds with decent synergy, none of them provide condition or healing, the rest involve either stacking glass cannon stats while other profesions can add toughness, vitality, or healing to their mix for the same result, or abusing a fundamentally overpowered or bugged ability/mechanic..

Problem Two:

There is no gear unity in a given profession between most builds.

If you want to move from a power build to a condition one, you have upwards of 20-25g (and since the nerfs and DR to farming, rapidly rising) to invest in exotics off the TP, or dozens of hours to pour into CM or TA to get the condition gear, whereas other games, even big blue’s 10 million player monstrosity, have enough gear unity between specs that you can still test different specs.

Problem 2 is why after each balance patch you see people on profession forums looking for advice on re-rolls, or in the general forums or customer service forums saying they’re leaving and want a refund.

Whether ANet acknowledges it or not, the lack of gear unity coupled with patches which “break” the synergy of favorite builds results in a very long grind to replace gear.. and that’s only if you know what gear you need to get, because nobody wants to invest into gear that may or may not have a viable build.

This is why I always prefer damage or number of target adjustments to duration or fundamental mechanic adjustments, and why most MMO houses only adjust fundamental mechanics in an expansion where yanking someone’s gear out from under them doesn’t feel like complete robbery.

t’s a clone creating, shatter, confusion, CD weapon. It’s what it’s good at.

If only it were good at that, but it’s not. I can get more clones by simply traiting 5 pts into illusions (mandatory for shatter anyway) and using pretty much any other weapon.

Either they need to reduce the chain to 2, or perhaps make the block spawn an illusion when its blind hits.

That’s all fine and good, but I really need more assistance as to where I should be looking to find out where my system deviates from others, because the only thing I’m running are gw2, task manager, and gpuz

I don’t agree that scepter is fine.

I’m not saying it’s weak, per say, but I am going to say it seems to be lacking identity.

confusion images screams “i’m a condition weapon”, while every other attack screams “i’m a power weapon”.

Granted, this is not just an issue with scepter, but with the entire mesmer profession itself (unlike every other condition build I can think of, you also need to stack precision to get mesmer cond builds fully viable?).

My suggestion:

cut the direct damage of 1 by 70%, add a bounce to it, and have it apply either confusion, burning, or bleeding with each bounce.

Are there some tuning settings i’m missing here?

I have a quad core I7 (sandy bridge) oc’d to 4.5 ghz, a gtx670 oc’d by hand by about 17% (it runs in gpuz at around 1246 usually and falls about ~3 fps short of the 680 on heaven benchmarks)

In pretty much all dynamic dragon events there are 50 person zergs, and my fps tanks from 60 (with fps cap) to 20 with severe chop.

I then check my resource monitor and see 100% cpu on all cores, and my video card not even clocking it’s full throughput (hovering in the 950 range).

you have to use stuns and daze, the skritt burglar is immune to snare and immobilize.

for straight-up damage, warrior.

For highest damage potential for minimum personal risk, mesmer (specifically a condition/shatter build (20/20/0/0/30) with carrion gear.

Which servers have high orr activity between 6 pm and 2 am pacific?

I’m growing quite tired of being alone or with 3 people trying to take down the temple events. They just don’t scale down that small.

Elementalist is very, very dependent upon traits to become durable.

Most experienced eles spec heavy into water and arcana, or water and earth with either a smattering of air, earth, or fire.

most eles run some variant of the D/D bunker build (0 or 10)/10/(0 or 10)/30/20 with primary focus on pow/tough/vitality (actual stat priority power, toughness, condition damage)

durability with scholar classes usually doesn’t become apparent to the player until about 30 or 40 when the traits really start to synergize. Until then take it easy and enjoy the ride.

If you want a durable scholar, thoguh mesmer is for you. They can live for freaking ever. If you spec them right they will be able to kill pretty much every champion in the game with minimal tanking stats .. they will take longer to do it though.

All the temples are impossible to complete at this point.

Thanks for FotM and for ignoring what you yourself said on reddit about distributing ascended gear to other aspects of the game ANET, because the dragons are winning now, by a mile.

Agreed, I’ve noticed this.

I’ve started equipping travelers/explorer’s gear and signets.

I broke 25% magic find and am seeing some returns.. but it’s only the same amount I had before the 9/15 patch.

Dyes have gone absolutely through the roof.

Exotics jumped from 1.8g 9/14 to 8g today on the TP.

forget guild wars.. the gorilla in the playground (wow) took 1.5 YEARS to get even close to balance and fairness, especially with rogues, glitches (fear and blink through walls anyone?), and pet classes (aoe).

This game is doing far better in every way (except the pet classes).

Just make the cape something you can hide.. no clipping issue.

projectile reflects would seem to be the way to go.

Speak for yourself i love how tough it is in orr.

It trains you for pvp and makes you better in dungeons.

Learn to use your skills and its a non-issue.

I especially love how my mes (which only recently got its first exotic) is in combat for 20-30 continuous minutes at a time with at least 3 mobs.

They could do something about the continuous burning near the temple of balthazar though.

get them to spread ascended rewards to karma (good ones, not hodge-podge ones they have like the karma exotics) with an RNG chance off chests and people will do these events again.

ANet has been taking their sweet time dealing with the fallout of putting ascended in FOTM only, even with their design lead saying “this was a mistake and they should be obtainable elsewhere in game”.

In the mean time, while they twiddle their thumbs, the game gets turned into a world-of-stormwindcraft clone.

40 people were doing that in your realm?

what is your realm?! on my realm the zone is BARREN

I want to know when ANet will be equalizing rewards to get people out of FOTM and back into the world.

earlier this week I attempted this event multiple times and each time got less than 7 people to participate.

Needless to say the pact morale did not last long.

Carighan.6758:

boroguy.5690:

Not to mention, first the mesmer must successfully land the attack. Then the phantasm must survive long enough to attack. Finally, the phantasm must land the attacks on a target that is in range and not blocking, dodging, or invulnerable. Other professions must only worry about landing the attack, and many of those skills are even more “powerful”.

Apples and Telephones.
Other classes’ attacks don’t cycle every 6 seconds on their own.

I disagree with the idea that phantasms should either. I think they should be decoupled from our illusion counter and vanish after the first attack.

Anyone who knows what they’re doing, any boss who sneezes kills it.

So apparently we’re being “balanced” around the idea that our opponents are too stupid to sneeze in the general direction of our phantasms until 3 of them are up, then leave them there for the duration of a fight.

Even big, stupid dragons who stand around waiting to be killed by the giant asura lasers do enough to kill phantasms.

how can anyone make a pve build without including warden’s feedback?

it’s a massive group utility coupled to the strongest AOE weapon mesmers have in the game, and the projectile reflect in world events beats out any source of damage including 100 blades.

put up that focus wall and watch entire groups of ranged in DE’s just melt themselves (now THAT is LAZY), and in dungeons, between the warden, the focus wall, and feedback you can shut down ranged 75% of the time.

The phantasms should be an elaborate spell effect like elementalist’s dragon’s tooth, and just as vulnerable once summoned to attack. (e.g. not at all)

They should also disappear after connecting their attack, and be de-coupled from our illusion counter.

This seems like the best solution to bring phantasms into line with the devs’ current ‘vision’ of phantasms while removing the triple-penalty of having the summon dodgable, the phantasm killable or its attack also dodgable, and the dodging of the summon also denying us our shatters.

It would also provide more reliable balance numbers.. we would no longer be nerfed based on the upper-bound of having 3 wardens, or 3 zerkers, or 3 duelists up at one time.

I suppose that makes sense.

There is a trait: “Distortion grants reflection”

The only reason I can see for them to change it from distortion to “Blur” is to remove the ability to use sword to reflect projectiles.

Has anyone tested this, though?

is this the build I was reading about a couple days ago that causes things to melt from confusion?

Just a note to all the people still whining…

The 0.25 seconds our red poster Mr. Peters was mentioning was what he adjusted on his INTERNAL BUILD and will be pushing out with the next update.

it does not necessarily mean that it’s live now.

he’s changing the oil on the car, you still have to wait for it to drain and be refilled, if you know what I mean.

So leave it be for a little while.

Yukishiro.8792:

The problem with mesmers for tagging in orr comes when you’re on a server where mobs die within 1 second of spawning. It sounds like you arn’t on one of those servers. If you are mesmer is by far the worst class for tagging. Setting up even a single clone shatter takes a few seconds – you have the cast time of the clone ability, then the clone has to run to the mob and explode.

You can get by with IP if you know where the mobs spawn by just sitting on their spawn point and shattering as soon as they appear but that’s about it. If you have a second or two you can cast something like izerker or iwarden that spawns in melee range then shatter it instantly and that works too but you need a second or two. Same for something like using staff 2.

With the advent of FotM, “tagging in orr” is not a big deal because you don’t get the chance.

I attempted some balthazar temple offensives and ended up losing morale before seeing the hill due to the lack of participation.

The devs say they’ll fix this, but I have yet to see it.

RapidSausage.4620:

plasmacutter.2709:

RapidSausage.4620:

or i can just get 20 dueling with high precision and a GS, spam clones and see the bleeds drain it down, which also works with other mobs

and die due to lacking defense because feedback is down and dodges alone don’t work against the 18k rapid-fire attack it does. (same for the other cd spam builds)

unless you know how to keep it off of you.

I find these golems tend to lock target. I have yet to engage one which did not find me quickly and relentlessly pursue no matter how far back I went or how many times I dodged.

speak for yourself about the shatter builds.

Mine is 20/20/5/20/5 and built for dungeon, solo, and DE.

i don’t die often, ranged rip themselves to pieces on my projectile reflects, and i’m a massive help to my dungeon groups.

warden’s feedback is the reason why I went dom/dueling/inspiration for my mesmer rather than illusions.

I’ve been in DE’s where I put up focus curtain and watched entire packs of ranged kill themselves dead on it.

It makes confusion look utterly pathetic.

RapidSausage.4620:

or i can just get 20 dueling with high precision and a GS, spam clones and see the bleeds drain it down, which also works with other mobs

and die due to lacking defense because feedback is down and dodges alone don’t work against the 18k rapid-fire attack it does. (same for the other cd spam builds)

The answer is that unlike hundred-blades, our phantasms stick around and there can be multiple of them.

I’d rather there be a limit of only one on the field or better yet have them just de-couple them from our clone mechanics, have them spawn, do their thing, and immediately die — as a tradeoff they are immune to damage and targeting (they essentially turn into a spell effect).

The current mechanic where there can be multiple causes the following problems for both opponents and mesmer:
1 – is too punishing to noobs and is useless against any player with 2 brain cells.
2 – the balancing is done based on the upper bound of all 3 illusions being phantasms dishing out their full damage, but the reality is we’re lucky if one stays alive long enough at any time to get its single attack off.

I’d much prefer the alternative I’ve suggested to the current system in which we can be blocked from summoning, the summon can be dodged, and any sneeze causes the summon to die before it unloads.

JonPeters.5630:

Ok so its sounds like you could counter the summon delay by having a subset of traits. So we fixed a bug that lets all those triats work together but that also makes them not able to exploit the delay anymore. Since it seems like they were working and mostly balanced without the delay I am going to go ahead and reduce the delay on this stuff to .25 seconds. I just tested it at 0 seconds and that breaks some other things so I think .25 is the best compromise.

Thankyou Mr. Peters.

Does the zerker have its own in-built attack algorithms, or does it share them with other professions?

If it shares them with other professions I highly suggest de-coupling them.

It’s just begging for any change in one profession to affect others.

oh.. and this…

This is fantastic. Finally mesmers are receiving some well deserved attention to bugs plaguing this class. Thank you very much Mr Peters.

While you’re at it, can you please give some sort of official explanation to the changes made in the Nov 15 patch where now phantasm skills have to land twice to perform its function(on cast, then the attack from the phantasm itself) and we have to hope it survives long enough to do it. Phantasm skills are not powerful enough to deserve so many chances to counter it yet is so important for the mesmer casting it to maintain a decent level of effectiveness.

ANY attack which does not regularly reach 10k does not deserve “special treatment” in which it can be negated multiple times.

100 blades, backstab, etc don’t get this treatment but mesmers do. It’s shocking.

just don’t get moad when you have 3k hp.

I found the warden’s AI to be improved, and the zerker’s to be worse.

Warden, when spawned, will now run with its target if the target happens to be moving, until said target stops, before unloading its aoe.

the zerker, on the other hand, seems to stagger out drunk, remember where it is about a second or two later, then do its thing, if it’s still alive.

Its actual attack seems slightly more reliable, but still sucks royally compared to pre 11/15.

The issue with berzerker is it uses other professions’ attack algorithms.

Whenever they release an update relating to, say, warriors, it messes with zerker.

Until they code the zerker its own attack algorithm instead of shifting it from one profession’s skills to another, it will keep being unintentionally changed.

That said, I think the behavior of zerker has improved this patch in pve, even if it does now behave like dragon’s tooth and take time to introduce it’s 23 relatives before actually doing its job.

I trait GS and focus cooldowns, spam zerker (yes, even the nerfed one) and warden, and shatter very, very often.

Also, I equip everything “of the traveler” or “of the explorer” i can find.

For those who think scepter is garbage, I suggest you pick one up with a sword, and go find a champion inquest golem.

If you time it right you can make due with just that, feedback, and if really necessary decoy, and solo those things in a glass cannon build.

Think EA is bad, the only good grand master trait for mesmer is illusionary persona, and you sacrifice so much of either survivability, group utility, or power to get it that it’s not worth it.

I’m in the same boat as OP, but i’m RTFM and from what i’m seeing it’s important to get the boon stacking traits asap.

Until then, I’m feeling squishy but at least understanding why.

roostapro.9827:

Ele Attunement IS OUR Weapon Swapping, as we are swapping to another element…..

Indeed.

The issue here is you have a bunch of D/D eles in this thread who want to have their cake and eat it too.

This is part of the tradeoff of D/D. if you want to specialize in anti-ranged there are other weapons more viable for that.. in exchange for the perks you lose by losing a dagger or two.

Falunel.7645:

plasmacutter.2709:

Regizer.1763:

I wouldn’t mind built-in out of combat weapon swap but in combat weapon swap would be OP

worse, we would be balanced around that, and instead of having to track 4 bars, we’d be tracking 8.

I will second/third this. My workaround for fights where I know I’ll have to range at some point is to slot Frost Bow. Has fared pretty well against Lupi and others.

Funny you mention this.

My thought on fixing the arcana tree issue would be to bake the cooldown reduction from 20pts in arcana into the profession and instead have arcana’s points invested increase the charges on conjured weapons.

It’d better integrate these into ele builds.

Cosmic Teapot.9162:

Although they may be good ideas, I think you need realize that anet isn’t going to be fundamentally altering the entire trait line at this point. I think the best we can hope for is lingering elements actually working with the attunement specific traits and even that is a long shot.

Anet didn’t have a problem after that statement “fundamentally altering” the mechanics of mesmer illusion generation to make it utterly unreliable and kitten their defensive cooldowns (which rely on summons), or “fundamentally altering” ele playstyle through evasive arcana.

I say they’re blowing smoke when they say this, because their 2-man balance team is so clueless they don’t understand what “fundamental” means.

ATMAvatar.5749:

If they bumped our base HP to 14k many of the glass cannon builds might become viable.

not with them basing ele survivability on water healing, then nerfing healing by vast amounts in pvp.

snizzle.6143:

@ plasmacutter:
i dont understand what you mean with TA gear.
Prec vit cd seems to be the worse combination for an elementalist.
You cant heal that big amount of healf with your tiny heals.
Without power your Crit does realy low damage.
Also your damage come from conditions not form burst and conditions cant crit.

If you realy go for condition damage i would play defenitly an asura with pain inverter.
Also with conditions you dont realy need power. So you can invest in healingpower or vitality.

This is why I’m asking.

I’ve had one D/D suggest pow/vital/healing power

The main thread suggest pow/tough/cond as the priority stats(a stat combo which does not exist in game), then suggest pow/tough/vitality

I’ve had others suggest other combos like one of the karma sets.

So I’m looking for a “best case” setup for cross-game functionality (dungeons, soloing, AND pvp).

Regizer.1763:

I wouldn’t mind built-in out of combat weapon swap but in combat weapon swap would be OP

worse, we would be balanced around that, and instead of having to track 4 bars, we’d be tracking 8.