as an ele I lived longer than everyone in my group all 3 times I did CoE. Honestly ele has it made for alpha. mist form, arcane shield and lightning flash? I used to love getting stuck in the crystals because then I could just tank while he stood in front of me as my party wailed on him.
Every time I see two posts like this disagreeing, I always wish the original posters had their builds in the post as well. This guys’ build works very well for the encounter, and it would be a good learning experience if the build were posted.
Dungeon design in this game is flawed. Its to skewed. You either face melt dungeons or dungeons face melt you.
This, i think, again comes back to traits/skills.
leveled-down 80’s are much better prepared trait-wise than their counterparts who are “even” with the dungeon’s level-rating.
The devs seem to have tuned the dungeons to be interesting for people with 80’s who side-kick down to the dungeon’s level, but that leaves people who are stuck with far fewer trait and skill points, and therefore a far less synergistic toolkit, in a “heap ’o trouble”.
The devs need to do something about this spread, and i’d prefer it not involve heavy-handed nerfs to the dungeons.
2. Agree again.. I say this loads of times, and anyone who has noticed is probably thinking “oh this again….” but, we dont all have access to dungeon expert guilds and friends who play. alot of us are on our own and have to use PuG’s, but that’s a chance to meet new players and some day form such guilds. if we meet on frustrating terms like wiping on the last boss a bunch of times, i see less chance of that happening.
I heartily disagree with this. Sure certain things could use tuning tweaks, but I do NOT want to see mindnumbingly boring zergfest dungeons like WoW. People should be punished and punished HARD for speccing glass cannon and trying to be lone heroes rather than properly adhering to mechanics and prioritizing group synergy and group play. There are some stupid things like RNG 1hko mechanics which should be looked at on an individual case basis, but making dungeons as painfully easy as queensdale veteran mobs is just silly and will bore me to tears.
As for risk/reward, there are two aspects which need to be addressed:
1 – the collective community, especially casuals, should not be punished with zero rewards for incomplete runs because of exploiters. Restore per-boss rewards and impose escalating token-lockouts starting at 1 hour for each incomplete path which are lifted only once the path is complete (the lockouts would be on a per-boss basis.. if you downed 2 bosses on a path you can’t get rewards from them for 1+ hours unless you down the rest of the bosses in that path).
2 – think a better median for dungeons to cut down the risk-penalty vs learning curve is to lower repair costs while in the dungeon and/or make sure the worst you can do is break even. Surely the time-sink and the fact that you didn’t make anything (as opposed to multiple gold loss in extreme cases) should be enough of a “punishment mechanic”
(edited by plasmacutter.2709)
You missed something in your guide that’s pretty major:
“SUPPORT”
You should always think of your utility skills. Many of them will do more damage when used properly than what you could accomplish mindlessly tunneling your target with your normal weapon skills, and in the process they could save the lives of your fellow players.
Rather than focusing on downing your targets, you will often prevail by prioritizing the survival of your team first. Peel nastier mobs off people getting low on HP or endurance, put aegis on people who get caught in aoe, keep maximum uptime on condition removal, etc.
I will be making video guides, the dungeons are actually fine, minus the bugs. It’s how you approach the encounters that makes it easy. I’ll see if I can upload some videos next week. Look forward to this section next week =)
Excellent. I’d rather have people applying knowledge to adapt to this game rather than sticking to their “holy trinity” blinders and leaving in frustration.
The game has a great deal of potential, and everything in dungeons is designed to utterly necessitate team play.
If you don’t play with the welfare of your teammates as your highest priority, even in a “dps” build, your dungeons will be like a long walk through the 9th circle of hell.
“Also, AoEs plus random spikes aren’t very nice… Maybe it’s a learning curve thing.”
I agree on this a bit. There’s a pull in AC story that typifies this. ele + ranger + warrior, all crammed WAY down a narrow hallway that produces a “funnel of death” effect not unlike the battle of agincourt. If you don’t have the right comp to lock down the ele/ranger, you get shredded by overlapping aoes which are impossible to dodge in the narrow space.
In particular, I think spike traps could use a little de-tune OR we need more professions with easy access to “damage mitigation” combo fields ( like the second concept better, it forces team-play). An aoe that nearly one-shots you, applies bleed after to finish the job, and has a radius of 900 is nasty.
Allow me to clarify the intent of the devs here:
There are survivability traits on clothies for a reason. There are support and healing abilities on all toons for a reason.
I guarantee if some of these people traiting glass cannon made one of their major lines toughness and another person traited healing/support, they could tank it and heal. This game favors hybridization and defensive builds MUCH more favorably than games which had the “holy trinity”
I think it needs a little polish: for instance, while i’ve heard clothies can tank in later levels when the traits are open, in early levels when you’re limited to 10 points in a given line, it’s heavy armor or bust. This could use a fix.
Still, you have to get out of the tunnel vision. This game has no such thing as “pure” anything. As such, you have to trait some survivability and bring your own healing and group utility, or you will be a useless corpse most of the time.
A second point:
Professions do matter in this game, and they SHOULD, otherwise you end up with everything as “halo.. now with leveling”. There’s a reason there was a mass exodus from WoW when they introduced “homogenization” in cataclysm.
The major point of an RPG is you have different “classes” of either players or npcs (depending on whether it’s online or not) whose abilities add up synergistically to create a “whole” more powerful than the sum of its parts. If you don’t like this, the FPS genre is “that way”.
(edited by plasmacutter.2709)
I agree, I wish I could recommend for sticky
I think the main issue is that the dungeon designers are trying too hard to make people perform the dungeons within the time frame they think it should take them.
As you can see the result are these current issues with dungeons. What they need to do now is either adjust the HP of certain enemies in dungeons to be lower or adjust the current damage rate certain enemies does.
We all currently agree that enemies in Dungeons have way too many HP to the point it takes too long to kill them and Damage rate is way to high to the point it can kill us in either 3 or 2 hits if you don’t have very high Toughness.
Having both high HP and very high damage rate for all the mobs (both trash, elite, and boss) in dungeons so far has cause all these negative feed back about dungeons and seem to have backfired on the dungeon developers.
They need to lower one of these two in the dungeons because having both of these for the Dungeon enemy mobs so far is the problem about 95% of the forums are complaining about in dungeons.
I disagree on this one, I don’t think having the mobs actually be dangerous (GASP) is a bad thing in dungeons.
I just think the issue here is that scaled-down 80 performs a lot better in 35 dungeons than normal 35’s, and that’s an issue with trait points.
Either they need to put in a mid-tier of difficulty designed for people running the dungeons at 35, or they need to give people access to their full set of traits asap.
I disagree with the approach they’ve taken. I think they should return to per-boss tokens and find some other way to prevent exploits, such as locking you out of tokens until you kill the bosses missing from your last run.
This is far better than diminishing returns to collectively punish everyone else for the exploits of a few.
….Just try ac explore mode with all clothies and see how well things go….
Already done multiple times now, and last time was one of the smoothest groups!
Clothies really have no difference than Heavies, depending on your traits and skills.
Have you seen a Water or Earth attuned Ele before? Specially when they trait into toughness and vit? BAM instant tank! Heck, thats all I start to see now in 5v5s
At level 35? (as opposed to scaled-down 80). I think not.
Maybe with maxed survival traits (30/30) and armor at 80, then scaled down, but not at 35 unless you’re a heavy.
I still don’t understand how people can miss the telegraph for Kholer’s pull after getting caught maybe 1-2 times once he’s alone.
If you’re not confident enough to dodge, bring a stun break so you can break out of the small knockdown at the end of the pull and get away, bring stability so you don’t have to care about dodging, or you can even use a block/aegis to avoid being pulled.
The telegraph is visual.
There are two other foes in the arena, both of which can cause pain to clothies.
Even if not told to focus them down, you still have to deal with them if they decide you look tasty.
In the mean time, the camera distance allowed in this game is rather short and restrictive, meaning focusing on one foe will very likely blind you to others.
“Furthermore, Rytlock is not apologetic because he knows that the ghosts only see the living as invading Charr and fight to their last ghosty breath. "
And what of my character, who is also human? I’m not talking about his reaction to the ghosts, I’m talking about the careful glazing-over of the searing in his story and his complete lack of deference over the genocide of an entire human kingdom given present company.
Then you add the krogan-ite stance his entire race have toward others, but especially humans, and I should have the option to leave him and any other members of his species who believe has he does to his death at the hands of the legions his people have slaughtered.
“Please give me a boss that doesnt telegraph their moves..
(You better not tell me Lt. Kholer from AC EM)”
Why not mention him? There are other examples but this is an especially good one, as you have two adds, either of which might be the center of attention for a given player, so they won’t see the visual cues and suddenly find themselves dead.
(this, of course, would be less of an issue if ANet gave us better control and more flexibility with camera distance)
From the wiki on AC explorable:
“Lieutenant Kohler
This enemy is the bane of unorganised groups. Attempt to pull him away from his lackies by bringing the fight to the lower area, near the chain that deactivates the traps. His grab attack will destroy an entire team and must be dodged at all costs. "
This 1hit-KO’d my 35 mesmer with the max points I can put into inspiration for that level, and was not well broadcast before I ended up on the receiving end. If it’s meant to 1hko you, then it needs to be much more obvious what’s going to happen, and it needs to be audible, as you may have people focusing on the two adds.
If it’s not meant to 1hko you, then the damage needs a nerf so people have a chance to get up and catch their breath, even if they’re wheezing at 10% after.
If you want to punish glass cannon builds that’s one thing, but I traited quite a bit of survivability into my mesmer and honestly did not feel I was given the opportunity to factor skill into the encounter.
“I understand you don’t. But the way they have these dungeons designed it seems like you do. They did a poor job balancing it for everyone.”
I agree with this because in a way you still do.
If you don’t have someone in heavy armor with the build for mitigation and self-healing (a TANK), you will die.
Just try ac explore mode with all clothies and see how well things go.
Still, the playstyle of this game and what is expected in dungeon is very different from others. I think it’s a question of the playerbase adapting, after which the community will develop an experienced core with enough members to teach people who join.
Personally, I stopped doing dungeons because most people I ran into while doing them were dbags. The dungeons are like an antithesis to the rest of the game. You get kicked for watching cutscenes, people leave if they die and to make things worse, without a dungeon finder tool, you spent 30+ minutes just hanging out in a particular zone spamming /map to find a group.
I agree! They state that their design goals is for the game to be fun moment to moment. No waiting around to have fun. Unfourtantely dungeons couldn’t be further from that. A lot of the dungeon design “undoes” the visceral nature of combat because very often the “best” way to do something is to run past it or cheese it somehow.
This is generally because bosses/champion type mobs don’t “broadcast” their power moves well enough to bring a great deal of skill into dungeon play, and I additionally find a great deal of abilities which should be avoidable in theory will fly out so fast you don’t really get a chance to dodge them.
Stupidity should be punished, surely, but people need the chance to react to what’s being thrown at them.
Several things to keep in mind for dungeons from someone only slightly beyond your current situation:
1 – tanking and healing are not there in traditional MMO perspective, but they still exist and are still needed. If you don’t have a tank with the armor and spec for it, you will be splattered by any specials done by “big boss man”.
2 – because threat is not a fixed concept in this game, and because healing is not targeted, group utility and situational awareness take precedence over damage output.
3 – a big priority in these dungeons is teamwork. something I’ve noticed as a noob mistake is people will ignore downed players. Help them rally and have others help you rally while others distract the boss.
4 – bosses have resilience against crowd control, but its not necessarily 100% like in certain other mmos. You can and should use daze/stun etc to interrupt major attacks.
5 – many fights have mechanics which involve creative uses of envrionment in addition to your own skills. If you’re having trouble, you’re probably missing something.
Maybe they wouldn’t have been so “desperate” if the brutality and use of WMD’s by the charr had not convinced them that surrender is not an option.
Werdase, I think you exemplify just why people don’t like to do PUGs.
Agreed. The game’s still relatively new and people have to cut their teeth sooner or later.
You do realise humans got magic and instantly rallied together to steal the charr homelands of ascalon from them for themselves?
I didn’t see humans use WMD’s which indiscriminately:
A – decimated civillian population centers, killing men, women, and children
B – defoliated the land and rendered it unarable for a century
The charr were simply taking back what was theirs, and then the King Adelbern decided that he would childishly never allow the charr to reclaim it by sacrificing his entire nation into an army of ghosts..
The charr impart so much suffering on the monarch and his population that they go mad. Acting like the charr don’t bear the vast majority of the blame here is like ignoring the bullying problem that gave rise to littleton.
And you think charr are bad?
I think the charr of the past are affirmatively responsible for genocide, something their human opponents never resorted to, and this particular charr and any other which remains unapologetic for their mission to “eradicate humans from the face of tyria” are right up there with them.
I’ve noticed some professions tend to have a much heavier impact on group dynamics in fights than others.
Mesmers will make a ranged fight much easier.
Guardians tend to make aoe and hard-hitting melee easiser.
warriors tend to do an excellent job locking down caster types.
I’ll come out and say it… I should have the option once meeting up with eir to ditch the racist charr.
His people nuked ascalon with burning crystals, and he has zero deference to my human toon when it comes to the tragedy surrounding the whole conflict. Personally, I think the charr get what they deserve having to engage in eternal war with the restless spirits of the countless civillians they brutally murdered with WMD’s and the resulting famine, and I should have the option to leave him to his fate and drum up another member to fill his place in the guild.
Mirroring what other people are saying.. mantras miss the mark because they need to be actively charged.
If they operated the same way they do now, but with 4 more seconds on their cooldown, after which they were AUTOMATICALLY charged and ready for use, they would be much more heavily utilized.
As they stand now, mantras are relegated purely to healing and control builds. Even then, I could only see a build with more than 1 mantra being used for dungeon healing and support.
EDIT: I meant ARMORS. My bad.
I prefer human aesthetics but want access to asura cultural armor for looks and charr armor for stats. I should be able to pour a massive amount of time into unlocking this armor if I really want it. It’s not as if it isn’t expensive enough as-is.
I was fighting in the mountains in south-eastern gendarran fields, and the respawn rate is just a “little” too quick here, and by a “little” i mean I spent easily 10 minutes at a time in combat, leaving it only when reaching a fort, and the skill challenges involving veterans actually involved veterans +4 respawns all spamming stun.
Typical combat scenario, engage 2 ettins at once (no other way), kill one in first 10 seconds, as second one reaches critical, the first one respawns, rinse and repeat until forced to retreat halfway across the zone through the other ettins which have respawned behind you.
Uglier combat scenario.. clear out 5 cave spiders, engage veteran, end up killing 10 cave spiders and 3 cave trolls in the 15 minute combat that ensues as a new non-vet respawns easily every 9 seconds.
I somehow think when setting up the server someone goofed on a decimal place in this area.
Warmaster yulia still missing.
Replace mesmer with any other class and you pretty much have the same thing.
Play a mesmer and learn their weaknesses.
remove the root from the sword/pistol build and it nullifies their heavy-hitting #2 attack.
auto-attack the phantasms and the damage becomes pathetic.
use ctrl+t and the clones become useless.
mesmer is only op’d against noobs. If you want an indication of how powerful they actually are, watch them in pve.. they’re either very squishy or take for EVER to kill anything.
I’ve put together a build based on Hocofaisan’s description, and came up with the following:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/en/?fgAQNAR8alwz6pXVzoGZNJipCB3pHQXyNdkKUalUgbXIA;ToAg0CnoQygkAJLSOkkIt+YMC
runes/sigils are of course fungible, but I added a few utility skills to deal with ranged because this build seems to (on paper) have a weakness with ranged.
I’d need to get a feel for the build.. it may be possible to retain the condition resiliency or even enhance it if you go 30 points into might and use MoR as your #6 slot. The question is, can you afford to drop the 10 pts in chaos and inspiriation to pick it up while still being durable enough.
IMHO, they need to decide whether illusions exist purely kittenter fodder, or if they exist as decoys, and then focus on it.
If clones are shatter fodder then allow them to exist independently of a victim, they instead act as a swarm of weaponised mirror images that break easily.
If clones are decoys then make them serve better as such; perhaps have them serve as relays for the mesmer’s spellcasting so that his “spells” appear to come from the clones improving the deception
I like this guy.
I agree with most people here.. with 5 caveats:
1 – getting trapped against water or in an otherwise confined combat arena with more than 1 foe feels like instant death to me, whereas most others can easily withstand focus fire from 3x the number of foes with far less movement.
2 – anything that spams immobilize really hurts. inability to gain distance is a killer.
3 – short leashing ranges suck.. period.
4 – anything with a low aoe cooldown nullifies 20 to 30% of my damage in a greatsword/staff build by killing every single one of my clones, or ignoring nearby clones and chasing me from 1700+ range.
5 – our condition removal phantasm has the dumbest ai ever conceived, and has yet to cure a single condition from me.. i’m still trying to determine the best way to deal with nastier conditions.
No pvp yet.
(edited by plasmacutter.2709)
I’ve been using this skill all day and have yet to have this phantasm remove a single condition from my mesmer in the presence of an enemy unit.
This is really annoying as a clothie doing skill challenges with vets that spam immobilize.
It’s too aggressive on offense and not acting defensively in the slightest.
This skill goes off my bars until it works, or is replaced with the standard “removes 1 condition every x seconds” signet.
(edited by plasmacutter.2709)
Change #1 – Ctrl + t will no longer dependably target the original mesmer.
Nice… so the clones thing is pointless
I agree with most of this thread.
There should have been at least a couple conditions which had specific applications.
I’m reminded of a move from rift which caused people to blow up if they walked. I’d love to see things like this on mesmer. I want that aspect of control on a condition based build.
At the same time, I want the tools for damage based builds to make them feel less “passive-aggressive” in their play-style. I remember greatsword builds used to be like this in beta, but now they’ve watered GS builds down to the point it’s almost pointless.
oh god no… i’d rather have the bugs than have this ALSO be turned into a targeted ability like blink and become utterly useless for what it’s supposed to be — an “oh kitten” gap opener.
You’ll find lots of other engineers in the engineer forum, in the professions section.
Please read the first, pinned topic on the head of this forum and stop trolling. Thank you.
mesmer greatsword: underwhelming, needs help and consistency.
in Suggestions
Posted by: plasmacutter.2709
You know there is section in the forums for mesmer, right? If not, you’ll find it under professions.
And it’s not marked suggestions. This post is a suggestion.
Normalize Cost of 1h vs 2h weapons please, stop punishing dual-wielders?
in Suggestions
Posted by: plasmacutter.2709
When my staff will have two rune/gem slots for upgrades – than its OK.
For now its ok like it is.
A single extra rune is not worth double the cost.
I can see charging 60% or even 65% of the cost of a 2hander for each 1-hander for a total of 120 to 130% karma cost for dual wield, but 200% is beyond the pale I say.
mesmer greatsword: underwhelming, needs help and consistency.
in Suggestions
Posted by: plasmacutter.2709
I have to say it, from an RP and sheer dynamics perspective, I absolutely love the concept of greatsword on mesmer being used to channel energy as a ranged weapon.
This said, I’ve found it terribly underwhelming and lacking in consistency. Is it an aoe weapon or a single target one? If it’s aoe why does it not measure up to staff in EITHER survivability or damage, if it’s single target why does it lack the punch of a sword/pistol or scepter/pistol build while also being less survivable than either? What’s the point of range based modifiers on attack if the clones it produces with the second skill die a horrible death before they can be effective?
I’ve done the research on this, and it seems like ANet devs don’t know what they want greatsword to be for mesmer.
It started out a very coherent weapon, with boosts to damage at range, plenty of skills to keep a single foe there, and a reasonable amount of burst, but balanced by a lack of survivability when attacked by multiple foes or when your cooldowns run out.
Now, it seems GS has been stripped of most of its ability to keep foes at range (meaning its main attack is pretty much permanently neutered in a solo or pvp situation), the changes to blink since its introduction exacerbated this, and the reworking of mind stab into a lower damage aoe has rendered its damage underwhelming.
I now find it the least survivable weapon in the game while only packing slightly more damage than scepter/focus. If I didn’t have a nostromo to aid in my mobility it would be completely untennable.
TLDR:
Mesmer greatsword needs help.
Thoughts:
If it’s to be glass cannon it needs to be the clear winner in single-target damage.
If it’s to be an aoe weapon its remaining attacks need to chain and it needs more survivability.
If it’s to be balanced with other weapons in terms of single target vs aoe it needs both more single-target damage and survivability
(mind stab should hit harder and either the remove the range penalty on the first attack or enhance the ability to retain range and actually preserve clone life such as phase retreat — or having the main attack apply a snare?)
clones which cast spatial surge should spawn and attempt to stay at range.
Personally, I’d love to see this weapon viable as a main-line single target power weapon again, and think it rather sad that theory-crafters are now trying to make conditions based builds on a weapon specifically mentioned in our dominance trait.
(edited by plasmacutter.2709)
I’m adding my affirmative agreement to the original poster’s request, and would like to add another:
the ability to re-arrange weapon skills visually on the bar. I have a nostromo and find it awkward to have my bars presented on the screen in the reverse of what is mapped.
I always laugh when I go from one zone to a neighboring one and it changes from sunny to pitch black. Reminds me of those old mystery science theater episodes and begs a jab at the continuity staff.
Agreed. I think bosses should have superior equippable items, and vets should have an enhanced chance to drop cosmetic and flavor items such as dyes.
mesmer: "slashing blades" - please prevent "movement-cancel" on this
in Suggestions
Posted by: plasmacutter.2709
Either activating slashing blades should prevent you moving (as it makes you invulnerable so you shouldn’t care), or you should be able to move while casting it.
Right now, if you’re strafing while casting this it cancels after the first second and is left uselessly on cooldown.
A thanks in advance from all the main-hand sword mesmers.
Normalize Cost of 1h vs 2h weapons please, stop punishing dual-wielders?
in Suggestions
Posted by: plasmacutter.2709
I’m looking at the weapon vendors, and i’m seeing the same karma costs for one-handed weapons and even offhand only items as for two-handers .
This certainly discourages me from getting used to MH/OH or dual wield with the costs being high enough that a single weapon will put serious hurt on your karma.
I find it considerably unjust charging double to people who happened to (unluckily) choose professions where the most efficient weapons are not two-handed. Then there are professions which make use of weapon-swapping instead of non-weapon-based mechanics which are put at a disadvantage.
just my two copper on this one.