Guild Wars 2

dancingmonkey.4902:

Your making many statements that are contrary to my experience. Do you have any argument to support your declarations? Or even some suggestions for changes you feel would help? Otherwise, your simply complaining, and with out anything that is constructive, your countering your own desire to solve your perceive issue.

As far as your direct comparison to the ele, that is more of an issue with the game design itself and not the engineer as a profession.

I am not going to tell anet how to fix their game unless they pay me. I am not going to tell you how to play because you are walking around with my precursor.

This is just a dissatisfied customer lodging a complaint.

Synosius.9876:

You play in t1, you play by their rules.

Us scrubs feel bad for you, honest ~_^

Yeah now I feel bad about saying that.. so now everyone feels bad.

dancingmonkey.4902:

I am in a large T1 guild and most of my experience differs from yours. I get asked for my mortar water. My pin, when I am not pinned, loves my low cool down EG Fumigate that converts condition to boons. They love my ability to stomp with elixir S.

Maybe you need to educate others about what you can do to aid them. We set an entire mid line group to support the front line and protect the backline.

By the way, why do you assume T8 is full of scrubs? How long were you on a T8 server to make that claim?

Sure, the profession can use some work and benefiting changes, but making your post is such a combative and accusatory manner doesn’t help your case.

Besides, I solo camps faster then any of those other professions, which is benifitial as all get out, and I find dispatching those thieves that try to gank back liners or random trying to get somewhere to be very good at making everyone happy.

I find the engineer to be ideal for roaming thieves and mesmers that give others trouble. I wish I got a title for being such a good destroyer of stealth spammers.

Yeah we can put water on tag but a staff ele does it 10x better. So they take you for fumigate? I am going to stop right there and thank you for the bags. Elixir S stomps really?

As for the stealth killer role you need to spec entirely for it and it is only good for mesmer in keeps. Rangers do that much better with taunt and sickem

There are good roamers in t8 but their experience will be vastly different from mine.

Thing is I can’t educate my commanders in things that aren’t true and I know (and they know) I should login my staff ele.

It is all GWEN in T1/T2. As an engi you can’t get groups or get assigned to stomp duty with the rest of the leather armors. Staff ele and necro wells are just that much better than any thing engies can offer.

It is getting so bad on my server that the comanders will stop the pin and demand/wait for you to login front line or Ele / Necro. Rangers have it just as bad as us.

Mortar is ok but it is clearly not enough to make a dent in the meta.

All I do is WvW I don’t care about anything else. If you are having a different experience you probably aren’t playing top end where efficiency matters. I don’t wanna hear about your scrub experince in t8 where that one time you killed a ranger

I am not sure why anet has designed a game with the worse class shunning even if there is no healers tanks or cc primaries. All they have to do is balance direct damage and they are doing a bad job of it

YB needs to work on their builds. TC is doing the normal pirate ship GWEN and YB getting one pushed over and over. I mean thanks for the bags and enjoy your stay but you have some work to do. I am sure JQ is noticing the same

just playing it straight condi PU (staff scepter torch, dire)

Chaos 368
Illusions 367
Chrono 259

I get all my illusions back to condi bomb twice, reduced skill recharges x2, 45 seconds of stealth by continuum splitting mas invis without veil. The runspeed trait means I can drop travelers and take perplexity

I lose inspiration but gain way more.

the nerf calls are going to be deafening

people don’t like fighting mesmers… never have never will. There are plenty of classes that can blow all their cooldowns and drop a zerker build. Now mesmers in addition to being annoying are dangerous as well.

I don’t like fighting mesmers either on any of my classes so I understand the annoyance.

There is some sort of weird Stockholm syndrome going on with mesmers waiting for the nerf hammer.

There is a memory leak in the client. The client keeps using up memory to the 32 bit limit and hangs or crashes in large scale WVW.

Neurophen.9738:

Carighan.6758:

Caelus.7139:

There wouldn’t be any here, or less in extent, IF THEY ACTUALLY FIXED THE BUGS THEY SAID THEY WERE GONNA FIX.

Do people still believe this?

MMO-forums are always:

• Full of complaints.
• Hostile.
• Accusing the devs of being incompetent.
• Accusing the devs of playing personal favours.
• Talking about how much less of the above there would be if only the devs would for once listen to the obviously much-better-developers players.

Since this happens in any MMO, it’s probably safe to assume that this is an inherent “feature” of the community drawn to such games, and can be ~safely ignored.

I worked in console games for 10 years. It was fun and I was convinced I was a good programmer. It was only after leaving games I realized how little I knew about testing and large scale software design.

There will always be bugs, but the frequent regressions seen in many MMOs simply arnt necessary. This is entirely due to the development culture in most games studios. The main anti-patterns I’ve seen are:

1. No code reviews
2. No (or inadiquate) unit or integration testing, even if you wanted it there would be no management buy in.
3. No Presubmit checks
4. No proper planning (every major feature ought to have a design doc and a design review)
5. Massive overreliance on minimum wage manual testers
6. In some studios the engineering department can’t push back on obviously bad design decisions.
7. Low status job with bad hours and poor pay in comparison to what you can get elsewhere for doing an easier programming job

I wouldn’t characterise game devs as incompetent, rather over worked and naieve. This includes my younger self and many friends who were in the industry at the time.

One thing you forgot to mention: typically the talent accociated with creating and coding the game are all gone on to other projects shortly after GA. This game has been in the hands of software sustaining for a couple of years now. These are definitely second stringers in general and especially in this game. Whomever has been coding the Mesmer fixes is in my professional opinion is incompetent.

The way this is going there are going to be three mesmers left running hiptserupt (hipster-interrupt) while getting owned by up level thieves.

Anet cares about keeping the dollars rolling. In order to do this they need to keep as many people happy and playing the game as they can. If there is an obviously OP class setup it will kitten off the other 80% and bore the 20% playing the OP class.

An example is Archers in DAOC. At release archers were rediculously OP: one shot kills from stealth at max range. They were killing RvR participation and kittening off everyone else. The archers were one-shoting everything and it was boring. What the devs did was nerf Archers so hard they were unplayable for an entire year. It probably saved the game.

If you are playing an OP spec enjoy it while you can because you are heading for a nerf.

Guardians make the best commanders and warriors are ok. Everything else is a poor second. Mesmers are worse than poor if they are stealthing or blinking around.

I cannot get my Mesmer though a choke in T1 that all the heavys roll through np. All she is good for is capping BL.

The worst commanders I have seen are all mesmers and thieves.

Maybe JQ should have done something else at SEA other than roll TCBL and sing kumbaya with BG in garrison? Maybe something like hitting BG?

The way I see it is that BG has been driving this from the start: a hard 2vs1 on TC to eliminate them early and then strategic help to TC to keep JQ down.

JQ has been played from the start. If you really hate BG so much then prove it next time.

Pyroathiest.4168:

quercus.9261:

Go on the thief boards and ask thieves what kind of warriors they fear and it is shield axe for stun/evis.

It’s because of statements like this that I just have a hard time taking anything you say seriously. Thieves and mesmers both have loads of easily accessible stunbreakers. Thieves also have a ton of blind application. No good thief or mesmer will get hit with your shield stun. If they do, they’ll break it and dodge your eviscerate.

Basically, shield/axe is a noob-stomper build. You’ll destroy people that aren’t good enough to actually dodge things, but anyone that is decent at dodging will be untouchable.

Again with the one on one. In large scale WvW fights people flow
like rivers . You don’t look at individual people you look at the flow and attack the stream and cut off the back line. I guarantee that you are not looking at skills. In fact this is the reason why Mesmer interrupt builds are never going to be anything but dueling specs in WvW. If you are not saving your dodges for avoiding the hammer train then you will likely die.

There has only been one reply on this thread that even remotely seems to understand how WvW works and it wasn’t by you.

Pyroathiest.4168:

quercus.9261:

The point being that on the most successful WvW servers mesmers and thieves are non-factors.

That’s a bit odd to me. In my experience mesmers are continually in short supply. Nobody plays them, and everyone needs them.

quercus.9261:

Umm there are no reflects because the JQ/BG hammer trains run retaliation only. What the EU guilds have been doing to beat the hammer meta is piercing projectiles and ranged kiting. I have been trying it and it is very effective vs clumped melee.

Running with no reflects whatsoever is rather unique, and quite foolish. Every competent group I’ve seen has several methods of providing reflects when they engage, as reflects instantly nullify many methods of high damage from range.

quercus.9261:

And yes whenever I see a Mesmer I literally just stand there and shoot clones and phantasms and maybe dodge a zerker. I am not mocking mesmers I am kittened off that my Mesmer is basically useless in T1 WvW.

You keep saying things like this that make no sense. On the one hand, you’re always talking about how you only do zerg combat, and then on the other hand you talk about times where you have the leisure to shoot clones and phantasms…which is most definitely not zerg combat.

I’ll assume that you’re just lying about only doing zerg combat. If you actually fight any skilled mesmer, you will get destroyed. If they’re PU condie, you’ll be able to escape if you’re good enough. If shatter or phantasm, not so much. No highly skilled mesmer would lose to a warrior, let alone a warrior using such a silly build as axe/shield+rifle.

Yes if I fought a Mesmer or pretty much anyone one on one I would lose with a warrior stances build. The thing with stances is that they are a force multiplier in that they are as good against 100 people as they are solo. The whole point of this was to display the fact that warrior have superior active defences in that I can crowd-surf a 50 man Zerg.

On occasion I have split up say in ruins to get bloodlust or whatever and mesmers are the least of my concerns. Normally they run in stealth groups and I il say once again: I just stand there and shoot clones and volley any stealthier that pops. Go on the thief boards and ask thieves what kind of warriors they fear and it is shield axe for stun/evis. I do just fine and stealth there are only dangerous if they outnumber.

I never run alone but you seem to think only in those terms. One on one is completely irrelevant to winning the WvW tournament

I don’t know why I am being so polite to you considering you have called me a liar. My warriors name Sajib on TC and I usually run with HEL or one of the pugmanders in Sea or early Eu times slots. TC is currently doing extremely well and leading JQ and I am doing my part.

Pyroathiest.4168:

quercus.9261:

The funny thing is he is traited rifle too. This char kills more stealthers with kill shot and volley in a group than any of my other L80. Channeled attacks own thieves. Mesmers are super easy I just shoot the clones and the attacks pierce right through to the Mesmer.

And no I don’t run him solo he is a Zerg spec only. This game isn’t played solo. If I need to scout I have a thief and a Mesmer.

Honestly, that’s pretty cute. There’s enough projectile reflects going around in any competent group that the only thing you’ll be doing with rifle is killing yourself.

Additionally, saying that mesmers are easy because you just shoot the clones immediately tells us that you run him outside of zergs…because clones don’t survive in zergs.

Umm there are no reflects because the JQ/BG hammer trains run retaliation only. What the EU guilds have been doing to beat the hammer meta is piercing projectiles and ranged kiting. I have been trying it and it is very effective vs clumped melee.

And yes whenever I see a Mesmer I literally just stand there and shoot clones and phantasms and maybe dodge a zerker. I am not mocking mesmers I am kittened off that my Mesmer is basically useless in T1 WvW.

I know how mesmers work and I have run a PU condi build. What you may not be aware of is how weak sauce it is from a warrior perspective.

Ptolemy.5086:

Pyroathiest.4168:

quercus.9261:

The funny thing is he is traited rifle too. This char kills more stealthers with kill shot and volley in a group than any of my other L80. Channeled attacks own thieves. Mesmers are super easy I just shoot the clones and the attacks pierce right through to the Mesmer.

And no I don’t run him solo he is a Zerg spec only. This game isn’t played solo. If I need to scout I have a thief and a Mesmer.

Honestly, that’s pretty cute. There’s enough projectile reflects going around in any competent group that the only thing you’ll be doing with rifle is killing yourself.

Additionally, saying that mesmers are easy because you just shoot the clones immediately tells us that you run him outside of zergs…because clones don’t survive in zergs.

Please please kill my clones. I have 1 up every time i dodge. I love people killing my clones and get conditions. BTW when invis i have aegis ie no DMG to me. That guy is an idiot who kill few noobs and now think he is god of WvW

Nice

FYI this lame warrior build helped defend a massive double team on TC garrison by JQ and BG followed by taking a Fully upgrade hills from JQ this morning. Commander put out a call for thieves in mumble on a queued map and got two names. Later we managed to get a few people to login mesmers so that we could get four to portal omegas to Hills.

The point being that on the most successful WvW servers mesmers and thieves are non-factors.

I am only telling you what works in T1 but you can call me a noob if you want.

The funny thing is he is traited rifle too. This char kills more stealthers with kill shot and volley in a group than any of my other L80. Channeled attacks own thieves. Mesmers are super easy I just shoot the clones and the attacks pierce right through to the Mesmer.

And no I don’t run him solo he is a Zerg spec only. This game isn’t played solo. If I need to scout I have a thief and a Mesmer.

Ptolemy.5086:

quercus.9261:

I know that a warrior has much better active defences than a Mesmer. My warrior runs a complete zerker/stances build – 2 ignore pain, zerker stance, 2 balanced stance, shield stance, defiant stance for heals. He basically crowd-surfs WvW zergs running full zerker and AA axe for 4k.

I was literally farming the JQ Zerg on their BL not 30 min ago with half their numbers with this build. My Mesmer would drop instantly especially if I ran zerker.

That is so funny. Zerk war in WVW with Axe. Any half decent thief or mesmer would love your bags.

I know that a warrior has much better active defences than a Mesmer. My warrior runs a complete zerker/stances build – 2 ignore pain, zerker stance, 2 balanced stance, shield stance, defiant stance for heals. He basically crowd-surfs WvW zergs running full zerker and AA axe for 4k.

I was literally farming the JQ Zerg on their BL not 30 min ago with half their numbers with this build. My Mesmer would drop instantly especially if I ran zerker.

Mesmers are tough to level but it gets easier at 40. Go 20 in dueling and get clone on dodge when you can.

Warriors who don’t think they are OP should play other classes more. I play my warrior exclusively now in WvW. None of my other 80s are even close.

TC and any kind of big three way fight. Everyone will complain at once. I see skill lag mainly and banners seem to be worse. Sometime it clears after a few seconds sometimes you get stuck and can’t even auto attack and have to log.

The problem I have with the interrupt builds is that they are great 1vs1 or focusing down a single target with a group. As soon as you get multiple attackers you are toast.

All these interrupt skills should be doing aoe damage if you are giving up all stealth and most of you phant/clone production.

As for thieves: my interrupt builds are the only reliable way to take down a (solo) d/p thief and I can usually drop them very quickly.

Charming Rogue.8071:

How does this build work in big zerg fights? Somehow it seems like it’s impossible to tag a variety of enemies for loot bags (except for Chaos Storm, which has a very long cd). This is also a very important aspect of WvW. :P

It doesn’t

Running tonight on a staff build on TC against JQ map blobs. Kept getting downed, clones die instantly, conditions cleared instantly, just a rally bot. I actually rage quit and logged my warrior.

Honestly I have been wondering the same thing. I might just try full PVT, dual swords, healing mantras and run veil, stability and condi clear mantra. Stick right on the commander like a melee.

Edit: tried it don’t do this

I was trying a staff chaos glamor/CI build yesterday just due to this thread. I am always trying new builds and I haven’t run staff in a while. I found a JQ guardian after a wipe at Bay and was chasing him around with three staff clones. I was hitting him with WoC for 74 damage. Needless to say his health bar wasn’t moving. My shout-heals warrior does literally an order of magnitude more damage and he aoe heals and cleanses.

CI on chaos storm/focus pull is fun though in a group.

You wrote a lot of words and some of them were right.

I haven’t seen a staff Mesmer in T1 in about a month. There is a reason for that. There aren’t a lot of mesmers but they are all GS and sw/x

The melee train don’t care about your buffs when they are running 20 stacks of might and fury already. They don’t care about you bleeds they get cleansed instantly. Those warriors heal 400 hp/tick which is more than staff hits for. The melee train don’t want your chaos fields they want water and fire.

I like the idea of staff but the actuality leaves it completely on the sidelines.

sminkiottone.6972:

quercus.9261:

Jake.5017:

I main a mesmer and I completely annihilate people. especially warriors they stand no chance lol

I hope you are a time traveller and this is a post from the future.

If not honestly post your build and tips

I’m no expert with mesmer so there will be better build/tips, but with this one I rarely have any problem 1vs1 :

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vgAQNAR8flsnpMtNqxNNcrNig6h2ldfHJFtWqVShtdhA-zUCBYLCyEEw0HBK5pIaslhFRjVtATVSQWZKp+EFRrmUAjKMC-w

This is a standard shatter build, as soon as you understand the concept of shattering it will rocks a lot, against power based specs or 1vs2 i usually prefer portal instead of arcane thievery to confuse my enemys even more.

You always need to pay attention on where are your illusions/you and your target is, there was a video on this forum explaining everything important for shatter mesmer, maybe someone will find it.

The mesmer as a great survivalability even in serker builds, the important thing is to dodge/daze/portal/stealth at the right time, and of course burst in the right way.

Or a dire armor + perplexity is alway good against noobs.

Well thanks for answering

FYI a WvW warrior can eat a full zerker shatter and still be at %60 health if he has at least 2800 def (and they all do). And that is only if he is a noob because when I see a mesmer with swords running at me on my warrior I just IP stance and don’t take any damage at all. Now your glass mesmer is sitting there with everything on cooldown.

The best approach is PU/power and a sword/torch burst/shatter and then go stealth, dps range rinse repeat. Eventually the warrior will get to half and run away.

of course this is all 1vs1 which is kinda pointless and none of this works in zerg where mesmers are veilbots

Jake.5017:

I main a mesmer and I completely annihilate people. especially warriors they stand no chance lol

I hope you are a time traveller and this is a post from the future.

If not honestly post your build and tips

A power GS build isn’t going to hurt a roaming warrior build. The best you can do is PU condi or power and chip away at them. Best case scenario they run. Worse case they lock you down.

Any warrior roamer with stacks just don’t even bother.

Yeah I know the feeling. It is not just you. I play my under geared shout heals warrior to help the home side these days.

I agree with one thing the OP said: mesmers are useless in the WvW hammer train meta. The only build that can even scratch the heavies is full zerker/mantras but that build can’t survive at all.

this trait isn’t going to be that good. Won’t work on thieves == crap

My dual axe warrior gets high speed blender mode however

I admit it I LOLed. I am a bad person

Putin is pretty busy these days but Bush Jr might be looking for a gig

D/P 30 SA builds are broken in WvW.. the thieves know it. I won’t play it on my thief and I main a PU mesmer for the most part.

D/D thieves are ok, P/D condi aren’t terrible, SW/P builds are reasonable but D/P needs a nerf on stacking stealth by leaping through blind fields.

Every time a commander is killed it should spawn a ore node in the shape of a gravestone

Rangers are good 1vs1. They don’t zerg well. Pets suck in zergs and Rangers are balanced for pets.

I have some of the same issues with my Mesmer and phantasms. At least stealth works against a whole zerg.

I hit them with my hammer, they hit me back with their hammer, everyone is a heavy wailing away with a hammer. Every time I die it is six guys with hammers and maybe a meteor shower. It has been weeks since I got hit with a mind wrack or even a backstab. I see a blurred frenzy or hip shot on my log and I get all nostalgic.

I am playing a shout heals hammer warrior because you are either on the hammer train or under it.

I watched the video and attempted to recreate it forensically. I think it is a dire 0 10 15 30 15 build.. Fast hands healing shouts no CI traited war horn. It actually kicks butt

wyther.8372:

Buzzcrave.6197:

People should stop relying on stats, this is a game that have an active combat mechanics. No sane person will stand toe to toe with a war and just auto attack and click skill. If that is how you play, then this game is not for you. Its pointless to have the best stats in the game if you don’t even know how to play the game.

Active gameplay>passive stats.

Fix the immunities and skills of other classes and they wouldn’t stand toe to toe. However, right now, there isn’t much choice, our warriors move faster, cover more ground, and are mostly immune to CC and has CC that blows past immunities of many classes/builds. I have an 80 of every class, and by far warrior is the easiest to play and win on in WvW. Now does he have the usefulness in every fight or scenario as some of the other classes, no, he doesn’t. But for what we have, we don’t give up much at all.

This. of all my 80s my warrior is by far my most effective char both WvW and pve. Right now I am running a kitten axes / rifle zerker build and it is still better. Dogged march, cleansing ire, Mellandru’s and lemongrass and spec anything else you want.

In WVW d/d thieves are pretty much extinct. It is all d/p perma stealth cheese.

Against these guys I am finding a straight up zerker power mantras interrupt build GS/S/S effective. You can blow them up within seconds.

Against a d/d build you would be dirt napping eating 12k bs but it owns d/p SA builds

In WvW staff isn’t great. The weapon is too slow. In a power it does crap damage. In a condi build it is ok especially if you can get burning to 2sec from the default one sec. This gives 3x staff clones constant burning on a target.

It is ok for trying to survive 1vsX but it won’t kill any one and they just run away.

Yeah I took it to EOTM and hit some thief for 5k. Working as intended

In the LA knight events I respected to a 30 30 0 10 0 zerker mantras damage build. With the 4% mantras trait, food, ascended zerker weaps and trinkets, and the scarlet potions I am hitting 5k + halting strikes on trash mobs.

Anyone see this before? Damage on the tooltip says 745 or so.

This sucks as a Mesmer. You have to go GS and just auto attack. Mirror blade is a projectile and will apply combo finishers to yourself. Clones stack bleeds and zerker pets stack bleeds and cripple. The only weapon that doesn’t apply conditions and doesn’t produce clones is GS auto attack.

Dual.8953:

quercus.9261:

It is hilarious to see thieves effect on the game in WvW. They are absolutely apex predators. You can tell by the response of the bunch of mammals behind the keyboards: defensive herding just like a pack of buffalo.

Are you really saying zergs exist because of thieves? Is that really your arguement?
These are the reasons Zerging is a thing in WvW.
1) Capturing most objectives within minutes.
2) Big rewards for little effort.
3) The enemy zergs.
4) AoE damage can be mitigated by stacking.
5) Pugs are naturally drawn towards Commanders.

In addition, there are a wide variety of classes that roam regularly aside from Thieves. And better yet, almost all of them save for maybe Ranger can zerg well too. On top of that Eles and Mesmer both have a massive effect on their zergs, and they’re considered decent and great roamers respectively.
Lastly, this isn’t a WvW debate. This is strictly about SPvP and TPvP.

I’m gunna answer anyways because I am a rebel

Yes I ascribe all the herding behaviours in WvW to the threat of unseen apex predators. There are lots of parallels: warriors and guardians as bull elephants guarding the herd, up levels as young animals and preferred targets, thieves as unseen lions lurking in the grass.

They don’t need to be out there just the threat of the unseen is enough. These are ancient fears and ancient behaviours. Why do you think thieves are hated so much?

It is hilarious to see thieves effect on the game in WvW. They are absolutely apex predators. You can tell by the response of the bunch of mammals behind the keyboards: defensive herding just like a pack of buffalo.

yeah what is the deal. I am a WvW player and I have never been in a dungeon. I do the LA events and always end up in an overflow. I finally get a good overflow this morning and we kill the knights, kill the boss with lots of time to spare. No loots *3 on knights and a bunch of greens for the boss.

I thought being a carebear would be a little more lucrative.