Guild Wars 2

This thread is probably going to get deleted.

But, anyway, we don’t know how old the leaker’s info is. Some things (expansion location) aren’t likely to change during development, but others are. Like specialisation weapons. Remember the leaked Elementalist sword spec?

You can hide your head in the sand all you like, it doesn’t make you correct.

Forum bug fifteen characters.

I don’t know how many times we have to remind you that nobody cares about an artificial testing scenario that plays to all of our strengths and invalidates all of our weaknesses. Stop posting golem parses as if they mean anything.

It’s probably accurate to say that the downed state is irrelevant in instanced group PvE. Especially with the level of healing that Druids put out right now, getting downed means you probably failed a fight mechanic.

But there’s PvE other than instanced groups. Many of the HoT events feature stunlocking and persistent ground AoEs that deal a significant amount of damage. The clearest example is probably this: If I get downed in the Wyvern Matriach fight on my Thief, I can get out of the fire and channel 4 and maybe get revived. If I get downed in the same fight on my Mesmer, hitting 2 pretty just dumps you in a different part of the fire.

So, whatever. I won’t lose sleep if our downed skills never get touched. There are certainly much higher priorities for the Mesmer class. But if something were done to make our downed 2 better, that’d be nice.

Nope, still Zerker for most stuff. Only exception is raids.

Clearly, it wasn’t obvious enough.

Go play The Secret World’s investigation missions if you want to know what applying critical thinking to a puzzle looks like. This is just plain and simple lack of clarity.

Ithilwen.1529:

I don’t see a melee weapon working very well. Sword / Shield works well enough but it’s just not, “Mesmerish,” you know? Beside that, our survival in extended melee is questionable at best and our burst isn’t enough to do a quick assassination and bail.

Yes, this is a serious problem with a new melee-range weapon, even if I do think it’s likely we get one of those for the next Elite. Shield is almost essential now for making Mesmer work in melee range. And a new melee MH weapon would mean we don’t get access to Blurred Frenzy either.

So a hypothetical new melee MH weapon would have to be at least as defensive as those two weapons to be viable, unless the new Elite’s twist on our class mechanic provides enough defensive power by itself to allow our new MH weapon to do more offensive stuff. Which, if that happens… Well, I’d be tempted to call it overpowered, but DH exists, so maybe it isn’t.

I mean, in PvP the stealth on Downed #2 actually is really good.

The only problem I have with it is that, unlike Thief Downed #2, it’s totally random. Which isn’t a big problem in PvP but makes the skill essentially useless in PvE, thanks to ANet’s overreliance on persistent damaging ground effects to create fake difficulty.

Phantasm attacks do a ton of damage, of course they’d benefit from receiving our Might stacks. I don’t know what point you’re trying to make.

Working twice as hard to get half the results is just bad design no matter how you justify it. ¯\_(?)_/¯

Break the mold and give us a main-hand Torch!

Mesmer could do a lot of cool things with MH Pistol, but the fact is that we’ve already got a lot of single-target ranged weapons to choose from. What we lack is a solid melee alternative to the Sword, especially when you consider that it’s literally the only melee weapon we have at all. (Although, granted, Staff AA is more effective the closer you are to your target.)

So, I’d really like to see some kind of melee main-hand for our new Elite spec. It doesn’t even have to be a traditional melee weapon, and in fact I’d love it if we got something off-beat like the ranged Hammer for Revenants.

A main-hand Focus weapon that punches enemies with magic would be a cool way to go. Or a main-hand Torch.

That being said, I think a lot of folks will feel slightly cheated to get an Elite Spec that doesn’t come with a new weapon phantasm… So I would expect to get either a 2H weapon or another off-hand weapon.

Black Powder + Bounding Dodge lets you spam Sneak Attack and rack up a lot of Bleeding stacks that way. Or just directly spam conditions via Lotus Training.

On top of that, Impairing Daggers or Needle Trap can add extra non-Venom conditions as well.

Honestly, as annoying as it would be for ANet to “fix” our class mechanic that way… I’d take it.

(I suspect changing the rules about how Phantasms despawn and choose targets would be too large of an undertaking, from a QA perspective if not an engineering one, to ever realistically expect it to happen, either as a trait or a baseline effect. Hence why I like to make suggestions that leave Phantasms mostly as they are now and just move their damage around instead.)

I don’t know if we need to share boons, necessarily, though that wouldn’t hurt. The bigger issue seems to be the anti-synergy of traits that only the Mesmer but not Illusions. Like Compounding Power and Danger Time, for instance. We don’t have much access to damage increasing traits, compared to other classes, and most of the ones we have are more restrictive in what skills they apply to.

But, I think I’ve said this before, I don’t think that lack of raw DPS per se is what holds Mesmer back, at least in PvE. I feel more aggrieved about all the fight mechanics that seem precisely calibrated to kitten over our ability to contribute what little DPS we can provide.

What I definitely have said before is that more of the damage we do have needs to move off Phantasms and directly onto our weapon skills. It’s a two-birds-one-stone solution, IMO. Mechanics that punish illusions get less punishing and the inconsistent application of damage buffs to Phantasms becomes less of a deal. Three birds, maybe, if you consider that our ability to camp stealth while letting AIs deal all our damage for us is one of the excuses salty PvP players use for constantly crying nerf.

Are you raiding at all? I believe the standard raid setup for Chronotank is a Commander’s/Berserker’s blend. Metabattle says Commander’s weapons, but Berserker’s weapons should be fine if you substitute one of your other items for Commander’s.

However, if you are raiding, you probably shouldn’t bother crafting anything other than a Shield (or just complete Horologicus), a pair of Swords, and a Focus.

Outside of raids, pretty much just decide whether you’re doing Power or Condi. Get Berserker’s for Power, Viper’s or Sinister for Condi.

Yeah, Shield is great for two reasons: Alacrity and Quickness in organised PvE, and Blocks and projectile destruction for PvP/WvW and open world. It’ll be tough to find a new mechanic or weapon that completely outpaces it in all game modes. But it’s entirely possible that a new elite spec could bring a mechanic or weapon that equals or betters the Shield in some situations. And, indeed, that’s exactly what I’d hope for out of a second elite spec.

Obtena.7952:

And as usual, that’s a pretty irrelevant point, for a whole bunch of reasons, most notably that Anet doesn’t balance classes based on other classes performance.

That’s literally what balance is. So you’re saying that ANet doesn’t do balance. Which I think might be the one thing we’re all in agreement on.

Well, there’s also the bigger issue that DPS per se isn’t the problem with Mesmer so much as the relatively long DPS ramp-up time and the sharp trough our DPS falls into when faced with multiple targets, both of which are tied to the twin facts that:

• Most of our damage comes from Phantasms
• Phantasms disappear when their original target dies

We can parse alright enough damage when we’re up against a single target that takes more than 20 seconds to kill, but ultimately that’s not a situation that occurs in many places in the game.

Diovid.9506:

Many of the corsairs who inhabited the island chain before the peninsula rose again were subsumed by the dragon’s power, twisted by its breath, and enslaved to its will. Ships with black sails, built from seized corsair vessels, sail along the Strait of Malchor, west of Orr. These vessels surround the Fire Islands, manned by undead minions of the dragon that fear neither fire nor sea.

That seems like a conclusive answer, then. Zhaitan made a bunch of Risen there, but then had them sail elsewhere for things like the attack on Lion’s Arch.

MesmerizingQuaggan.9124:

So, if i wanted to go back to pistol, do you think it would be a good idea to keep my illusions trait (for shatter stuff) or should I swap it to dueling (for the bleeding)? I’m keeping chrono and domination no matter what.

In that case, stick with Illusions. The Bleeding from the Pistol trait really isn’t that much damage unless you’re going for a full-on condi build. More shatters and more phantasms will serve you better.

So, PvE meaning open world or meaning fractals/raids? For organised group content, you simply can’t skip the Shield’s Quickness generation (and, to a less extent, Alacrity).

But there’s no reason you can’t go with /P + /Sh for open world stuff instead of the traditional GS + Sw/Sh. You may want to use Scepter as your main-hand if you do, so you have a ranged option. Sc/P + Sw/Sh is probably a good set to use.

Something like this, which I’ve just thrown together without doing much optimisation on: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQRAra8encfClphtfCWoBEgilcjqMAStWr+Vn1bF92KpcA-TxREABPp8DgnAwhKBXU9H53f4N9CEcSAAA-e

(Doing that made me wish Danger Time applied to illusions. It might be less of a trash-tier trait if it did.)

It’s literally impossible to fail the instance right now (likely a bug that will get fixed, but still), so it’s not about difficult or not difficult. It’s about story instance design that consistently works against Mesmer mechanics.

Doing a condi-heavy instance on Necro is almost cheating. :P

ErebusVindictus.6514:

My question is: why not just change it for shadow shot and leave it the same for the others?

Or make it a 100% chance but it only applies to autoattacks?

Mursaat——→Exalted———→ Glint’s Egg

The Exalted were humans who were taught how to preserve themselves in living armour by the Forgotten. No Mursaat connection there, actually, despite the superficial similarities.

Yup.

/15 characters

Frenzify.6832:

I’d rather always have the map show 100%, and it just allows you to repeat hearts, if you want, rather than having it reset it to 87% and just being a nightmare for people with OCD.

Right??? That’s the logical way to do it.

If Fay is anything like me, Mesmer was the first character he clicked with enough to take to 80 and then he just never bothered to go back and redo map completion on the others.

So, you know what skill is surprisingly good in that egg chamber fight? Phantasmal Disenchanter. Seriously. Even in the worst case scenario (one bounce, no Alacrity or CS, no Chronophantasma), you get ~4 condi cleanses per cast on a 16 second cooldown. That’s nice to have in your pocket when you get slapped with a dozen Burning stacks plus cover conditions, and for once the enclosed shape of the arena makes the bounce mechanic almost reliable.

draxynnic.3719:

I don’t think there’s anything in the tablets that mean that the mursaat were the good guys, certainly not at the time of Prophecies. In Prophecies, we see them megalomaniacally trying to take over the world. In the final tablet, we see them… megalomaniacally declaring that one day the world would be theirs.

On the other hand, the hints that the mursaat weren’t always the bad guys were there as soon as we knew there was an alliance among the elder races. Yes, they betrayed and abandoned their allies… but before then, they were part of the alliance, and in fact the strongest fighters in the alliance. Why did they betray their former allies, go to war with the Seers, and abandon Tyria? Well, now we know they’re side of the story – from their perspective, they were the ones that were betrayed and abandoned.

This doesn’t mean that they’re suddenly the good guys. It just means that they have a backstory to why they went bad.

Yes, this is it exactly. We get a sympathetic retelling of ancient events, written by either the Mursaat or the White Mantle for self-serving reasons. The author’s biases show pretty clearly and run counter to the story we’re more familiar with, but nothing in the tablets actually contradict existing events.

mexay.3902:

1. Magic is like “light” with each dragon energy being a component of said light. Other Dragons can and have absorbed other Elder Dragon’s magic. The combine energy forms Ley-line energy or “white” light.

…

6. The Chak filter out Death magic.

Slowpokeking.8720:

If Jormag is getting some fire power, would it weaken the dragon?

I’m definitely curious to see what comes out of this discovery. Is it possible that certain forms of magic are “anathema” to certain Elder Dragons? Maybe the EDs are capable of filtering magic when they draw it from a ley line like the Chak do, so that they aren’t hurt by absorbing their anathema magic that way. But that wouldn’t necessarily prevent us from targeting them directly with their anathema magic…

Alternatively, could we replicate the filtering effect on a larger scale to block Primordus’ Fire magic from getting transferred to the other Dragons when we kill him?

This makes me wonder something as well… Killing Zhaitan transferred Death magic to the other dragons, and killing Mordy transferred Plant magic to the other dragons. But Zhaitan was also the Dragon of Shadow, and Mordy was also the Dragon of Mind. Are those other aspects reflected in the prism? Is Primordus now a Fire-Death-Plant Dragon, or is he a Fire-Death-Shadow-Plant-Mind Dragon?

They’re standard loot drops, basically. I look forward to the Reddit post where somebody opens a thousand of them and logs the results.

Every time I do this meta, there are at least two or three people in my squad who complain about DCing and not being able to get back into the map. Just because they don’t come to the forums to post every single time it happens doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Anyway, crashes will happen, and most of them are outside a dev’s control. What’s unforgivable here is players getting locked out of the map they just spent an hour working on.

Agreed, I would have expected a lot better from ANet than just changing the icon and having them completely reset every day.

The nice thing about achievements is that they’re account-wide, so if I ever decide to get that one I can just play the story on another character. (This SHOULDN’T be the right answer to the problem, but at the moment it’s really the only answer.)

“Less Legendary” gets me the bingo!

Ananeos.4587:

Just to prove my point, the latest Living Season episode featured a kill room where waves upon waves of normal mobs and then a boss that spawns infinite waves until you kill it. You had to defend yourself and the object. If you died you failed the achievement and you had to replay the entire episode all over again.

How are mesmers supposed to deal with this?

“Restart from checkpoint” spawns you back in the room with full health but doesn’t reset the boss mob’s HP. So that’s how I did it.

That said… This is far from the hardest fight in the game, but it’s a perfect case in point. They clearly expect players to focus the boss mob while cleaving the adds. But because our cleave sucks, we have to deal with adds that stack up faster than we can kill them, which quickly becomes overwhelming. And because our personal DPS sucks, we can’t kill the boss fast enough to avoid the adds stacking up on us, either. And because the adds and boss both drop persistent AoEs, dragging out the fight as long as we have to quickly leaves no room on the floor to stand.

Every LS release seems to include at least one of these fights. They’re not “hard”, they’re just designed and built in a way that plays to all of Mesmer’s weaknesses. It’s cheap as hell, and I’m sick of it.

TheGrimm.5624:

Queue both Stronghold and Conquest. During play times get a regular pop on both.

I always leave both queues checked, and I only ever get into Conquest matches. Nobody is out there playing SH right now, it’s just not happening.

Having two queues is part of the problem, because most of the PvP community is unchecking the Stronghold box so they can stick with the same super enjoyable Stand-Inside-A-Circle action they’ve enjoyed since launch.

It was still like that when I played it, which was at least six months after it was released. Ugh, that was miserable. Yeah, only your crappy personal attacks do anything to the enemies in that one, and they’re hard to melee, so I pretty much had to sit there GS autoing them forever.

My Thief runs two signets plus the Block/Stun Break, and my Elite is Basilisk Venom just for a little extra Defiance Bar damage during events. It clears mobs so kitten fast in comparison to my Mesmer, and it’s not even considered a particularly good PvE class.

If you think Mesmer is at all reasonable for open world events (which is obviously the direction content will be taking from now on), go play any other class for a couple of hours.

Kuya.6495:

Also, stronghold is popular? Could have fooled me with the feedback that map receives in this forun.

It’s a classic catch-22 scenario. The PvP community as a whole doesn’t like it because there’s not an established meta like for Conquest. There isn’t an established meta because no tournaments are played on Stronghold. No tournaments are played on Stronghold because the PvP community as a whole doesn’t like it…

Exactly, apharma. Phantasms aren’t used in PvP because it’s too easy for alert players to avoid or cleave them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have damage. Quite the opposite, Phantasm attacks are usually the hardest-hitting skills we have on any of our weapon sets.

flog.3485:

Just use MoP with some wells and GS/staff for weapons, OP. I can assure you I can tag multiple foes with this set-up

Notice what you’re not doing in this scenario: using Mesmer mechanics at all. Nobody else has to ignore their class mechanics just to do open world stuff.

Thanks, Xaylin! I’m sure I read that one at the time, but I’d forgotten about it.

myren.5490:

Phantasmal Mage: Wave your torch forward, blinding and burning foes in a cone in front of you. Summon a phantasm that burns foes and pulses might for allies.

I especially like this suggestion because I think we could use more Blinds in our active defense kitten nal, even if it is a relatively weak defensive condition at the moment. If nothing else, it’d be another way to trigger Ineptitude.

So, the last big balance patch tuned up our Utility Phantasms a bit by adding new effects that occur before the phantasm is summoned. This follows on from the Shield’s Phantasm, which has a block effect in addition to its phantasm summon. Even though the Utility Phantasm skills aren’t currently in any meta builds, the consensus seems to be that this change was a step in the right direction, and in particular it seems like the Phantasmal Disenchanter has gone from being a trash tier skill that nobody ever takes to merely a mediocre skill that might see good use in the current meta if not for the crappy bounce projectile used by the attack itself and the summoned phantasm.

Given that, it might be fun to brainstorm changes to the other weapon phantasm skills that add an extra effect on top of the phantasm summoning.

The obvious thing would be to have the Mesmer execute the Phantasm’s attack before the summoning, like Phantasmal Disenchanter does, so I’ll lead with that and hopefully other folks have more interesting suggestions:

• Phantasmal Warlock: Deal damage to a target foe, with extra damage per condition on the target. Summon a phantasm that does the same.
• Phantasmal Berserker: Perform a whirling attack that travels in a line, damaging and crippling foes. Summon a phantasm that does the same.
• Phantasmal Swordsman: Perform a leaping attack on a target foe. Summon a phantasm that does the same.
• Phantasmal Warden: Perform a whirling attack and create a defensive bubble that destroys projectiles. Summon a phantasm that does the same.
• Phantasmal Duelist: Unload your pistol on a target foe. Summon a phantasm that does the same.
• Phantasmal Mage: Burn your foes and grant Fury to your allies. Summon a phantasm that does the same.

Now, doubling these attacks is not only boring but probably overpowered, especially since that exact thing is what got Chronophantasma nerfed with the 1.5s Daze on resummoned phantasms. But I give those ideas out just to start the conversation. Probably a better approach would be to emulate Phantasmal Defender by giving out a buff or effect that mimics the results of the phantasm attack or else emulate Echo of Memory by having the Mesmer do something useful during the channel time of the skill.

So, for instance, a different version of Phantasmal Warden could apply the Mirror effect to the Mesmer while channeling or when the channel ends. Similarly, Phantasmal Swordsman could have the Mesmer perform a leap after channeling that deals no damage but has Evade frames. Etc.

Xillllix.3485:

the class will still be forced to bunker up just to do something useful

This is an inherent problem with Conquest as a game mode. To win Conquest, you need to hold two capture points for longer than your opponents can hold two capture points. To hold a capture point, you need to stand in it longer than your opponents. To stand in a capture point, you need to have a bunker build. This is why the strongest PvP builds have always been bunker builds. This is why the strongest PvP builds always will be bunker builds.

Mobility builds and burst builds and sustained damage builds only come into meta if they’re strong enough to kill bunkers. And when they’re strong enough to kill bunkers, they’re so insanely deadly that they melt non-bunkers with little counter-play, so they inevitably get nerfed. And the cycle repeats until the only builds that are viable are bunkers.

Even if ANet plays whack-a-mole with the bunker of the month, this pattern won’t change. Because it’s baked into the game mode. The only thing that could possibly save us from the eternal bunker meta is a new game mode. But ANet can’t get anybody to play a new mode now, because the die hard PvP players are too addicted to the current meta and the idea of change scares them, while everybody else has already been driven away from the boring, frustrating bunker meta.

Test of Faith should be Evadeable, right? So you could escape it via Staff 3/5, as long as you can break the Daze? (In addition to just dodging out.)

Agreed that shadowsteps seem like they should also work. But I think the explanation we’ve been given for the wonky way they behave is that a shadowstepping character is still physically crossing the distance, they’re just doing it faster than the eye can see or some nonsense like that. Shadowsteps are not teleports, basically, even though they look exactly the same as teleports.

I’ve been playing open world stuff on my Thief and Ranger for the past few months. It’s actually possible to have fun in the open world! I swear! (Just, you know, not on Mesmer…)

One man’s difficulty is another’s annoying mechanics.

Mesmers can already build enough active defence and self-healing to frontline if we really, really wanted to. We don’t need more bunkering ability, we need something that turns open world content into something other than a miserable chore.