Guild Wars 2

Just gonna throw my two cents down in agreement with the OP. The range on the White Mantle snipers is a bit over the top.

Hesacon.8735:

Before the salvage/all option was introduced, it was the same thing with rare gear.

Speaking of which, does using the Salvage All feature prompt for each Blood Ruby in the stack as well?

Azukas, do you just demand nerfs on every build you lose to, or what?

My kingdom for HoT BWE1/2 Well of Precognition.

I haven’t done any PvP in a while, but… Yeah, that sounds about right to me? kitten sustained damage, burst and survivability keep getting nerfed. What we have left are a couple of gimmicks that won’t work against good opponents. In other words, B tier for Solo Queue and how good it is for Competitive depends on milking Portal for all it’s worth.

Really, the stupid decision here was to have an individual memorial for Eir rather than a mass memorial service for “all of our fallen friends” or something like that.

SkyFallsInThunder.8257:

All in all, it’s not a terribly difficult mechanic to understand, but the tutorial they put in to teach it is actually quite misleading as to what you need to do and is actually doing more harm than good IMO.

Yeah, I think that’s why this is confusing people. I beat the elementals without having to cross the beams over them, so I figured the technique to break the shield was to just channel the Counter-Magic skill, then destroy the bloodstone. I was confused for a bit when I noticed that wasn’t helping against the Justiciar.

Honestly, the “rant” is the best part of that comment, and it’s not even that ranty. Required reading, IMO.

Please, go play living hell season 2 with your Mesmer and you’ll see what I mean.

:(:(:(:(:( And LW3 isn’t any friendlier so far.

I see a lot of people in this thread are answering the questions “Is it possible?” or “How do you do it?” But there’s only one question that actually matters: “Is it fun?”

It’s not, basically. None of the PvE added to this game since HoT has actually been fun.

Jeez mesmers are the only class that always cry for buff

The only way you could possibly believe this is if the only class forum you’ve ever visited in your life is this one.

I came back for a bit because of the buffs and LW and got immediately turned off by AoE damage circles everywhere, knockdown spam, and swarming trash mobs. It’s like they design content specifically to give Mesmers a hard time.

I think there might be a few places left to stand in some of these fights, definitely need more damaging ground circles. And if more of them could have knockdowns or stuns or whatever, that would be great as well.

kthx

Until you get to HoT, the survivability from just Inspiration isn’t that necessary. You can certainly still use it, though, if you want.

Inspiration is a good choice for dealing with a lot of the AoE spam and swarming enemies that start showing up in LS2 and HoT, though, so swapping it in can be a good idea once you get there.

Heck even Azukas is already flying his “mesmer top dog” flag after a few months at half mast.

Do you want nerfs? This is how you get nerfs.

Weird how different this is than what people uncovered in the API.

I’d like an Elite Spec that doesn’t get nerfed to kitten in three months because of PvP whining.

This will surely stop bad PvP players from whining for more Mesmer nerfs.

Silverkey.2078:

Also, once CS is nerfed, a-net may not feel as guilty in increasing our sustained damage which would be positive for both PvE and PvP mesmers.

Right, because in the years before CS even existed at all ANet was quite happy giving us better sustained damage.

Why do people even ask for help with a build when they very intentionally don’t want to be given an optimal build? If your weird personal biases are more important than being optimal, just experiment on your own and do whatever.

Exciton.8942:

Expect a lot of nerf cry coming since both necro and rev have been nerf’ed. We will be the main target and eventually get nerf’ed hard again.

The Mes-seeker Prophecies.

Who’s excited to finally have proper DPS-testing golems in the game?

There’s always a small-but-vocal group of players who take great pride in doing weird, suboptimal stuff. I think some people gravitate to playstyles that involve doing light-but-consistent damage, and that’s condi for you. (Why those people don’t play a class that’s actually good at doing condi, I couldn’t tell you.)

From August to this week, Mesmer was actually fun and useful.

ANet needs to hire someone who can actually do math.

I agree with the OP 100%. I enjoyed most of the HoT content for what it was (though I’ve only done the VB/AB map metas), but I also think that ANet needs to be very wary of heading too far in a hardcore direction and losing what made their game stand out in the crowd of raid-raid-raid MMOs.

Kudos to ANet for enforcing good sportsmanship here.

For open world, I went through a cycle of Well of Eternity → Traited Mirror → Well of Eternity. But I switched back mainly because I took out the Chaos trait line. WoE is tricky to use correctly, because half of the self-heal is delayed for 3 seconds. It’s working for me now mainly because I swapped in Restorative Illusions, so I can pop Distortion for the extra heal plus invuln that lasts until WoE pops.

What Silverkey said.

I think the best way to approach a Cele-ish playstyle on Mesmer would be to grab Vigilant or Wanderer armour on a bunker build. I really liked bunkering with Chaos/Insp/Chrono during the betas. At the time, I used Knight’s/Crusader’s, but if I did it now I’d probably use Vigilant instead.

I’m undecided about which runes work best. I feel like Dolyak or Earth are probably the best choices for pure survivability, but Guardian is tempting.

Of course, the build you posted is much more of a hybrid power/condition build than a Cele bunker. So that one’s easy. Suck it up and go glass with Viper Amulet and Berzerker runes. Rely on your active defences to survive. Or go Rabid instead of Viper if you really don’t want to be glassy.

The Phantasm effect is listed on the page for the skill itself. Looks like the coefficient is missing, though: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Echo_of_Memory

ChrizZcE.5981:

I always see tons of people in the new zones. You just have to use LFG and use a taxi.

This is a big problem, though. How many players know how to find and use a taxi? How many know how to use a taxi but simply don’t want to?

Taxiing isn’t a game mechanic, it’s a side effect of the megaserver system that players have learned to use to their advantage. ANet shouldn’t be relying on it, they should be tweaking event scaling and megaserver sorting so that taxis aren’t necessary.

Defeating the Legendary Wyvern Matriarch seems to spawn a bunch of Airship Cargo around her platform. I think almost all of the events will similarly cause Airship Cargo to spawn when completed, similarly to the chests that appear after defeating the Vinewrath in SW.

No regrets here.

Yes, finding shoulder pieces that look right on Charr is… difficult.

RyuDragnier.9476:

It’s not lost. Turns out they put it in another line. I’m not sure what determines which line they put it in, but they definitely put it in one. Forgot about my mastery points for a while, remembered about them, thinking they were lost. Turns out they threw the excess exp from my Pact Commander Mastery line down into the Fractal line.

This is what I’ve observed as well.

Mesmer
Into the Void: This skill now pulls foes to the center of the wall rather than to the nearest point on the wall.
Chronomancer—Illusionary Avenger: Increased the distance traveled for this phantasm’s charge attack by 346%.
Chronomancer—Seize the Moment: Updated this trait to count the player as an illusion, as do other similar traits.
Chronomancer—Tides of Time: Fixed a bug that allowed this skill to destroy unblockable projectiles.

Mostly fixes. The meaning of the iAvenger change isn’t immediately obvious. I assume it’s just a larger attack range for the skill the Phantasm is casting?

Nope. And getting Downed will cancel the Chronoshift without restoring your HP and cooldowns.

Zumi.6384:

I won’t pretend like I’ve done extensive research into a Mesmer healing build, but I do notice that you don’t even mention the “heal on shatter” trait. My only point there is (theoretically) you don’t have to spam mantras to heal the party.

You clearly haven’t done extensive research into Mesmer healing builds, or you’d know that Restorative Illusions only heals the Mesmer.

Mesmers have exactly three ways of healing the party:

• Restorative Mantras
• Well of Eternity
• Healing Prism

The two traits have .2 scaling with Healing Power. Well of Eternity has good scaling (1.2), but it’s one skill and it’s on an 18-30s cooldown.

Chaba.5410:

Going further about the Wyld Hunt, when Sylvaris were revealed as minions of Mordremoth, everyone’s Wyld Hunt became suspect to me. Sylvaris lead the attack on Zhaitan and the Marshal’s Wyld Hunt was to cleanse Orr. Sylvari were uncorruptable by Zhaitan. Were the Sylvari a “plant” by Mordremoth to destroy a rival Elder Dragon? I wonder if Trahearne felt extremely manipulated.

This presumes that the Elder Dragons are in competition somehow. Which, maybe they are, but I don’t think we’ve seen any non-ambiguous evidence of this.

Rather, I think the Pale Tree is genuinely interested in opposing all Elder Dragons, much like Glint apparently was. It’s just that Zhaitan was the most active threat at the time of the PS, hence the number of Wyld Hunts that revolve around combating Zhaitan.

Whoever said that was probably referring to Central Tyria Mastery Points. IIRC, a significant number of them are given out for completing the LW2 story steps.

It’d also be nice to have a melee two-hander, but a Power-based ranged main-hand is a higher priority for me.

The undocumented Stunbreak got removed from iLeap/Swap.

Still, if the next Elite doesn’t have MH Pistol, folks are gonna riot.

Great guide! I was wondering what was the deal with some of those canopy bosses, so this really clears things up.

Blush Lift.3570:

Thanks for the guide but regarding Axemaster, the only way we got his tracked skill to not down everyone was to break his defiance bar after he jumped. You’ll notice he doesn’t have it any other time.

Interesting. So, I guess you need Nuhoch Stealth to find him, then you need to coordinate CC to take down his breakbar.

If you haven’t tried this with Action Cam yet, I highly recommend it. It’s much easier to aim and hit the target dummies within the time allotted with Action Cam than with the standard camera.

Have you posted this in the Bugs forum already? AFAIK, posts there are more likely to get visibility from someone in a position to either confirm it’s intended or schedule a fix.

TheFrighteningFrenchFry.3275:

Levetty.1279:

Considering a big part of Chronos usefulness in Raids is Quickness swapping to gear with Concentration on will probably be Meta.

That said all gear with concentration on also has toughness and at least some, if not all, of the raid bosses goes after whoever has the highest toughness.

Similarly Runes of the Herald look pretty good for Chrono but also has a lot of toughness.

With herald, timewarp, f5, shield 5, and the quickness well, concentration gear will almost definitely not be good in raids. If you really really need more quickness bad, you can run Fried Golden Dumplings.

Yeah. Concentration will be more useful for Open World, where you can’t rely on having a Herald around to boost your condition duration.

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: we’ll have to see what DPS numbers look like in full Viper gear, but, even if Viper’s numbers beat out Zerker, damage ramp-up is an inherent weakness in condi PvE builds that no gear set can address.

Admire the big number. >.>

Truthfully, this is kind of a problem, but not until the next time ANet releases new Elite or Core Specs. Now that the bar has been set at 250 Hero Points for an Elite Spec, people who do map completion will be able to unlock their next Elite without playing any new content whatsoever. The ruckus that led to the Elite spec cost getting reduced in the first place means they also have to plan on having new Elite specs be unlockable with a similar ratio of HPs in the new zone, i.e. the Elite spec has to be achieveable with only ~60% zone completion.

My personal guess is that ANet will repeat what they did when they split Skill Points into Hero Points and Spirit Shards in the first place. They’ll institute a new cap for unspent Hero Points, somewhere in the range of 100-200, and convert any excess into Spirit Shards. Alternatively, they’ll come up with some other sink for Hero Points; the Elite Specialisation track has created a precedent for awarding gear by unlocking Hero Points, so maybe there will be a new one-time Specialisation track that just unlocks new gear/skins.

I wonder if the breakbars on some of these mobs are overtuned or if people just don’t know yet to include some CC in their builds, because I haven’t seen the Wyvern Matriach’s breakbar knocked down yet either.

Maybe someone should test out that hypothesis by getting like five Scrappers/Mesmers or something and focussing on just taking out the breakbars. See if it’s possible to actually down the Gerents if people are popping the breakbars as soon as they turn blue. (Relying on the randoms in your lane to execute the burn, of course.)

I’m taking a somewhat unorthodox approach for PvE of Chr/Cha/Ins. Bountiful Disillusionment, Mental Defence, and Chronophantasma. Also take Restorative Illusions and Chaotic Dampening.

The point of the build is to provide strong survivability via Protection, condi cleanse, and shatter heals. Especially with liberal application of Distortion. I found that I was getting by okish in a lot of situations with a more damage-oriented build, but I was dying a little too much during events with a lot of splash damage. In group fights, the point is to stay alive and keep the Alacrity flowing to your allies. With some condi cleanse as icing, of course. You can even take Restorative Mantras and Mantra of Pain if you want to dish out some healing.

I find it also helps with some of the more difficult pulls while soloing, but YMMV on those.