As I said, what you people are complaining about IS A CLASS MECHANICAL ISSUE WITH MESMERS/RANGERS/NECROMANCERS/ GUARDIAN SPIRIT WEAPONS THAT NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED INSTEAD OF SWEPT UNDER THE RUG.
My big hope for Engineer’s Elite spec is that their Drones will operate like other pets and then finally this stupid kittening problem will be too widespread to keep ignoring.
The Rift was always intended to be targetable and damageable, from the very beginning, as a necessary counterbalance to the power of being able to reset cooldowns and damage.
Echo of Memory/Deja Vu: Changed functionality. Now blocks all attacks for a short duration rather than a single attack. If this skill fully channels, summon an Illusionary Avenger. Deja Vu is available if any attack is blocked during the channel time.
Deja Vu: Fixed a bug which allowed players to constantly cancel cast this skill to get a longer than intended uptime of the block effect. Canceling this skill now removes the Time Echo buff.
Illusionary Avenger: Increased damage of this phantasm by 20%. Fixed a bug which prevented this skill from displaying the benefit from Empowered Illusions. Increased alacrity given to 2 seconds per hit. This phantasm no longer shoots a bouncing projectile but instead initiates a melee attack that slows enemies and gives alacrity to allies within a 240 radius around the target. Removed old phantasm description.
Tides of Time: This skill now attempts to bounce back if it hits a wall. Fixed a bug where the time freeze caused by this skill would not show a stun icon in the status bar.
Perfect! This really solves the complaints I had about the Shield. It’s looking like a really solid weapon now, and the block/iAvenger changes improve its usefulness in PvE by a lot.
Well of Eternity: No longer gives vigor per pulse to allies but instead removes conditions from them. Increased recharge to from 25s to 30s. Increased base initial heal by 25%
Well of Precognition: Updated functionality. Now gives blur for 1 second per pulse during its active portion instead of on end. When it ends, allies within the well regain 35 endurance.
Neat.
Illusionary Reversion: No changes.
There is a pretty clear division of people that would rather have an ICD on this skill and those that prefer the illusion requirement. After some thought we’ve decided we prefer the current version (illusion requirement) as it is an easier to understand limitation when compared to internal cooldowns. I know that some have asked that this requirement be toned down to 1 illusion required but this wouldn’t solve the original problem of being able to get large bonuses from your shatters without an investment.
I’ve come around on this, I think the 2 illusion requirement is probably fine. I still think we need better clone generation that isn’t tied to DE, but clone-on-shatter probably wasn’t the right way to create a DE alternative. Shatter two, get one free is still pretty handy.
If Power Burst being the Mesmer meta build annoys you, blame ANet for making it the plainly superior option for anybody who cares about actually accomplishing something in PvP.
Condi Shatter is a fairly viable alternate build, but it’s already been nerfed several times and will probably get nerfed again between now and when we actually get ours hands on Chronomancer for real.
Your DPS build should consider using Phantasmal Haste instead of Shattered Strength. You’ll be shattering a lot, sure, but you should also have 25 Might stacks from your group’s Phalanx Warrior or blasting Fire fields. Even when you’re maintaining a heavy shatter cadence, you should still get a noticeable benefit out of Phantasmal Haste. (Even nerfed MtD will probably do more for you, if you don’t like PH.)
I’m not thrilled with Master of Fragmentation either, but neither other option for Illusion GM is a clear PvE win.
All that being said, this kind of Quickness generation build clearly has more potential as a support/boonshare build anyway. Quickness is certainly nice on a Mesmer, but not as nice for us as it is for classes with actually good AA damage in the first place.
If you are asking about “organized PvE” (dungeons/fractals), there are currently discussion about what is the most powerful mesmer build once chronomancer comes:
maximizing damage with phantasms
maximizing support to your party with wells (alacrity + quickness)
thanks to chronophantasma + alacrity on shatter, shattering may actually be useful in the second case.
Chronophantasma really changes a lot of things for PvE Mesmer. Even a Phantasm DPS build can afford to shatter once or twice during a fight now, as opposed to never.
The usefulness of Shatter Support will really depend on the nature of PvE content in HoT. As it stands, with a “long” fight still being under a minute, I’m not sure that Alacrity recovers cooldowns quickly enough to make a difference. I’ll leave it to DnT to figure that out.
From a pure DPS perspective, though, shattering without Chronophantasma is only worth it when your target or your phantasms are about to die anyway. Maximum damage from Mind Wrack amounts to, what, 2-3 seconds of expected DPS? And it’ll take much longer than that just to ramp back up.
Seems obvious to me that Mordremoth’s “call” is not able to be heard outside of Maguuma yet, so the Nightmare Court and Soundless in Central Tyria will still exist outside his influence.
The events of the expansion and living story may change this for a while, but I doubt either the Nightmare Court or the Soundless will be going away, if for no other reason than they have to exist in the world for the Sylvari Personal Story (which takes place prior to the Living Story/expansion and thus remains the same regardless of what might happen during HoT) to continue to make sense.
I assume you skipped over Delayed Reactions because this is intended to be a teamfight-oriented build (though most of your vids are duels…), right? Still, I’m kind of curious if the additional Slow source could be worthwhile.
Seeing an interrupt-oriented build that doesn’t have MoD or Pistol is weird, though. It also means that CS is mostly going to proc at random against enemies in Chaos Storm, which seems weird. (Not that there’s a better Adept choice in Dom anyway, but still.)
The tweaks were pretty small, basically just tuning and tweaking. So most of the BWE1 feedback still applies.
The biggest changes were Gravity Well and All’s Well That Ends Well. Gravity Well went from 3 damage ticks + 1 Float to 3 ticks of damage + Pull. All’s Well went from clearing conditions on Well expiration to granting Alacrity on Well expiration.
Honestly, there are valid arguments on both sides of both of those changes. I definitely prefer the BWE2 version of Gravity Well, but All’s Well was pretty good either way.
In dungeon and fractal content, everyone needs to be in melee to maximise the benefit from allied fields and Warrior banners. Which is why the meta PvE builds exclusively use mainhand sword.
Which is not to say that Greatsword can’t be used for other PvE. It’s actually really good for Silverwastes mobs, because Imagined Burden makes it easy to interrupt Teragriff charges. I tend to use it for most other open world content, as well, just out of convenience. Dodge -> Mirror Blade -> Mind Wrack -> Mind Spike will wipe out most trash mobs pretty quickly.
There won’t be any new “Dungeons” in Heart of Thorns. If these are anything, they’ll be Raids. But most likely they’re planned dungeons that wound up getting canceled.
RNGesus chooses not to show you favour. Perform your daily offerings by dumping exotics into the Forge, and He may bestow upon you a survey for your faithfulness. Or not, for RNGesus is fickle.
I just hope that BWE3 includes a Raid in some form or other, so we have some point of reference for what those mean in GW2 and get a chance to give feedback about the raid viability of our classes and Elite specs.
And yet something needs to be done about mesmer DPS in PvE, which is plain terrible and by far the lowest of all the classes.
Of course. But is dumping a bunch of extra damage onto iAvenger or ToT the right way to address this?
Seems to me that the best starting point would be to reduce Phantasm damage by 10% and increase AA damage 30% across the board, then handle any outliers created by this change.
It’s two birds with one stone, frankly, since Phantasm attacks do contribute significantly to our burst potential in PvP as it is. Forcing us to weave an AA chain into our burst rotation wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
To be fair, I think it’s just Carighan saying that. The rest of us are just pointing out that Shield is already pretty good in PvP, while making suggestions that would improve it in PvE without making it OP in PvP. (Which is why a straight damage increase is off the table, as it should be, because iAvenger out DPSing a pSwordsman would be ridiculous given its access to Slow and Alacrity.)
Yeah, the Thief pile-on is funny, like facepalm funny. The same crap they’re throwing around at us right now is exactly why they got nerfed in the past. You’d think they’d catch a clue and realise that their arguments for nerfing Mesmer apply just as much to Thieves.
The smarter thing to do would be to build arguments that Thieves are too reliant on Stealth as a defensive mechanic. (Which, admittedly, a lot of the Thieves who don’t go around trolling other subforums have done and continue to do.)
I’m really glad you linked MetaBattle, because it nakedly reveals your fundamental fallacy: the complete inability to distinguish between “in meta” and “overpowered”.
I was disappointed to discover that Distracting Daggers doesn’t have a background recharge. Because if it did, I’d have been jumping up and down and saying “This! Make mantras work like this!”
If an ICD isn’t in the cards for IR, maybe just cutting the requirement down to one illusion instead of two? I get that the point currently is to require setup to use IR, but really the dependency on having DE and/or Chronophanstasma to make IR work effectively is just a bit too steep.
Too powerful? I dunno. As you say, really the only reliable way to proc it is with Spatial Surge in a Assassin/Marauder build. And those builds are more likely to just blow up someone immediately rather than sit around perma-slowing them. (Death is the hardest form of CC, after all.)
The shield is way more than just a bunker weapon in PvP. Echo of Memory and Deja Vu are awesome illusion generation tools with Persistence of Memory, not to mention great mitigation; and you can really control your enemies with the Slow and Tides of Time.
It’s really an incredible all-around teamfight weapon. Landing ToT on a clump of enemies can secure multiple downs if your teammates are on the ball enough. Not to mention prevent or secure stomps. The phantasm admittedly isn’t too incredible in PvP (Slow is useful, but the targeting is meh), but the back-to-back blocks aren’t shabby.
Well of Recall seems to have become obsolete with the glorious changes made to All’s Well that Ends Well.
Yeah, I agree. But, I admit I’m seeing it from a PvP perspective.
In PvP, Well of Recall just can’t compete with Well of Calamity or Well of Action. In PvE, I could see the extra Alacrity potentially being worth more than the damage from WoC. But I’ll let the PvE experts settle that one.
While I haven’t played around with Rev yet this beta, I do have to point out that Facet skills require Energy upkeep. So the Revenant is trading the potential use of other skills to get perma-Swiftness.
Cele is not broken, it’s only strong (not even OP, just strong) in two or three builds. D/D Ele and Signet Necro are the two I know about. I think Cele Eng used to be a thing, but it might not any more.
Really, Ele is the only class that can effectively use all the stats on Cele. Most of them are wasted on everybody else.
I will repeat. Fire fields and water fields only give might and healing. I am so tired of people who think 25 stacks of might and sudden burst healing is all this game is about.
You can be tired of them all you want, that doesn’t make them wrong.
There is nitpick… and then there is the fact that the video is a strawman argument on every major point of his.
I only had time to watch the first half of the video before leaving for work, but I absolutely had the same impression. He’s attacking some “ZERK ONLY” strawman and trying to blame speedrun guilds and theorycrafters for the actions of annoying PUGs whose only knowledge of the meta comes from half-understood recollections of forum posts with oversimplified summaries of DNT guides.
The important thing to know is that there are real, material differences between classes in terms of their PvE performance — as measured by DPS, sure, but also by group utility and access to active defences. It’s also a plain and simple fact that two classes — Elementalists and Guardians — dominate all three categories of PvE performance within a single “meta” build.
With PvE content that can more or less be facerolled by five warm bodies in Exotic gear, the fact above is merely annoying. But we’ve been promised “difficult” PvE content in the form of raids, and the harder content gets the more important those performance differences become.
My hardcore raiding days are past (oh, for the days when I wasn’t employed and lived by myself — got a lot more League of Legends in back then as well), but I’d love to try out the new raids with other Mesmers anyway.
Do we already have an established dungeon day? Sundays generally work best for me.
Even if this doesn’t become a regular thing, we really need to try it during whatever BWE includes raids.
Probably this. The inclusion of enrage timers on bosses virtually guarantees that as many glass gear wearers as the raid can get away with is going to be considered the meta. Also, the raids may require carrying multiple sets of gear — glass and whatever other set is considered to be needed for a specific fight.
Really the zerker meta is in place because the faster stuff dies the less you need to deal with it’s mechanics, most of them big one shot deals.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Mechanics that require you to stop DPSing during certain periods only increase the importance of hitting maximum DPS numbers during periods when you can attack the boss. Mechanics that require some members of the party to sacrifice DPS steps only increase the importance of hitting maximum DPS numbers for the rest of the party.
Raid mechanics don’t break the zerker meta, they double down on it for classes that can’t tank or heal (most of them). They amplify the significance of existing DPS discrepancies between classes.
I see a lot of PHIW types going around chuffed to bits that the “zerker meta” is going to be “broken” by raids. But, in reality, they’re the ones due for a rude awakening when they find that they can’t just walk in to an encounter with their kittenty gimmick build and expect to get carried by the rest of their party. The meta players they hate so much don’t give a kitten and will happily equip whatever they need to equip in order to beat the content.
This is actually not a bad idea. For each class there is a best gear anyways. Why even allow the people to equip anything else? Theres berserker and maybe some condi stat combo for nekro and thats it.
Seriously, the thing raiders say they want is challenging, skill-based combat. But raids have traditionally always involved gear-checking through unavoidable damage, Enrage timers, etc., etc, even when they don’t have hard attunement stats.
Truly skill-based content would either eliminate stats altogether or standardise them when you enter. Heck, GW2 even already does the latter when it downscales players as they move between zones or enter dungeons. The dynamic level adjustment system compresses the difference between exotic and ascended/legendary, even erasing the distinction entirely below a certain level, as I recall.
So why not compress the difference in gear tiers when you enter a Raid, so that full exo and full legendary have the same amount of stats? Raiders still get the prestige of a full Legendary set when roflstomping open world content, as well as the convenience of easily changing their stat prefix, but then Raids would truly be skill-based, rather than gear-based.
This is a pretty good idea, although I doubt it’s going to happen any time soon. I also think that the bouncy Phantasms would still suck even if we could attach them to an ally.
Maybe we’ll get a Phantasmancer elite spec with the next expansion that modifies all Phantasms like:
Untargetable/invincible
Don’t count toward illusion limit
Cannot be shattered
Do not disappear when current target dies
Only one Phantasm at a time
Always target Mesmer’s last attacked enemy
Imaginary pets, more or less. iDefender might need some reworking so it’s not a permanent 50% damage reduction, but otherwise I think most Phantasms should work without modification other than a +150/200% damage bonus on the Elite spec or something.
Well, that’s assuming those are the only cookies at the party. if you want chocolate chip, play face punch. If you want frosted sugar cookies, play canasta. Nobody’s going to give you the sugar cookies for face punch, and nobody’s going to give you the chocolate ship for canasta.
I love this metaphor, and I hope this thread expands on it even more as it makes for a much more entertaining thread!
Indeed!
Let’s say that exotics are like oatmeal raisin, because they’re perfectly serviceable cookies but most people would prefer something else. Ascended is chocolate chip, clearly better than oatmeal raisin in every way. Legendary are white chocolate macadamia, a special treat that you don’t see very often.
Anyone who comes in the door can play a few rounds of Tic Tac Toe for oatmeal cookies. If you want chocolate chip, you’re gonna have to sit through an entire game of Monopoly. For the white chocolate macadamia, you have to get in line to get punched in the face.
Some people can only learn the hard way. I’ll be honest with you – it would not have taken three years for me to deck this theoretical facepunch junkie..
Yeah, but listen, your analogy is terrible. It’s more like you have this one friend who keeps asking you to punch him in the face and then give him cookies. So you bake a batch of cookies and offer it to a whole group of your friends at a party, on the condition that they have to let you punch them in the face first.
“Punch your buddy in the face” isn’t the only party game you could be playing in this situation, and only one guy you invited is actually enjoying it.
