Guild Wars 2

yeah there are other ways, but none of them are as efficient kittenters. with IP, you get 4 stacks of confusion every 10 seconds just by itself with minimal setup. or 8 stacks every 30 seconds. what other mechanic in the game lets you have such consistent confusion?

scepter comes close, but you’re kicking yourself if you don’t use both if you’re looking for a full on confusion build.

quercus.9261:

that would work. I would drop Phant Haste and pick up IP

Best confusion burst is a is a CoF / MW shatter with 3 clones + IP

Glamor confusion builds work well in standoffs + seige. 30 points in Dom opens a lot of possibilities.

Most people are not going to like this without Deceptive evasion but it is not required IMO

Carrion gear + condition duration food would help get confusion to 5 sec on this build.

you need deceptive evasion for a good confusion build. considering each illusion shattered applies 1 confusion stack, the more clone generation you have, the higher you can stack your confusions.

Sonnet.9840:

Hi, Could someone explain to me the situation where you run with constant 18+ stacks of might, (or even 9 stacks) with shatter build and have the resources left to benefit from it?

I played a couple rounds of hot join doing my normal shatter rotations and just using my normal play style. I had 9 stacks at times, but no more (and I Frapsed the games to get a good look). That got me a few good hits with my sword auto attack, that’s it. If you do, let’s say, a confusion shatter with your first illusions, and then Mind Wrack + BF with your next batch, is the dps higher/is it viable in any way? And I’d like a comment from a person that actually has been playing sPvP/tPvP after the patch, not some theoretical assumptions.

I like the buff for pve reasons, but is it really affecting pvp? I’m not saying that mesmers needed this buff, but I’d like to get a reality check from pvp perspective.

this is basically the counter argument. the buff sounds OP at a glance, but it’s not practical to use consistently.

Cero.5132:

I think it´s okay that the oponent doesnt lose target.
Instead I wish for the clones produced on dodge to target my target instead of a random enemy nearby

on the flip side, having a random target means you are able to daze multiple targets with F3 without the grandmaster trait.

Delofakitten.4231:

Clones doing damage is actually important to Sharper Images, if they do 0 and Crit for 0 they don’t apply Sharper Images since it’s likely the game doesn’t register a critical hit for 0. ; ) Important stuff.

Regardless though, critical hit based Sigils do not work with clones critical hits so it’s really okay anyhow. Anything involving utilizing your illusions for anything more than a shatter is being removed slowly since beta, I’ve been playing it all the way through. Play your shatterer and enjoy it. = )

i’m 90% sure that a 0 damage crit will proc bleed with sharper images.

the one and only time a phantasm build excels, is killing a champion boss in dungeons. you have the highest sustained dps, but its overshadowed by the utility of a shatter build in any pvp situation.

Jayblah.4682:

We aren’t suffering when it comes to clone production with or without D.E.. Dropping target would be fantastic, and fall in line with A.Net’s “tricky” philosophy for our class.

My main wish is that an A.Net dev addresses the question. Hey, one can dream right?

without DE, you can only make 2 illusions on average every 10 seconds with most weapon sets, without blowing cd’s on utilities. meaning in a fight, you can’t realistically ever get a 3x mind wrack off without DE.

also means you can only shatter once every 10 seconds or so, regardless of how you look at it, it’ll be a huge nerf to the class as a whole if they somehow reduced the clone generation rate on the trait.

the tradeoff doesn’t come from straight up damage, but the number of utility sigils you can have. effects on crit/kill/weapon swap, etc.

the trait is used for clone generation in shatter builds. not for target dropping.

honestly i’m fine with the damage nerf. it was ridiculous before, 7-9k damage while invuln is pretty op, now it’s more 4-5k, more inline with other phantasm damage.

not to mention the trident got huge buffs, even more than before. the whaler does insane bleed AND direct damage now, and it attacks more often(i think).

Dinama.3764:

Shroock.2934:

- Phantasmal Warlock and Phantasmal Mage now properly run away from melee and maintain distance of 1.200 from their target at all time.
- Increased range of Phantasmal Warlock and Phantasmal Mage to 600

Doesn’t make sense to me.

With AoE from staff removed, GS seems to be the only legit AoE weapon atm.
Never was into Sword+F/T/P but may be now it time for scepter to replace the sword from the standard weapon choice.
None is said about iBerserker sad…

…………………

what the kitten is going on

Prelude.3817:

And kitten if you tell me you can dodge the summon, you have never pvped.
YOU CANT DODGE A PHANTASM SUMMON. NOR BLOCK IT.

are you serious? dodging the summon itself is often easier than dodging its attacks.

especially if you play a mesmer, and know the timings of when other mesmers usually summon phantasms.

Psych.6527:

wads.5730:

Dexxer.3174:

@Osicat

ofc its about tpvp. the game is balanced more for tpvp.
Wvwvw is something casual based. ot has its place. but you hace a complete different view on things there. iqm npt even sure if you can even compare anything in wvwvw with competitive tpvp…
Its.. different games we playing like anet said.

the game isnt balanced around tpvp, s/tpvp have different gear sets and skill descriptions.

a glass cannon burst build in wvw do aLOT more damage than a similar glass cannon in spvp.

What are you talking about? Skills are exactly the same in both, and all they do is give you a different template to use for PvE/WvWvW and PvP.

Sure they give you end game content as far aas stats for weapons, gear and upgrades in PvP but that doesnt mean you cant match it…

many different skills have different numbers for balance related reasons, i suggest you go look up past patch notes.

and gear distributions for exotic 80 gear in pve/wvw is different from that you can get from mists vendors. for instance berserker gear in wvw gives you more crit chance and roughly 40% more crit damage than berserker gear in mists, in exchange you get some vitality for the lost damage.

in general glass cannon builds in wvw hit much harder than the same glass cannon build in mists, no you can’t match it, it’s not possible.

my most interesting story is that one time when i camped the puzzle and they mad

Dexxer.3174:

@Osicat

ofc its about tpvp. the game is balanced more for tpvp.
Wvwvw is something casual based. ot has its place. but you hace a complete different view on things there. iqm npt even sure if you can even compare anything in wvwvw with competitive tpvp…
Its.. different games we playing like anet said.

the game isnt balanced around tpvp, s/tpvp have different gear sets and skill descriptions.

a glass cannon burst build in wvw do aLOT more damage than a similar glass cannon in spvp.

phant build would lose simply because you would be able to dodge roll to prevent atleast 1-2 phantasms from spawning.

where as clones are much easier to generate in a shatter build.

afaik, all those only apply to direct damage, not condition damage. so if you’re intend is to increase bleed damage from sharper images, then i wouldn’t use it.

Katlan.6301:

has it been reduced to a .25 delay yet? Thought that change was not going to happen until the balance patch

supposedly the 14th

LaronX.8079:

Some PvE mobs finisher the move regadless if the target is invis or not. Some player skills do as awell ( our staff 1 for example). The guardian thing on the other hand is a to part skill. First he marcks you and then he pulls you. If you are marcked it does not matter if you invisble or not he will still pull you ( same as TC if you are in range you will get pulled)

in addition if you have a channeled skill being cast at you, and you go invis after the skill has started channeling, it will hit you through invis. for example the karka with the crippling shots. or pistol unload from thieves or the iduelist.

the same moves however doesn’t connect if you go invis before they start the channeling of course.

gymdawg.6347:

Gathbard.6904:

Tip: as far as I know, Blink is the only meaningful action that doesn’t stop the channeling of your mantras, otherwise the only “safe” way to recast them is after Mass Invi, or decoy if you take it.

That might be the only action that doesn’t prevent it, but stealth is another great way to get off mantras. decoy and mass invis have just enough stealth for you to finish the mantra charge.

the point of a mantra build that doesn’t take heal on mantra use is to finish the fight before you have to recharge the mantras. not very effective running with zergs, ok in small fights, but standard builds with blink/decoy/whatever is much more adaptable to more situations.

it doesnt share cd with the staff skill chaos storm. the fall damage part is always active.

i dont get it

if you plan on using that weapon set, then go all berserker. you make up for the lack of toughness and vitality with blink, decoy, mirror image, etc.

and for dungeons, it’s a little trickier, a more supportive build often is more desired from mesmers, but its adequate for all dungeons, and you can get to level 20 fractal np.

although i’d wait for the next patch and see what they do to the outstanding bugs, before you spend any money on buying gear.

doesn’t pistol whip also make you invuln?

Prelude.3817:

Very interesting video.
You should post this in the pvp section, many things they say in this video apply to pvp balancing, for all those cheesy Instagib combos this game offers: shatter combo, 100b, bs combo, pistol whip…
Pop cooldowns, smash your keyboard and watch your opponent health bar drop.

I just hope all of this gets nerfed to the ground, and that Anet proposes us something REALLY challenging and skillful…
Not something you can macro on your keyboard…

its hard to come up with a system that requires actual ‘skill’ that isn’t simply how good you are at pressing buttons in the right order.

the only skill required in video games that isn’t how good you can press buttons are from games like grand strategy, and precision shooters. neither of which is gw2.

edit: in response to the video, i guess you could consider it a foo strat, but the problem is there isn’t enough depth in the game for there to be deeper and more skillful playstyles to learn.

that video is really aimed at more involved strategy games, which have lots of depth and a huge learning curve such at starcraft2 and dota type games.

Snoxx.7943:

wads.5730:

any condition build without 15 in duelist is a sub-optimal one in terms of its dps.

I agree to this, but only if you have a half-decent crit chance.

The build we discuss here has only 4% crit chance. The “Sharper Images” trait from 15 pts into Duelist line is worthless when you have such a low crit rate.

On my own Mesmer I basically run a 0/20/20/0/20 build (with 10 spare points to spend, for example 0/25/25/0/20 or 10/20/20/0/20 or whatever you like). Equip is mostly “rabid” with precision/toughness/condition. Weapons are staff + scepter/focus. I create lots of staff clones with Deceptive Evasion, having Vigor up all the time and dodge rolling like crazy while my staff clones do some damage. If this doesn’t work I switch to scepter and try to kill them with confusion.

yeah i agree, you basically need precision/toughness/condition damage gear to make a dps oriented build. otherwise you’re goin 0 damage and full support. such builds have their place, but its not fun to play =/.

Mere Image.8376:

I truly don’t understand the logic in making phantasms have a delay in their attacks. First of all, there are already easy methods to avoid phantasms now, starting with limiting phantasm generation: Blind, dodge, aegis will all prevent a phantasms from even spawning. Whereas if a warrior uses hundred blades, the first blow is merely nullified and the rest of the attack lands. Secondly, phantasms can be destroyed. A staff guardian can autoattack, destroying all illusions that may be on route for a shatter. Thirdly, no other profession has their attacks pre-displayed. Let me put this in warrior terms again. Imagine you’re playing a warrior and a banner appears above your head every time you use hundred blades to indicate what you are doing. Not only that, but you must now suffer a delay in your attack. It makes no sense to cripple a single profession like this. IT’S ILLOGICAL. How is it fair to punish a class by, firstly, nerfing their ability to land an attack. And secondly, by making it easier to avoid the attack if it even activates properly.

This is why I’m upset: it’s less probable that our attacks will even land anymore; our damage was nerfed when we don’t even come close to the damage of other classes in terms of weapon skills; even if our attacks can even be “summoned,” they can easily be killed before the damage or even the effect of that phantasm can trigger. We have the most difficult time getting our attacks to land, and now those easily avoidable attacks / utilities are weakened once again.

And btw, phantasms never had a delay in their attacks. I read a recent article about layoffs at NCSOFT. Also I have noticed that the guild wars team is always advertising for additional programmers. My bet would be that they lost the members who were originally responsible for designing the mesmer and their skills. We get nerfed each patch, with the addition of an “unexpected” nerf that is not even listed in the patch notes. Which is unprofessional and quite frankly, bull crap.

having a slight delay made sense before they made it so blind/block/dodge nullified the phantasm spawn. it doesn’t make sense anymore, thats why they said they are reducing it to manageable amount.

wtf are you arguing for, its been stated that the damage is a bug, and the attack delay is also going to be fixed.

just wait for the fix.

any condition build without 15 in duelist is a sub-optimal one in terms of its dps.

warlock is also the worst phantasm you can have for a condition build, since it scales mostly with power.

how hard could it be to make one yourself?

take all the mantra related traits, then equip 3-4 mantras on skill bar. and there you go.

shochinhwa.1648:

So I cast iWarden on a thief that is trying to stealth finish a friendly player. iWarden pop up. Stood there doing nothing where ranged skills like unload, volley and what not have heat seeking abilities, iWarden just stand there and look pretty. Broken..

because the thief stealthed before the warden started attacking. all other phantasms work the same.

the phantasm needs to start attacking before thief stealths for the rest of the attack chain to complete.

~400 hr
~6k kills
~2.5k badges

logitech mx518

best mouse you can buy

Wise.8025:

wads.5730:

Wise.8025:

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

Can you please define “powerful summon” to us?

I am confused as to what constitutes this definition of the iZerker.

iZerker vs Heavy Golem in the mists
Attack 3139
Crit 44% chance 50% damage bonus

iZerker damage tooltip 576

Typically iZerker hits for an average of 1.1-1.3k plus some minor condition damage.
Lowest damage I saw after 20 minutes of testing was 666.
Highest damage I saw after 20 minutes of testing 2478

I’m not going to be stacking a hell of a lot more than 3100 attack in a pvp setting.

Please, we would all like to know what aspect of this damage output is so powerful that it warrants such massive delays?

its already been reported and acknowledged that izerker damage is bugged. in general, damage oriented phantasms are indeed very powerful.

So you’re saying IF our damage wasn’t bugged then it would be powerful? Because currently the damage is laughable even to glass cannons. My concern is the delay that is currently in place that is supposedly there to prevent this pathetic damage from taking place.

The delay isn’t just on iZerker either it’s on all of the phantasms. They’re dying before they even land anything rendering them useless in PvE/WvW and laughable in PvP vs any player that’s aware they can just swat the Illusions and they’ll die without ever having done damage. Also preventing any reasonable shatter from us.

yes, if the zerker damage wasn’t bugged, it is powerful, you can hit up to 5-6k on other glass targets pre-bug.

yes, the current delay is kitten thats why devs have stated it’s going to be reduced to a reasonable amount.

i have like 30 golem blueprints

not sure what do

Wise.8025:

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

Can you please define “powerful summon” to us?

I am confused as to what constitutes this definition of the iZerker.

iZerker vs Heavy Golem in the mists
Attack 3139
Crit 44% chance 50% damage bonus

iZerker damage tooltip 576

Typically iZerker hits for an average of 1.1-1.3k plus some minor condition damage.
Lowest damage I saw after 20 minutes of testing was 666.
Highest damage I saw after 20 minutes of testing 2478

I’m not going to be stacking a hell of a lot more than 3100 attack in a pvp setting.

Please, we would all like to know what aspect of this damage output is so powerful that it warrants such massive delays?

its already been reported and acknowledged that izerker damage is bugged. in general, damage oriented phantasms are indeed very powerful.

Curvs.9183:

Bones.5762:

I guess CD just don’t understand what it takes to be a maguuman, so please don’t xfer over here because you guys will qq about how we play.

You’re right, we don’t know how to be Maguuman. We can’t comprehend getting rolled so hard, then still claiming we’re better.

Also, I had a 1v3, then a 1v4 against the supposed elite maguuman small force pvpers. I figured I stood no chance, being my zerg wasn’t with me. I mean, Crystal Desert players are nothing without the zerg, right? But I won both encounters! So weird. I guess this means, since I fought, collectively, seven people, that you’re whole entire server is actually awful.

Furthermore, during your successful capture of SMC, which did seem to catch us off guard, as well as EBay coming in from the other side at the same time, I got 31 badges off the impregnable maguumans. without being downed once, and getting away to boot.

So, with that said, and most of this thread going to shambles (admittedly, this post is no different than most in here, and apologize for that, but I could only read so much blowhard before responding) I, sir/madam, along with what i’d think would be the vast majority/all of our, Crystal Desert, server are proud of not being maguuman. Mainly, and this is just speculation, because we like to, you know, win. Something you guys just haven’t added to your superior tactics, yet.

heres how this game works, 90% of players in wvw are bads. the rest are good at pvp. these 10% will always destroy even numbers, and more often then not, more numbers.

however because CD simply has more people, it means the chances of the 10% from mag meeting the bads on CD is going to happen more often. this is where the claims of the skillless CD comes from.

its not saying everyone from CD is bad, its just a sampling bias.

leafy lass true warrior of margguma

the delay was indeed intended, but jon realized that the length of the delay traited pre patch was actually balanced, so he reduced the actual delay now to be 0.25 seconds, instead of a little over 1 second.

i think that’s a fine compromise. now fix the berserker damage bug.

JonPeters.5630:

Now if only I could figure out the berserker dmg thing… Worst case scenario I will just try and readjust the numbers based on the new functionality but that is harder because I don’t have the old data. For what it is worth it was not the bladetrail change that messed with this because we locally reverted that and this berserker issue still persisted.

the problem with berserker damage isn’t that the damage itself is somehow lowered, it’s that the whirl used to hit atleast 3-4 times per pass, thus giving you the kinds of damage numbers you saw before, not to mention the 4 times to proc bleed, and extending cripple duration.

the problem now is that it hits only 1 time, if it doesnt just miss entirely. i think if you find out why it stops attacking after 1 attack in the whirl, you’ll solve your problem.

the drops you get are based on your level, not the level of the person you kill. i’m 100% sure of it.

Krispera.5087:

wads.5730:

Sarmach.1547:

I don’t know what everyone else’s rotation is but I use mirror blade then the iZerker so this change didn’t make a noticeable difference.

that makes no sense at all. regardless of the order you use skills, it means you have to wait 2 seconds before you can shatter, or you get no benefit out of using a cooldown.

It makes perfect sense. It’s the only way to get the delayed damage from iZerker. I tend to do iZerker before Mirror Blade, but the GOOD rotation is Mirror Blade then iZerker, because you want Vulnerability on the monster then iZerker damage.

yeah i get that, but this whole thread is about the delay before attacking, and how buggy the actual attack is following. regardless of the order, you still have to wait for the phantasm to attack before shattering it. this leads to dramatically lower damage and response time to enemy attack.

Sarmach.1547:

I don’t know what everyone else’s rotation is but I use mirror blade then the iZerker so this change didn’t make a noticeable difference.

that makes no sense at all. regardless of the order you use skills, it means you have to wait 2 seconds before you can shatter, or you get no benefit out of using a cooldown.

i love how ANET have atleast acknowledged and responded to every major bug introduced in the patch in these forums, EXCEPT for the mesmer bugs.

the visual appears, but it doesn’t actually do any damage.

not a big deal

no

KamikazKid.4872:

wads.5730:

lets see, you joined magurma months ago, as a GOON. then switched to CD the first time mag faced them and got destroyed. then you make a LF guild post asking to join a CD guild.

what server you hopping to after CD gets kitten kitten in T3?

LOL! You obviously think I’m trash if you think I was in Goon Squad. I was on Maguma during Maguuma v DB v DH. Your continued insistence on my fair-weather playing is quite amusing like it’s some kind of insult to not be SERIUS BIZNESS about this game.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/11-2-2012Dragonbrand-Maguuma-and-Darkhaven/page/3#post653861

It’s been a good fight so far, I’m a maguuma goon, and it seems like anywhere I go there’s at least 5-10 darkhaven, you guys are really taking the fight to us.

noticed the same, however it seems to last only about 2-3 hours from 6-7pm server time.

it also seems to be regional, friends on the east coast dont seem to be having the same lag.

maybe its a routing issue. you have comcast too?

you can sample a minority of a population and still get a good sampling of the whole. however in this case with the forum population, you WONT get a good sampling of all players that play the game.

because the majority of players who are playing the game and don’t have any issues won’t be making posts on the forums. as evidence by the overwhelming negative posts on ANY forums of ANY game.