Guild Wars 2

Tips for Specific Powers
Some of the powers may seem useless or unbeatable, but some careful thought has gone into each, and for every Power, there is a counter – usually held by the opposing God. The four-piece Powers are intentionally strong. The game is balanced such that winning is difficult, but not unreachable, and the offensive four-piece Powers are your best shot.
Shining Bulwark ruining your day? Remember that it only prevents placement of your pieces. It will not stop Furious Hammer from smashing an inevitable win into dust.
Wild Growth seems an easy setup to victory, but if Grip of Entropy forces you to skip the turn you were going to use to win, that victory will turn to ashes in your mouth quickly.

Be careful with Kormir’s powers. Both Kormir and Lyssa’s powers are doubled-edged, and can end up hurting you more than helping if you’re not careful. Judgment can seriously bite you in the kitty if you keep cycling it as it is not optional. (If you’re wondering, it is possible to win the game with Kormir, but you have to be sneaky.) If your opponent controls Kormir and you’re worried about a queued Judgment ruining your win-combo, try using Echoing Laughter to force Judgment early, then using the remaining pieces to set up your win in the same turn.

On that note, it is important to mention that Powers activate immediately. If you are placing or removing pieces with a Power that does so multiple times, any Powers activated interrupt the sequence with immediate action before the sequence continues.
(Example: Bill has three with Melandru and three with Grenth. He places one with Melandru, and on his next turn places his first Wild Growh piece with Grenth. Early Grave activates immediately, and he wipes Lyssa free of pieces, then he can choose his second Wild Growth piece.)
The exception to this rule is with other sequence Powers. In this case, the sequence Power activates after the first sequence is done.
(Example: Jenny has three with Lyssa and three with Melandru. She places one with Melandru, and on her next turn places her first Wild Growth piece with Lyssa. Echoing Laughter activates only after Jenny places her second Wild Growth piece.)

Brimstone Effigy may seem underwhelming, but it is the only Power in the game that can transcend the rule for placing pieces in their appropriate domain. If you take your opponent’s last Dwayna piece and put it with Kormir, it not only ruins his chance of victory with Dwayna, but it does so until he can get his piece back from where it’s stuck with Kormir – easier said than done.

Closing and Permissions
This game is still new, and may need minor tweaking, but I believe it’s mostly solid and balanced. I will keep checking this space if you wish to ask questions, post suggestions, ‘house rules’, or strategies!

Feel free to play this game either in- or out-of-game, but if you do so, please tell me how your game went! Either PM me on these forums, or send me a tell in-game! If you post the rules of Six Gods’ Wrath outside of the game itself, please refer back to this original post, or credit me with my account name.

Enjoy, and happy gaming! :)

Tips and Strategy
If you’ve paid attention, you have have figured out that the game is impossible to win by normal placement. If you somehow manage to place five pieces in a domain uncontested, your opponent can block your win by placing one piece in that domain on his next turn, forcing it to reset. Therefore, the only way to win is to set up chain reactions with the God Powers. Picture Connect Four, or even advanced Tic-Tac-Toe play. If you brute force your way there, victory will elude you. Try being creative, and setting up a game-winning combination of Powers, as it is doubtful that your opponent will let you set up a win using only one. Think ahead, and and try to plan your next moves before you get backed into a corner.
(Example: Jim has four with Lyssa, four with Grenth, and one with Balthazar. Mary, however, has one with Lyssa to block. Jim puts a piece with Balthazar, and uses Furious Hammer to remove Mary’s piece with Lyssa, which then activates Echoing Laughter. He uses this to place one piece with Grenth, one with Lyssa, and the other two randomly. This brings his totals to five with both Lyssa and Grenth. Unless she has a power handy, Mary cannot stop Jim from winning on his next turn.)

The observant will also have noticed that three of the Gods have more offensive powers, and other three are more defensive. Grenth, Balthazar and Kormir’s powers focus on controlling the flow of the game, while Dwayna, Melandru and Lyssa’s powers are about moving into winning positions. While it may seem like gunning straight for Dwayna, Melandru and Lyssa is the best way to win, leaving the controlling powers uncontested will see you quickly losing footing. Striking a balance between offense and defense will ensure you have some control over the game while you vie for your winning combo. Remember, however, that the Opposing Gods rule makes this delicate balance even more treacherous. To help you visualize, opposing Gods are placed on opposite sides of the board.

In the opening moves of the game, it may be tempting to immediately block the first domain your opponent chooses. Remember, however, that she cannot place a piece in that domain until her third turn, so you won’t have to face a ‘two-power’ just yet. Try instead to spread control over the board – if the first four pieces placed all go to different domains, I assure you the game will be an interesting one.

For an easier (or faster) game, try playing with 2 pieces per turn instead of 1! This is also a fun ‘house rule’ if you are playing in teams.

Advanced Rules
Opposing Gods
Note: This rule can easily sneak up on you, and requires a careful eye to keep in check, so it is possible to skip it for beginners.

Each God has his or her equal and opposite. If at any time one player controls the same number of pieces in play for two opposing Gods, all those pieces are removed from the board. This happens regardless of the state of control of a domain (i.e., mixed or unmixed.)
Dwayna <-> Balthazar
Lyssa <-> Kormir
Grenth <-> Melandru

God Powers
These powers are what will help you win the game. If roleplaying, this list is what is printed on the reference sheet, as you are not expected to memorize all of the powers right away.
God Powers activate when you own two (2) or four (4) tokens respectively in a domain. They only activate once per move, but not limited to activation on your normal turn. In addition, Powers only activate when you own complete control of a domain. Even one of your opponent’s pieces in a domain will nullify any Power activation.
God Powers are not optional unless specified as such.

Some examples for clarification:

• Player 1 has four uncontested pieces in Kormir from last turn, and places another piece in Lyssa. Kormir’s ‘four-power’ does not activate again.
• Player 2 activates a Power which lets her place a piece, and she chooses to place it in Balthazar, bringing her total in Balthazar to an uncontested two. Balthazar’s ‘two-power’ then activates.
• Player 1 places a piece in Melandru which brings his total to four, however player 2 already owns one piece in Melandru. No Power activates.

Lyssa
2: Mirror Mask. Place two (2) pieces in their respective domains, one of yours and one of your opponent’s.
4: Echoing Laughter. Place four (4) pieces of your choice belonging to either you or your opponent in their respective domains. Limit one (1) per domain. If you choose to place all four pieces as your opponent’s, she skips her next turn.

Melandru
2: Sheltered Roots. These two (2) pieces can no longer be removed for the rest of the game, except by Early Grave. (Optional)
4: Wild Growth. On your next turn, place two (2) pieces instead of one (1).

Dwayna
2: Healing Touch. Place one (1) piece into its respective domain.
4: Shining Bulwark. For the next two (2) turns after this one, your opponent cannot place any pieces in a domain of your choosing.

Grenth
2: Grip of Entropy. Your opponent skips his next turn.
4: Early Grave. Remove all pieces from any domain. (Optional)

Kormir
2: Mercy. All domains (excluding Kormir’s) containing fewer than three (3) pieces total are reduced to one (1) piece, which belongs to the first player who laid claim to that domain this game. (Optional)
4: Judgment. All domains (including Kormir’s) containing more than three (3) pieces total are reduced to one (1) piece, which belongs to the first player who laid claim to that domain this game.

Balthazar
2: Furious Hammer. Remove one (1) piece from any domain.
4: Brimstone Effigy. Place any colour piece in any domain. (Optional)

Hello, all!

So, the other day I decided that I needed a board game for roleplaying purposes, and instead of going with something cliched and possibly non-lore friendly, I created one from scratch. It at first started simply as a name and basic idea, and then when people expressed interest in actually playing it, I had to come up with some rules!
After I hatched the idea, I played it a few times to get the hang of it and threw in some minor tweaks. The result should be a fully-functioning strategy board game, and I thought I’d share my creation! With roleplaying in mind, I kept the layout simple to make it easy to play while RPing, so all you will need is a scrap of paper and a writing utensil. A pen and a pencil will make it easier, but one or the other will suffice.

Layout and Set-up
To start, use a pen to draw a circle on a scrap of paper. Bisect the circle down the middle, then draw two more bisections, splitting the circle into six roughly equal pie pieces. These pieces will now be referred to as ‘domains’.
In each domain, write the name (or an abbreviation, if space is short) of each of the six human Gods. Start at any point and go clockwise, naming them in the following order.

• Grenth
• Kormir
• Balthazar
• Melandru
• Lyssa
• Dwayna
  The actual location of the Gods does not matter, only their relative position to one another.

That’s it! The board is finished!

If roleplaying, the board itself is usually a small cube or short rectangular box. On the top side is a circular pattern emblazoned in six colours. The patterns vary from set to set, some more stylized than others, but all include the six roughly equal domains colour-coded for their gods. Dwayna, blue; Grenth, green; Kormir, orange; Balthazar, red; Melandru, yellow; Lyssa, purple. In each coloured domain there are six holes.
The set also comes with six dozen coloured pieces. The pieces sit comfortably in the holes much like Chinese Checkers, with 3/4 of the piece resting atop the hole for ease of manipulation. There are twelve pieces of each colour, split into two equal groups of a light and a dark shade. (e.g., there are six light green and six dark green Grenth pieces.)
Finally, there is a reference sheet, usually either laminated or carved on a plaque. Printed on it are the God Powers covered below.

Basic Rules
The game is traditionally for two players, but two teams may play, as well.
Flip a coin to determine the starting player. He picks his preferred shade for the game (using either the lighter or the darker pieces) and places any one piece in its corresponding domain. The second player then places her piece in the same fashion, and so on. A player cannot place a piece in the same domain twice in succession, but she can alternate between two domains. Use your pencil to keep track of the pieces. An efficient way to do this is to use the players’ initials to indicate a piece. You will be removing some of these pieces and later replacing them, so the pencil is handy to keep things neat. If you drew the ‘board’ in pen, you can erase the ‘pieces’ without disturbing the ‘board’.
The object of the game is to fully control any one domain by having all six of your pieces in it. If any domain is filled fully with mixed pieces, (belonging to both players), the domain is reset, and all pieces are removed.
That is the entirety of basic gameplay! The intricacies come in once you start placing pieces and building towards a win.

Pyroatheist.9031:

You should strongly consider using pistol phantasms because they are the only ones that are not bugged with the aoe regen from phantasms trait. Since your Plan is go get them out, and leave them out, having the only phantasms that don’t bug is greatly beneficial. Additionally, with illusionary membrane and 2+ pistol Phantasms, you will have 100% uptime of protection.

Thanks for mentioning this. I tested this, and noticed something strange. While the iDuelist does seem to refresh Phantasmal Healing more often than iSwordsman or iWarlock, having two iDuelists out does not seem to make any difference than standing next to one iDuelist and one iWarlock. With one Warlock alone the buff isn’t applied fast enough to stack with itself, and with one iDuelist the Illusionary Membrane duration isn’t long enough to stack. However with two of either, both buffs stack duration, but they both cap out at about 20s for Prot and 32s for Regen, regardless of the combination of which two you have – as long as one of them is a Duelist. However, if you stand near two iWarlocks, Prot falls off for 2-3s each time, but I got Regen to stack to about 46s. Strange! I suppose it just has to do with when you summon them and how the timers sync.

Either way, though, good tip about the Regen bug. Personally, I keep a sword, focus, and pistol all in my bags for varying situations

Also, I most definitely have a Water rune on my scepter main hand, but I haven’t been able to test the numbers on it yet to see if it’s viable. Certainly better than most other options, however.

Oh! And to those wanting to try out the spec, I will share notes about how I found myself being most effective in battle. If you manage to hold aggro long enough to tank something, you really shouldn’t be dragging the mob around to squishies to heal them unless they’re already stacked in melee range. So if you are tanking and you’re taking a lot of damage, rotate your mantras. Remember that finishing the charge is what heals you, so feel free to blow your mantra charges on nothing if you need another heal. If you’re not tanking, get your Phants out and keep an eye on your party’s health meters for heals. In the mean time, I find because I have no condition damage my staff damage is not as good as the Scepter damage, though remember that this pumps out clones. So if you have time, blow Mind Wrack and/or Cry of Frustration with full Clone sets, then get your Phants out and go back to healing. Try not to explode your Phants unless you’re using them for the heal, or the mob is about dead obviously.

Stupid semicolon messed with the link. Here it is again, fixed: http://bit.ly/RTpsTh
Also edited the original post to fix it there, too.

Edit: Furthermore, clicking that link from here seems to mess up ANet’s forwarding script, so copy/paste it till that’s working properly.

<cont.>
With all of that defense and healing come out the wazoo, I found I was able to actually tank anything that could be conceivably tanked – obviously some encounters are designed to be more punishing than others, but by rotating my mantras I could keep myself healthy while just about anything beat on me, as long as there weren’t too many interrupts – and if there were, I switched to Mantra of Concentration. Popping Power Break just before recharging a Mantra almost ensures the heal will activate. Otherwise you can just about face-tank anything, while keeping an eye on your friends’ health bars and running over to them to give them some health when necessary. I found it more helpful to keep Mantra of Pain uncharged, since the heal is more useful than the 1.4k damage from both charges.

Anyway I am thoroughly enjoying this spec and felt I should share it with the community! Try it out! It’s so much fun to tank the crap out of stuff as a ‘squishy’ Mesmer

So I was playing around with Mesmer builds and felt like putting together a build that was more tanky / support-based in order to help my guild through instances and such without just melting faces. I had a lot of fun with GS+S/F power shatter build, but being incredibly squishy it also taught me how to kite and stay alive in sticky situations. I figured I might be able to put that to good use as a support Mesmer.
Problem is, much of the Inspiration tree (which has the +healing boost) isn’t very useful. Or so I thought! After looking through everything and doing some research in the Heart of the Mists, I settled on this build: http://bit.ly/RTpsTh
Wearing mostly healing/toughness gear with a few pieces of Vitality on it for some extra health, I’m rocking 1,128 Healing power. With the full 25 stacks from the Life rune, I’m well over 1,550 Healing power.

Who the heck cares about healing power on a Mesmer!? You’re no doubt thinking. We have no healing! And I would have agreed with you up until yesterday, until I started testing Restorative Mantras. All I can say is… Wow. With 1,500+ healing power, every time I charge a Mantra (not use a charge) I pump out 3khp in a fairly large radius – about 10m around myself. In addition, with the full Dwayna set, every time I use a healing ability – both charging AND using a charge counts with this – I put out Regeneration for 5s on a cooldown of 10s. As you can see, I bring Mantra of Recovery for not only the Healing Mantra proc, but the 3x regeneration potential with the Dwayna 6-set. Not only this, but Mantra of Pain has a ONE SECOND cooldown on both use and recharge. Which means I can pump out 3khp every 5-6 seconds if I’m spamming nothing but Mantra of Pain. And as you know, Mantras can be activated in between other abilities without interrupting them, so I can easily do other things while blowing my Power Spike charges. The downside is, of course, that all Mantras have a cast time of 4.25 seconds, which is honestly the only thing keeping this spec from being insanely OP. Still, even in ridiculously mobile fights such as Alpha of Crucible of Eternity, I was able to recast Mantra of Pain between his circle-spam.

So yes, with gear set fully to max Compassion, you won’t be doing a whole lot of damage, but that’s not really an issue because we’re a support spec. However, you can still put out some non-trivial damage. I chose Staff and Scepter/Sword for defense and for some nice Phantasms. iWarden is much better damage than iSwordsman for sure, but iWarden has the unfortunate side effect of being completely immobile – iSwordsman will follow your target around. I also grabbed Persisting Images to beef up my Phants a little, the point here being to pump out three Phantasms and leave them there to do damage passively while I run around like a crazy person spamming my Mantras and keeping people healthy. Restorative Illusions is also there in case you need a quick burst of healing, and both iSwordsman and iWarlock do a good job of keeping out of trouble so replacing them is not a full-time job. Warlock does better damage with a full group and lots of conditions, but Swordsman attacks faster. You could also pick Pistol as your offhand, as Magic Bullet and iDuelist are swell, but I liked having two blocks with Scepter/Sword.

Your sigils are up to you, but the Life sigil I found to be indispensable. Water would be some nice extra healing but I have yet to test its numbers, and Energy is helpful since you won’t have any Vigor going out. For Utils, I took at least Mantra of Pain and Recovery, and found I wanted a third to rotate around, as well. Concentration or Resolve are both helpful in different situations, but Resolve is helpful more than Conc seems to be. Your third Util is also a wild card, but I find Blink to be just too powerful not to bring. Coupled with Phase Retreat, it makes it very easy to get where you need to go, or GTFO when necessary to preserve your Life sigil stacks. Now you may have noticed the Chaos 30 trait slot is blank. This is not a mistake. Unfortunately, both Prismatic Understanding and Bountiful Interruption are rather underwhelming, so you have a choice. Currently I have Debilitating Dissipation in there for lack of anything better, but you could alternatively forgo the last 10 points in Chaos and put them instead in Dueling for Mantra Mastery. Sharper Images and Chaotic Transference are equally useful in this spec (though Sharper Images might be nice if you picked Pistol o/h), so you’re really deciding between 100 Toughness and the extra few seconds of cooldown on Mantras.

Clones that crit for 0 put a stack of bleed on, too Enjoy!

While this strikes me as indeed a very simple solution, it is not very elegant. You’re talking about reducing the Mesmer from the artful juggling act of Phantasms and Clones into a basic pet class (of which there are already two options, Necro and Ranger.) Phantasms are very powerful. They do incredible damage if set up correctly, potentially last the entire fight, and best of all, they take 0 micromanagement once they are summoned. These ’pro’s are balanced by the ‘con’ of the Phantasms being squishy, easily killed, and bound to a target. To do what you’re proposing would require some serious nerfing to get them back in line with balance, and frankly, it doesn’t really solve any of the problems Mesmers currently have which are, in my opinion, minor.

Decent suggestion, but I don’t want my Mesmer to be mashed into a square hole. I’m happy being a round peg. Or an octangular peg, for that matter.

First off, let me state that I have an RP guild with which I am currently quite happy, so I cannot represent your guild 100% of the time. Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll tell you a little about what I am searching for.

Ideally I would like to join a competitive but somewhat casual group for sPvP or perhaps WvW. I am willing to play often, either at random times or on a fixed schedule, but I most likely will only represent during matches or when requested specifically.

If you’d like to know more about me or would like to contact me, feel free to speak to me in-game or shoot me an email.

Good luck and happy adventuring!

Your Mesmer build has a minor problem. Dueling trait Empowering Mantras is now XI – meaning you need 30 points in Dueling to activate it. Those 5 points can be taken out of Illusions, however, since elongated confusion is useless in a Mantra build.