apharma.3741

I had a friend with 6 of them on and the mist effect stacked but I'm not sure the colour changed much. Was difficult to tell with all the visual crap in general coming off people who stack this kind of stuff. Meanwhile, the OP dies of shock that someone could afford 6 of them on launch xD

I already bought 2, I'd have bought a 3rd, but I'm not really sold on the infusion tbh. Some different looks would be nice, or at least colours.

I think a better question is should classes be doing as much damage from range as we see them doing? I'm all for people being able to one shot you if you don't have protection and high toughness if they need to take some risk to do it, but from ranged when you can just run away and try again as part of a swarm is just boring no matter the class or its downtime.

More like a minor chaos storm? Honestly, I rarely play mesmer (in WvW) any more because other classes are just so much better, easier and have more competitive options. I can play ele and I have several strong roaming options, support, hybrid, damage and all pretty tough and some zerg options. I can play ranger and I have builds for different damage types, support, hybrid roaming, zergs, pretty much everything as long as it's druid or soulbest. Engineer, guardian, necro, and rev have tons of options for everything and all they really lack is moa (core engy has this though) and good stealth access which isn't as good as it once was because of all the sic'em rangers and marked. Why would I want to play the poor man's [insert class here]? I guess I can play invuln/block spam if I feel like just kittening everyone off.

I love how the 2 thief specs that can abuse stealth are top by a huge margin, meanwhile specs that are actually awful to fight with incredibly low skill and super high reward are barely voted for. Soulbeast and Druid are probably the worst specs to fight in the entire game mode outside of zergs and almost nothing comes close to how utterly broken they are.

I tried to sell this games PvP to someone but they didn't like the $600 asking price.

Force solo queue and some people stop playing because if you can't play with friends what's the point of multiplayer? Allow team queues only and you're likely to make it more exploitable as the only way to make a team of 5 without a solo is 2+3. Force solo above a certain rank we tried and a lot of people above that rank hated it and played less and the rank wasn't that high either. There isn't a good solution that doesn't have major problems, that's also without mentioning how soloQ actually diminishes your ability to climb to the top in randomly generated team based games. You stick rank 1 on one team then ranks 9 and 10 on the opposite and fill the rest with no-name plats/gold. Rank 1 loses and with it comes a ton of rating all because those 3 were the only top 10 players on for the last 15 minutes. You would need a major algorithm overhaul (matchmaking AND rating distribution) to account for this. Even then I think it'd be a case of be careful what you wish for. All of this is a symptom of the real problem though. The death of competitive gaming in GW2 and a lot of that falls squarely at ANet's feet as they don't enforce their own rules on RMT, account sharing and the more egregious manipulation.

GoB is very easy to get, you do your WvW dailies that you can be bothered doing like cap a ruin, capture 2 spawn camps, spend badges etc and use the potions to complete GoB reward track. You can even get quite a few of the rewards for being mostly afk flipping a camp every 5 minutes on a Saturday like what many are doing right now. It is extremely low effort and mostly PvE already. This cannot be said of getting things that have PvE aspects like map completion, PvE events and story completion even if you use the reward tracks to get most of the materials. Thankfully newer legendaries are 4 maps but you often have to deal with currencies that are prohibitively expensive as they are time gated.

Honestly they should do this every 5 minutes, for every server, in both regions!

Even some of the best players around think mirage should get 2 dodges in all game modes and it's not like they have great vigor access....

If winds of chaos healed allies then yes, but it doesn't, it gives some OK boons but nothing classes don't already vomit out.

You would have to ask those people what they mean as it's subjective. The reward is to feel good about doing something more complicated, it used to be you had higher (even if it was marginal) dps but that's kinda gone out the window at the moment. I firmly believe that "low intensity" builds should exist but that they shouldn't be as effective as those that are more complicated. For DPS I feel they should be ~80% of what a more complex build would achieve, fine to complete content but you're not setting any records. It's your bread and butter weekly clear without dying or drama. What do I consider complex? I consider complex rotations as those that require specific conditions and considerations about skill usage. That can be where you need to activate skills from behind, where a skill might move you in a way that could be dangerous or lock you into an animation for a certain time. Other aspects would be when you have skills where the they're a finisher and you generate a field to boost their damage so should use them in the field to combo higher dps etc. Weaver in particular can be quite complicated due to the lower cool down on attunement swap giving greater access to the 26 weapon skills they can have so you have to manage the order where if you're 0.5s off or you fat finger the wrong attunement you can end up dropping dps considerably. It's very punishing for mistakes.

This isn't the whole story or entirely correct. Moa used to last 10s, could be cast facing away from your target (common tactic was to blink behind them as you cast to hide the cast) and the signet icon didn't appear over the mesmer. Before Chrono and the nerfs, core mesmer would use it, but after chrono and then the nerf to duration, needing to be facing and then the signet animation it was used only on chrono because only chrono could use continuum split to reduce the cool down of moa to be viable. In other words it's been on a ~90s-100s cool down with chrono for a long time, the difference is that now chrono can double cast moa and ALWAYS have moa ready for the next continuum split, while before you wouldn't have moa ready for the next continuum split if you double cast it. The problem isn't exclusive to moa or elites, though. Double gravity well is every bit as unfun as double moa, the only difference is if you have 2-3 stunbreaks ready or perma stab you're less likely to have a problem. However do we want a game state where you have to run from a chrono fight if you don't have 2 stunbreaks off cool down or perma stab? The latter doesn't sound fun to anyone. The problem is more pronounced with elites as elites tend to be the most powerful skills balanced by cool down which CS circumvents, and they work well with CS. Other skills can be every bit as annoying to use twice in a row, imagine a support build using illusion of life twice, effectively nullifying any advantage to downing enemies in a team fight? Fortunately most mesmer utilities either don't work very well with CS or they're so weak it really doesn't matter....but the risk is always there with an ill-thought out buff.

Honestly, I can't remember, I know it sort of died off after asking so might not have registered for you. I'm aware of all the stuff that's happened and how the balance team seems to be able to improve other classes but similar aspects on mesmer get left for years. The alacrity nerf to hit down the current bunker chrono and untamed but leaving catalyst in it's still very strong state is questionable. I guess if there is explicit or easily inferred bias towards mesmer it's likely hidden. I do know one Twitch streamer was instrumental in the dominance of necro and toning down of thief and mesmer for years. That many of the players in the PvP section of the private discord have been making "good suggestions" that favour certain classes and match ups that may not be beneficial to classes many people dislike and don't understand. I can have a hunt and see if I do have the PvE stuff, but honestly I feel the comment of "I put alacrity onto staff because I'm bad at the game" was blown way out of proportion. Especially if you look at mechanist and the absurdity of how it provides everything so easily.

What is more telling is how quickly untamed and chrono have been nerfed as opposed to catalyst. Edit: For that confused person, it took months for catalyst to get toned down to it's current iteration, while untamed and chrono are adjusted pretty fast and weren't dominating to the same extent as catalyst was.

I did see some of the leaks, I think I saved a copy of the PvE leaks but that was mostly to do with buffing staff because a dev found axe harder to play or something. I didn't see anything that suggested a competitive game mode bias against mesmer other than what was warranted at the time.

It is kind of astounding how quickly this is addressed while catalyst was running rampant for months and is still in a league of it's own for duelling in PvP. I've asked @Xenesis.6389 if he can DM me a link to the proof before and it's open to anyone but no-one has been able to prove it. That isn't me saying it's not true, just there's a world of difference between documented evidence and general behaviour that suggests bias.

Same way many people become good in WvW, bring a lot more people to the fight.

It's worth paying attention to how Hizen rates the builds and what specifically his goals are, open world mainly achievement objectives which tend to focus more on events and big damage sponge targets like bounties and champions. To get the highest ranking a class has to be able to: DPS. Self heal. Self buff. Sustain this. This is why mirage is legendary along with reaper and mechanist. What it does not account for is cleave or ability to plough through mobs, especially in story content or big meta chains which are designed to be done by lots of people where the champion might take 20 mins and a ton of mobs to get to. A reaper will be a lot better here as it has a wealth of AoE high damage and cleave especially in reaper shroud while great for champions. Mechanist and mirage would be less effective here due to condition focus and ramp up of time, they're still good it's just reaper really is in a class of it's own across the breadth of open world, living world, meta chains and story instances.

What about, we can exchange all those emblems of the avenger and whatever the other one is called for a participation extension? Can even make it a potion you double click when you think you need to sustain your participation level because that guy just won't stop attacking a minstrels FB as you both embrace the eternity of boredom the fight will become. Lord knows I got no other use for the things and WvW just keeps vomiting them at me.

I remember saying exactly this in regards to supports and how they should all be differentiated so they compete within the support role but have different strengths and weaknesses. It's a major issue across the game with elite specs though where they all compete for the same role, often in the same way and some even have different specs on the same class competing for this! Mindblowing. 🤯

Ignoring Spinal Shivers again, the BASE animation of ray of judgement is readable but that is more to do with the freedom of animation a focus gives you. There aren't many weapon skills with 1/2s cast time skills with a good highly telegraphed and differentiated animations especially on pistol which is kind of limited in what you can do with it. Check out the pistol skills and you'll see most use cast time to differentiate or elongate animations/skills. That's what I'm saying they should do here as there's not a huge amount you can really do with pistols and some offhands in general. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pistol Shatter "one shot" has always been a problem, CS shatter is part of the topic being discussed right now, only difference is Shorts didn't need it in the video for 2 rounds. Most elite specs are well balanced compared to their core as core is often nerfed to accommodate the multiple elite specs for every class and is usually weaker. It's been a major gripe since elite specs came out and reinforces the argument against CS and keeping distortion, not for it. The state of game is that elite specs should be stronger, going off historical treatment of elite specs. Chronophantasma, yes we're in agreement because double cast mechanics are a problem and generally should be removed or toned down/have a drawback. Just not sure how you see it with chrono phantasma but not CS. SoI was a problem in WvW, so was SoE and you could see people using the aftercast trick with CS in PvP. Even removing chronophantasma it was still a problem as you could triple cast phantasms very easily. The nerf was justified not just because of CS but CS made the problem far worse than it needed to be. Some problems do have multiple constituents. Alacrity is less of an issue as it can be controlled reasonably easily (boon duration, tied to otherwise not good skills) and the benefit is seen over time, not front loaded like CS is. Generally cool down reduction and partial refunding is less of an issue and can be used as a reward compared to full resets as full resets have the potential for game breaking abuse of back to back skill use. 100% alacrity uptime and making it a 33% CDR is probably a bit much, but best not to start on that.

Honestly, yeah, I might be giving them too much credit and it really is far too similar to GW1. Does it hurt me to be optimistic?

Spinal Shivers has a 1s cast time, plenty of time for a good animation, my point was that magic bullet can't have a good, smooth and readable animation at 1/2s. Ray of Judgement 3/4s too. Double shatter burst isn't only happening in 2v2's and isn't recent and you know this, most people know mesmer has always had one of the highest burst combos and still does. If you're going to be pedantic about elite skills and utility (I meant anything reset by CS that gives you an advantage outside of CS) then I will too. You said in another reply about removing distortion from chrono as a trade off. They removed distortion from chrono (technically it was still on CS) and it made the class almost unplayable in competitive. You might say "Ah but it lost IP during that time" it did, IP was then added and it was still not competitive so you have demonstrated that your ideas and opinion is awful because it was done and it was awful. You might have meant remove distortion and do something else but you didn't say that. Most mesmer utilities were poo and they can't be better because of CS. Demonstrated by whenever something was reworked to make it good on core it was nerfed when chrono abused it. Phantasms were nerfed despite chronophantasma having 50% reduced damage and daze them for 1s. Signet of inspiration was nerfed multiple times. Signet of Ether due to CS shenanigans. Moa was nerfed to be useless without using it with CS. When using cooldowns as a balance method you have to be VERY careful with other mechanics that reduce or circumvent it's cooldown. In the Quora question answered by real devs is a great example of how LoL did a URF mode which made people realise how bad this kind of thing can be. https://www.quora.com/Why-is-a-cool-down-important-to-implement-into-a-video-game-during-development https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CooldownManipulation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJRwE6SXw_w

The way I see it, rev resourcing is the opposite to thief where thief has resource based weapon cool downs, rev has resource based heal, utility and elite cooldowns but ANet actually learned that letting a class use skills back to back to back is broken. So they added some short cool downs which is good. What they didn't do that they should have done is remove energy costs from weapon skills as these are largely cool down balanced now. This would probably fix a lot of the energy cost problems with rev while making it a lot easier to balance through cost as you're only balancing vs other slot skills and a more consistent expenditure.