Mungo Zen.9364

This is an important factor here. Anet could create a trait which simply says 'Every 5 seconds buff 5s Alac (or Quick) in 360 degrees' and then you just take your boon provider and sit in the middle of the squad and do nothing different. Like what is the actual point of all the work some professions need to invest into providing a boon? There is absolutely no payoff for being a good boon provider. There is also not much of a punishment for being a bad boon provider. Either you do it or you don't. To the OP, I am not a fan of your suggestion. Quick and Alac should appear in this game in 2 methods only: 1 - Self buffed only. In this case we would want to create builds that can self-buff 24/7 Quick or Alac to create unique playstyles. 2 - 5 Player Short Duration Long CD Buff. Used to pump up your team for burn phases such as after CC is broken. Having Quick and Alac 24/7 in PvE is such a bad choice and I hope Anet finds the stones to go back to the drawing board on this one. and, if you think it is too late to back out of how they have implemented Quick and Alac, this is software, they can do anything they want with it, include right this mistake they have made.

The various Profession Builds should be designed and balanced around the excitement or fun that it creates. I get it, that is rather nebulose concept, but consider that the profession mechanics are based upon a style of play, not a numeric value. Players might argue that being strongest is fun and exciting, and it is. But then why doesn't everyone play Firebrand or Mechanist or whatever the FOTM Meta builds are? Sure, lots and lots of players gravitated towards these professions, because they were easy to use and effective to play in multiple game modes. But we also see a lot of players stay with other professions regardless of how powerful swapping to a new profession might be. I'd suggest that players who don't follow the FOTM specs are likely playing their chosen profession because they enjoy the themes, including the way they play. Yet a common complaint we see on the forums is profession playstyles being warped to meet balancing needs. "My character used to do this thing, but then they nerfed my profession" oh they didn't nerf it, they changed it to fit within the some arbitrary framework of balance, at the cost of how you play the build. Your chosen profession is probably more balanced today, but it plays like garbage, lacks excitement or fun, because how we play appears to be less important than the results of play. An example of this, the wide ranging removal of Quick and Alac on almost every skill. then beefing up the boon share by augmenting a handful of traits and skills. Yet on a profession like Chrono, which is questionably capable as a Quick or Alac provider today, you simply do not have the ability to play the profession like you did pre EoD. You cannot self-buff Alac and make use of the Trait Improved Alac without actually being an Alac Support build. This has made both the trait and the build options for Chrono more limited than previously. This happened across several professions in different ways and has changed the way we play these professions in many cases as a less fun or less exciting alternative to what we had previously. So again, I believe the balance team should be focusing on fun and exciting ways to play each profession or eSpec and leaning into those unique or special themes. Once you have established an enjoyable set of mechanics, the numbers (APM, DPS, Boon Share, Heal etc) can follow suit.

‘Shatters are a gimmick that need to have damage removed so they aren’t a gimmick’ Can you expand on why you think shatters are a gimmick and what you would do to update them to make them not a gimmick?

Most any Condi Virtuoso build should be strong enough for any Story or AP hunting you want to do. You may prefer using. Chaos variant over Dueling as it offers a bit more sustain. Sample Chaos Condi Virt

The issue I have with this is eSpecs can play very differently and I don't necessarily see the difference between asking someone to change Professions or eSpecs. Like, Chrono DPS and Chrono Support are similar to each other but, totally different when compared to Virtuoso DPS and Mirage DPS and Support. Saying that, I do not support giving all Professions/eSpecs equal access to Boon/Support roles. I believe it would be healthier for the game and its players to have a handful of eSpecs that are focused on support rather than trying to make it fit everyone across the board. Like if I want to choose a Support or Heal role, I should choose the profession and eSpec that can do that, not expect to modify what I am already playing (I look at Ranger and Druid as an example of this. Druid is obviously intended to be Support first DPS second). If the idea was to give all professions and eSpecs equal access I would suggest each Profession have a Core Trait Tree revamped to include all Support. Imagine having the GM traits in this tree being "Provide Stab" - "Provide Alacrity" - "Provide Quick" in some form, and if your squad needs you to fulfill that role, you take the appropriate trait, nerf your DPS a little but presto, you're doing the thing. I also feel that Boons and Support in this game are in an odd place. There is no reward for being good at fulfilling a support role. Like being good at giving Alacrity or Healing doesn't really change the way you play, you are still stacked up pressing buttons on CD, maybe waiting to pop that CC Skill or Stun Breaker. In other games choosing to fulfill a support role came with unique challenges and rewards for being good at it. It's coming from those games that makes me look at eSpecs like the Druid and think, we need more Support first eSpecs in the game that can potentially fulfill several Support roles by changing Traits. Chrono is an example of Anet trying to give one eSpec access to either Alac or Quick, and I think it's an interesting starting point for other Support focused eSpecs to grow from.

OW Condi Virt is fine. Not amazing but if you enjoy the style of play it can be pretty fun. However, regardless of what profession you play do make use of Jade Bot Core to increase your vitality and Jade Offensive and Defensive boons. It makes any build smoother to play when you have 30 seconds of each boon when entering combat.

You have posted in this thread incorrect information about how Condi Damage and Condi Duration work. You also dismissed poster responses about how it works and used all caps to show how you didn't believe other posters here. In fact, knowing that Salt Mode tends to be a bit abrasive I was actually trying to give you access to all of the information you needed before you well, started ranting incorrectly and potentially incoherently. You get the Wiki links as they are publicly curated and well baked information that is fairly hard to dispute. The second link directs specifically to understanding what the breakpoints are and how they are calculated, in response to you clearly showing that you do not understand the information that was being discussed in this thread and using all caps to ask for more information. For real though, no one here is out to make your life harder. You asked a question and we tried to help. That you didn't appreciate the help, meh, I hope you enjoy the game.

Calculating Breakpoints A wiki article on the subject that should explain the topic well enough for you.

Ehhh it sounds like you may be mistaken on how Condi Duration works in GW2. Condi Duration adds time at the same current Damage Per Tick. If you add 10% Condi Duration, each application of a Condition will do 10% more damage, assuming that your Condition lasts the full duration**. It doesn't make the Damage Per Tick weaker in any way, you are simply getting more backloaded DPS at the same rate. GW2 Wiki Condi Duration ** Do read the article as it best explains the math behind this.

It appears that the trait updates didn’t make the patch notes. Anyone find any other undocumented changes to Mesmer or (if we care) other professions?

Updates to Distortion look, well, unexpectedly good? They even updated the Traits to go along with them and I can't see what they nerfed if they did anything. I did notice that using Bountiful Disillusionment the tooltip for Bladeturn Requiem still says it gives Regen but in game it correctly triggers to gives you Resistance as the trait suggests. Otherwise, waiting for the patch notes to happen....

You can play this game as casually as you like. If you want to focus on map completion, or story, or achievements or anything else you can get into it and enjoy it. Where you will have to play at the pace of other players is when engaging in larger events like Map Metas. You may find the learning curve for some aspects of the game (such as learning a new Meta event) not that casual but most of the game can be played on easy mode after you understand it a bit. Where you may possibly feel ‘less casual’ is organized game modes like Fractals and Strikes. That said a huge amount of the game can be completed solo and at your own pace. You can follow the achievements and story panels for content to get into if you are not sure what to try next.

The past 2 years have been a struggle for profession balancing and part of that is due to how Anet has managed the game development and balance. Is it good that they have revamped the Profession teams and are working with (another) new philosophy? Absolutely. Have they done anything of real worth yet? There are a lot of no's in that answer, but a few yes' as well. I get players might be excited about some changes that affect the profession they enjoy playing. Yet, even after tomorrow's patch there will still be professions that are not strong even in 'play what you want' OW PvE while others will be dominant not only in OW but in Meta instance groups as well. I also like Mesmer Chrono and would like for a viable and sensible build to present itself, but at this time, it's a giant pain to play. Meanwhile I can hop on multiple other professions and have an easier time being more successful and providing more value to the group I am in. The things that make Chrono weak and other professions strong isn't changing in tomorrow's patch either. Of course I could be wrong but since we only received the patch notes preview, and not the typical 'Friday before update' patch notes, we have no idea if they are just going to slap Distortion into Chrono and Virtuoso, or if they are going to take the time to update the multiple affected Traits that could/should interact with it and how other skills may be tweaked. While I would like to agree with you, I still think we are several balance patches away from Anet realizing a proper balance between Power/Condi DPS builds and Support/Heal builds. At this point all we have is talk about what they want to do since the change in leadership for the team. Seeing the road map today I am going to reserve further judgement until after the Nov 29th update, as that will be the second update with the new team lead and philosophies.

Since your OP, they have added another 6 to the sale. Sales appear to be updated 9AM PST or 4PM GMT or within an hour of that. I agree though that the clarity of communication from Anet regarding sale items or new item launches is pretty poor.

I'd love to see you on a product development team, so much hope! Unfortunately, business that succeed take very minimal risk. A game that has been around for 10 years has probably been fairly conservative with its approach, even if they are doing something groundbreaking. However, 'No' as a standalone response is absolutely valid and is something that companies can use to make business decisions about. Having worked in Software Development, our team would create various metrics for assessing customer feedback. While we would provide our customers with questionnaires and polls, the answers were not always reflective of the questions asked. If we had a number of customers simply respond with 'general negative feedback' we could assess that the customer was so disinterested with the product idea or update, that they didn't even think it was worth spending time saying how it was not for them. Maybe they hate the idea, maybe they don't care, maybe it doesn't affect them. When you compare those 'general negative' responses against the other customer responses, you can see trends in the responses and extrapolate usable information to decide your product path. The same, of course, could be said for 'general positive feedback' if someone just answered with a Yes. As for the OP idea. I think about 80% of it is not good. What I do like is the idea of a zone which allows players to face much harder content in an open world environment. Where the idea falls short: This would appeal to a smaller number of players unless it was heavily incentivized. If it was heavily incentivized, then it would become the new normal for player progression to move to this zone, which would require far greater investment of resources. It is hard to make a 'broken' game mode for all players to enjoy. Duplicating all 25 or so Core zones to this game mode is too much. While it might be fun to have a huge amount of content to explore, it doesn't really add much to the mode when the focus is much harder mobs for skilled players. You also run into the issue that zones can hold a squad of 50 players, likely more. While the focus was solo or group play, squad zergs would likely trivialize the content as it already has. As solo players can farm Champ and Legendary bounties already, the difficulty needs to be realistically high and player count limited. As such, I would suggest the following: Limit these zones to only a handful, thematically aligned with each region/expac. I'd say one each for HoT, PoF and EoD with one or two more based in the Core territories (probably something with Snow). Limit the players per instance to 10 or 15 and for the actual mobs, I would make everything an Elite and Champion by default. Include spawning Legendary bosses. Have the loot in line with current existing Champ/Lege loot. It should be that simple. I go here and fight really hard mobs to prove my skills with this profession or build, solo or with a few friends. Everything else is secondary window dressing.

Since PoF in 2017 Mantras on Mesmer have had no buffs or positive changes according to the Wiki. There were competitive split Nerfs during this time as well.

For those who have no idea what ‘horde’ game mode means, can you explain the idea for us. How it might be applied in GW2?

Heya, if you go to This page on the Belt you will find this: Click the Lost and Found link to see it’s an achievement from LWS1. There also appeared to be a full walkthrough as well on that page.

If Chronomancer Mesmer could have a pass over that would be swell. Updates to Wells and the Chrono Traits and Shield skills would be appreciated. The goal to find some QoL for Alacrity/Quick/Heal support builds that bring it inline with other support builds APM and Efficiency.

TL;DR Anet still confuses people with poor communication. Conspiracy Theory: Anet is offering a wide range of 20% off sales after the Anniversary period because people didn't actually buy much stuff from the Gem Shop during the Anniversary. Likely due to the atrocious communication about what was or was not going to be on sale, or when.

You probably want to start with Power Chrono as it would be fairly easy and inexpensive to gear up right away. Plus learning how use Continuum Split is a lot of fun.

Sure, care to provide some examples of how you might update this build to include condition cleanse?

If you look at the notes on the page there is a reference to charged quartz Crystal. It appears the link was not input correctly or may have broken. Recently I believe there was an update to the Wiki that did something to some page links. I believe you can leave a note on the page stating what is missing and at some point an editor may update it. Bear in mind the Wiki is updated by players not by Anet.

I’m pretty sure you need to make a texture map of the skin and then assign the regions for color application. Which would mean remaking the player model skins and then coding each skins underwear region and whatever they plug it into for the color values a player chooses. It isn’t insignificant work and could get more complicated if there are active layers or shaders alongside the base skin. That said, I’d be okay with this if, after other real issues the game has are resolved. So never.

You can run Dueling or Chaos variants of Condi Virtuoso in open world with relative ease. You can start with a snowcrows build and modify it from there. This is the build I have been running more or less since EoD dropped. OW Chaos Virtuoso In OW take advantage of Jade Core for extra vitality and Jade Offensive and Defensive boons to pump up your build. These buffs help any OW player especially when solo, far more than any other buff in the game. Really as long as you are able to Crit cap and get bleed duration to 100% you can mess around with the rest of the gear and traits in whatever way suits you.