ZephidelGRS.9520

I guess only if you like the Mirage theme and gameplay. But practicality-wise then yeah there’s really no reason. With Staxe now practically gone due to trait split, I wish they’d allow a fraction of the original Alac Mirage back, and also get rid of the dependence on Clone for Alac uptime (and increase the Alac duration up a bit for easier buffer room). That’d make Alac Mirage a lot more reliable, and a choice against Chrono as a condi vs power choice in fights that favor condi more. I don’t really understand why they had to destroy Alac Mirage like what they did. At least outside of Strikes/Raids/Fractals then Mirage is still a beast. For example, I’ve just begun the Raid armor journey and yesterday I’ve just used Mirage to solo a few HoT champs required for the Envoy collection. So to me Mirage still shines at the 1 niche it’s really good at.

These choices are purely aesthetic first for Fashion Wars, but I try to add some unique functionality to them compared to existing options. Ele: - Off hand Sword: Hybrid DPS skills + more mobility skills to compliment main hand Sword. - Off hand Pistol: Standard ranged condi DPS. High damage. - Shield: Utilities, tanky survivability skills (block/invul/projectile reflect/destroy/condi cleanse) + group buffs. Mesmer: - Off hand Dagger: Stealth-focused, power counterpart to Torch. - Main hand Pistol: Confusion + heavy CC ranged Stun weapon to compliment off hand Pistol. Blasting their mind away, literally. Necro: - Off hand Pistol: Poison and Weakness focused weapon. Tbh Harbinger not being a poison specialist is such a missed opportunity. - Main hand Mace: healing/support weapon to compliment Warhorn. Warhorn needs rework to become a proper support weapon. Revenant: - Longbow: Rev lacks a proper power ranged DPS option. And a bow would keep the mystic theme better than Rifle.

Weapon Master seems like a really poorly thought out idea by someone playing 1-2 classes, probably a Guardian player, spending 5 seconds thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if your Firebrand starts raining arrows or zipping around on dual swords?” while not considering in a vacuum how the balance of other classes work. The Pistol Scourge fiasco was hilarious for the short time it lasted. Scourge was absolutely not designed with a Torment weapon in mind, but it was gutted anyway due to a stupid idea and I’m pretty sure condi Scourge now can’t live without Pistol. Something similar happened to Ele but on a grander scale. Ele spec weapons are absolutely not designed with each other in mind. That’s why Warhorn, an overpowered weapon balanced only by its limited access, now renders every other off-hand choices obsolete. Also Tempest destroyed Hanmer and now Catalyst can’t even use its own weapon. Other similar cases could be Herald ruining Greatsword for Vindicator. Yet after much balance shuffling the numbers around, most especs went back to still using their own weapon/ old build anyway and nothing new really happened, unless their old weapon was nerfed like cases above and there’s nothing for them to go back to. Overall on average Weapon Master did a lot more damage to the game’s balance than the good it brought, if there was anything good at all. So in terms of “impact”, it was a flat negative. New weapons on the other hand is a fresh welcome due to them each offering something new to each profession, well except Ele Pistol. And probably Engi Shortbow, but I don’t play Engi. But I’d like to emphasize that their success is largely attributed to them offering a new niche for each profession. Ele Pistol shows exactly what would happen if they start adding new weapons that overlap a niche with an existing choice: Instead of balancing the overpowered Pistol, they nerfed Ele along with everything else to keep the shiny new toy. What a wise decision. So even though new weapons are overall a “success”, I’d be wary of the next batch of new weapons that they inevitably will release for potential cases like that.

We could always start first with a Fresh Water version, and there’s a perfect spot for it too: Replacing Cleansing Water. I’m sorry but a measly condi cleanse on Regen application is not worthy of a Grandmaster trait, but more like a side effect of an Adept or Master trait. It’ll solve the water attunement access and maybe make Heal Tempest feel less terrible to play.

Assuming this is asking about PvE, then there’s no such thing as a “pure” healer role in the group (”pure” as in a healer that brings neither Alac or Quick). This is because yes, while a DPS can be hybrid and bring either of those so in theory you can have a team composition of 2 boon DPS and 1 pure healer, but the total DPS output of this team is not optimal, so several things can happen: - First, this team will take longer to clear an encounter, in which some of the mechanics can be lethal and if prolonged can make room for individual errors and decrease the group’s overall success chance. No matter how powerful the healer is, they can’t out-heal a deadly mechanics, and so having them in the team doesn’t immediately offset any mechanical errors. - Second, if the encounter in question has a timed DPS check, then this group is very likely not going to meet said DPS check. While calling a healer as a dead weight is wrong, most healers already don’t do any damage and stunting 2 DPS and cutting the group’s total DPS further to cover for that healer is wrong. This is why the recommended team composition is 1 aheal or qheal, 1 boon DPS to cover whatever the healer doesn’t have, and the rest are DPS. This is also why a Mirage heal build doesn’t exist yet, because it doesn’t bring Alac or Quick. Now technically you can make it happen by bringing Staff, but it’s very clunky and like Micah said above you’re just playing a worse Chrono by juggling buttons for nothing better advantage-wise. If you have a close group of friends and you guys are confident enough to be cool with playing whatever you want then a Rifle Mirage healer is still more functional than a lot of other healing builds, it just doesn’t bring the 2 boons above. But for pug groups then please stay away from it, it’ll keep you out of trouble. Lastly, do note that Anet is aware of this Mirage heal problem and did say during the new weapon livestream that the Fury is just a placeholder while they’re working on other ideas to realize Mirage heal. So do be expected that in future patches they might give Rifle Mirage its Alac or Quick and make the build become viable. It’s just not for now.

Your "oh shet" panic button and burst heal is the Heal Mantra, specifically the charges. Pressing a heal Mantra charge will trigger Restorative Mantras twice due to Mender's Purity (the minor trait before it). I use this in tandem with Relic of the Flock, which adds another 2720 heal. I don't know about you, but my rule of thumb is that if people still die after I give them [(1500 x 2 + 2720) x 125%] = 7150 HP (15% increase from trait, 10% increase from Transference Sigil) then that's definitely no longer a healer issue. And that heal burst is stronger than any other classes except for Druid. Rifle 5 also give a big barrier, big enough that it makes me question why you can't heal through Vale Guardian. You don't need to heal when the barrier eats up all the damage. What used to be a Heal Mesmer's pain point, sustained healing and ranged healing, are both also solved by the Rifle. Unless people intentionally not dodging, which only God can help them, I'm surprised you can't heal people in Boneskinner. I've found that usually the burst is enough to counter the jump/crash, and barrier takes care of pulsing damage. The weak point of a Heal Mesmer, or Heal Chrono, is that there's no downstate management. Usually if a wipe is imminent, it's 99% certain since a Heal Mesmer can't rez people fast enough and turn the situation around. No, Illusion of Life is a joke in the content you specify. Unless the encounter has ads, giving someone 15 more seconds to walk around before becoming fully defeated is useless since they can't kill the boss alone to become fully revived. And the a Heal Mesmer's best rez tool, Medic's Feedback, directly competes with the burst heal and has to be ignored in favor for Restorative Mantras. Personally I wish they moved Medic's Feedback to the 2nd tier and replace Warden's Feedback (this is such a useless trait).

Because in PvE it's an ammo skill and you have 2 charges.

Because the only serious use of that Greatsword build is farming Mad King labyrinth, which is a once-per-year event. Yes it’s still a very efficient farming build to tag a lot of trash mobs during meta events, but on its own it takes forever to kill a fly. Of course it goes without saying that it’s not a viable build in any instanced content. When we talk about power Mirage now we meant more the Sword build whose damage got buffed 3x in the same patch, and the one that the new changes have the most synergy with. Sword Clones don’t really do anything, Infinite Horizon only multiplies the boon strip and nothing else (the Clones don’t copy the Ambush’s Clone generation). So they’re just ammo and it’s not counterproductive to Shatter them. Sword Ambush itself can generate Clones infinitely as long as you can Ambush, so with more Ambush access via the new Dune Cloak you can keep up a nice little loop of Ambush, get Clones, Ambush again, get Clones again, Ambush again. The damage output of this isn’t half-bad either, a few more tweaks and you could very well see people using it seriously in instanced content. You couldn’t do this before because access to Ambush was limited by your dodges, making your frequency a lot more sparse compared to now.

Dual Swords have interesting synergies with condi Reaper that make it such a sleeper build. They apply Bleeding faster than any other Necro weapons, faster than even Scepter, thanks to their interaction with Reaper’s traits. I’ll have to check how it benches, but Swords might be just the thing to push condi Reaper out of meme tier build.

Grieving feels like something only Firebrand could make it work, and even then I’d question if it’s even “optimal”. It only works because it can achieve 100% burn duration on its F1 skills through traits alone and Balth rune, leaving the Sigil slots still completely free like a normal build. Comparably to Ele, Ele needs a Smoldering sigil to achieve only 90% burn duration, which could have been something else in a normal Viper’s build that brings more DPS (an Earth sigil to trigger Fractal relic more frequently, for example). Also relying on Burning alone for condi Ele is bad gameplay, since the damage of a typical condi Ele build is split between Burning and Bleeding.

The only practical one we’re still missing is a condi equivalent to Diviner’s. There are so many power sets with Concentration, plus Rune of Fireworks and similar Runes, that makes playing power DPS with Concentration quite easy and diverse. Yet if you want to play condi DPS with Concentration then you’re forced to take Ritualist’s which is a suboptimal stat because of the wasted stat on Vitality major. There are also no Runes that accommodate both Condition Damage and Boon Duration. So: Oracle’s: major (Condition Damage, Concentration), minor (Precision, Expertise). This aims to be a direct 1:1 exchange of Power to Concentration from Viper’s.

The wiki guide on Skyscale acquisition method was not available until 4-5 days after release. I know, because I was there when SotO was first dropped. Lots of players' confusion why some people could find the egg within just 3-4 tries, whereas others had to go through all 14 nests to get it. Map chat in Skywatch or Amnytas was asked non-stop, questions even popped on reddit and Facebook groups. I was among those who tried to look on wiki too but there wasn't anything available until the aforementioned time, and had to ask around. I don't remember if it was an Anet official statement or people just concluded that the egg is RNG, but finally a fully written wiki guide was put up and the questions stopped appearing. So the wiki is 100% player made and run, Anet could come out and clarify some confusion but ultimately the writers are volunteering players. There's no conspiracy here, the GW2 players are that awesome. Some contributed so much that they were respectfully honored by Anet when they passed away. And regarding the 2nd point, did you know that you can bookmark an achievement by clicking the eye icon on its top right? It'll then show the achievement on your playing screen, along with the % of completion if there's any. And if you complete the achievement, it'll be deleted from the bookmark.

Feedback is already strong in most PvE encounters without that extra 1 second. In PvE the most practical application of that extra 1 second is usually comboing it with Medic Feedback to revive downed allies more effectively. But that’s a niche interaction and the Ego Restoration combo with the Heal Mantra is much better. You’ll heal much more while giving out a lot more boons. After all, your job as a healer is preventing your team from going down in the first place. Any revive tools is nice to have but when they’re competing like this then heal/boon is more important than reviving.

In group content squads will stack tightly within an inch of each other at the boss' feet unless forced to move by mechanics, and even then people will try to get back to the stack as soon as the mechanics are done. So you don't have to worry about that part where people will be outside your effect radius. And 240 is actually pretty forgiving, it's not the best but it's not so small that it's a problem. Small would be something more like 180 radius.

The worst offender is the Sniping ability “target 1 player, instantly down them” tbh. Wow, so much interaction. Especially when it spawns along with things that vomit a gazillion AoE particle effects and it’s impossible to see the firing marker or the bullet. And let’s face the real problem as someone mentioned too: These are not a “proven successful concept”; or more like these only prove that Anet can successfully get away with designing lazy mobs PoF onwards by simply slapping 2 random unstable abilities on them and cranking their HP tenfolds to call it a day, and SotO is full of these poorly designed mobs. Speaking of SotO mobs, “interaction” yeah right. Of all the mobs til now the SotO mobs are the ones that offer the least amount of counterplay. What’s there to even learn? Everything either instantly kills you in 1 hit, or wait 5 seconds to instantly kills you in 1 hit, with very few mobs have a CC bar and/or ways to counter their attacks. Oh and since they have a gigantic HP pool, you’re guaranteed to see those things fairly often. Where did the guy that design mechanics at Anet go?

I don’t think so. Unless they can come up with 27+ different ways/Relics to trigger Quick/Alac share for each espec (which sounds redundant as heck), having 1-2 Relics that can share Quick/Alac means there will be specs that are incompatible with the Relic’s trigger method and become unused. This will kill the current diversity. Thus I prefer much more the current balance we’re having: each profession has 1 spec for Alac and 1 spec for Quick, and they’re shared through each spec’s unique mechanics.

It’s worth noting that with Relic of the Midnight King, you’ll have at least a 2nd support skill for each weapon set since Necro weapons always have 1 skill that fear/CC. I use it with Staff 5 on my Heal Scourge to grant more Might + Fury in addition to Regen. This ensures my Scourge can maintain 25 Might stacks and Fury uptime by itself for my subgroup. And the heal on Locust Swarm is more useful than Swiftness share, since Swiftness is largely a not very useful boon when 90% of most encounters are about stacking in 1 place.

Relic of Aristocracy. The trait Deadly Blades ensure that you’ll always inflict Vulnerability, which translates to 15% more condi duration.

You can also buy Viper’s from the Trading Post, unless for whatever reason you just don’t want to use it. I’m aware it isn’t cheap, but considering that buying suboptimal gear is already more than half the price of Viper’s anyway then it’s better to save money and buy Viper’s. Don’t buy Sinister’s, it’s a waste of your money. Yes Rampager’s is definitely mandatory on condi Virt. A good condi Virt build is a mix of Viper’s/Rampager’s for optimization. You can run pure Rampager’s if you like to be cheap, but you’ll have no Expertise so your conditions don’t stick around for long to do damage. And while Celestial is the most casual-friendly set for the open world, it’s ironically also the most expensive and out of reach for a casual player. If you truly can’t afford Viper’s then I’d advise you to stay away from Celestial as well. .

Could take a page from Reaper's trait to continue the ice-vulnerability theme, and make it something like: Shattered Defense Striking vulnerable enemies increases your critical chance and damage. Striking vulnerable enemies with Water skills gains bonus damage. Critical Chance per Stack: 2% Critical Damage Increase: 5% Bonus Damage: 10%

I use dual Swords/Focus for weapon and Illusions instead of Domination. IMO Sword Ambush generates so many Clones that it justifies having an extra F1. Exactly how many, you asked? It’s enough to upkeep Compounding Power constantly at 5 stacks, which is something only Virt could do before. And I know we have had a lot of discussions about how Dagger overshadowed main-hand Sword as a weapon, but I truly believe Mirage Ambush is where main-hand Sword beats Dagger. But as fun as Sword Mirage goes, it doesn’t bench very high (yet). I’m sure the constant evasion and dashing/dancing through the battlefield while ripping enemies’ boons apart will have its place somewhere in PvP/WvW, but for instanced PvE it’s not quite viable yet.

To be honest Mirage turning mirror-less is pretty interesting, as it helps adapt the class to faster modern combat pacing. And the only use for Desert Disortion was just the original Alac Mirage tbh. Now that Alac has been separated and no longer works together with it, Desert Distortion really needs a revisit. Freeing it and Phantasmal Axes (why do we need an entire trait dedicated to a single weapon again? could easily be merged with Mirage Mantle now) opens up 2 Master trait slots to become something else.

Whatever they want to do, I hope they do it right and give it time to grow. SotO’s story is a mess, 16 chapters in and I still don’t know what’s even a Kryptis. They’re first described by the Ward to be semi-intelligent supernatural beings that can possess Tyrian living beings. Ok, no problem there. Then it’s revealed they’re actually highly intelligent beings living in their own society in a different dimension, oh and they’re actually corporeal beings since they also eat, drink, poop, sleep, and they just possess minds for fun because every born Kryptis randomly have interdimensional mind hack abilities (even though I’m pretty sure it was said from the start the Kryptis feed on emotions, and possession is how they eat). Oh and they can vary in size, from as small as a fly to literal omnipresent cosmic horror whose eyes and tentacles can reach everywhere across different dimensions. Serious question, but what IS a Kryptis?

Boon/heal prioritize allies based on the listed order. In your case it’ll only overflow if some of your party members are outside of your radius while your squadmates are nearer to you. And I’m pretty sure healing doesn’t prioritize allies with low HP over full HP, so your party members still get the effect even if they’re at full HP.

I use this build, except replacing Arcane Power with the Earth Signet to both upkeep Aura and trigger Fractal relic easier. Can’t get any more low intensity than just camping Fire and spamming skills off cooldown. Do note that yesterday patch nerfed Tempest by 5% condi damage, so the output now will be lower than what’s shown.