Alquinon.2957

Virtuoso is only strong under certain conditions, a good amount of your dps still comes from your phantasms. Your sword phantasm is stationary and only has 130 range when it starts its attack, so that can easily miss if bosses move just a tiny bit. Your focus phantasm shoots its attacks at all nearby targets, so adds will attract some attacks and lower your boss dps. I swear some people don't actually play these classes in raids and only look at benchmark numbers. Right now for raids and strikes I get the opportunity to regularly play condi renegade, condi mirage, condi virtuoso, condi mechanist, power soulbeast, power bladesworn, and power daredevil. The overall balance feels pretty good because different specs shine on different fights.

I think condi mech is still a very strong spec, maybe it was overshadowed before by power mech so people didn't really catch on. J-drive is the low intensity version that still puts out very competitive dps, and it's no slouch on confusion fights if you take mace. If you want to eke out more dps you can always go the more complex rotation with jade mortar/bomb + grenade kit/pistol pistol build. I still play the J-drive pistol/pistol build on fights that have a lot of mechanics and movement. You can probably also play J-drive as an LI build if you just camp mace and focus on casting your mech skills and superconducting signet. The only downside is that mace will force you to stay melee if you don't want to swap to grenades.

Are you kidding me? Offhand pistol barely does more dps than shield in a power build. On a condi build, it does 4 stacks of burning for 16 seconds on a 12 second cooldown with half a second cast time. With alacrity it maintains 6.667 stacks of burning throughout the benchmark with a single skill, which accounts for roughly 5.3k dps. Tell me how you can get that much dps out of offhand shield lol. Also if you don't like grenade spamming you can always just camp mace, which does more dps in real fights than its benchmark since the golem doesn't really take confusion damage.

How is heal tempest "multitudes" stronger than heal mech? Have you even played it? You need to constantly cycle through your attunements to overload for alacrity, and only then you get the alacrity at the end of a full overload (meaning it's extra punishing if you have to cancel your overload, that you have to continuously channel, for whatever reason). You also have to give up the healing on auras to give alac. Firebrand's healing is weaker than mechanist's healing + barrier, the only reason why it was the "premier" support is because there weren't other good quickness sources until anet introduced things like scrapper and herald. Once again you're bringing up benchmarks that are performed in perfect conditions. In fact, right now on SC's website power mech is #14 on the benchmarks list. If we have mech at 38k, there are only 7 builds that are >= 38.5k with 2 being pretty unrealistic to pull off in raids (condi untamed and power deadeye) and 2 being essentially the same build (condi/hybrid slb). I think I'll stop wasting my time replying to someone who tells me to play the game and yet can't offer any constructive arguments without resorting to bringing up benchmarks done in perfect golem conditions by other players.

How is mech not the top support? Mechanist can easily stack alacrity on the group while the player themself is over 1200 range away doing mechanics (we can see how useful that is in the HT cm groups, everybody runs mech for that reason). It is able to stack alacrity way better than any other option out there right now. You need to play the game to understand how classes perform in real scenarios in raids/strikes. Bench numbers might look nice for some other classes but you have to consider what they need to do to hit those numbers. For example, bladesworn needs to stand in place for a few seconds waiting for their dragon trigger to charge, they need to be within 300 range of their target, and they also need to flank. You also lose 200-300k damage whenever your dragon trigger gets interrupted somehow if you're not careful. That's not very good for a lot of the encounters in the game. Meanwhile power mechanist just pew pews from any range they want, only having to step in briefly to land a rifle 2, even then around 30% of their dps is a freebie from the mech existing.

What is more arbitrary is your anecdotal evidence. 🤣 Every spec you mentioned has been nerfed so I don't know what you're on about. Just because there were op/broken builds in the past doesn't mean mech is in a healthy place right now. What kind of logic is that?

Fractals are a completely different ballgame from raids. The phases in fractals are much, much shorter so it favours burstier classes. That's why anet felt the need to change how exposed works regarding power vs condi, hoping to allow condi specs to be competitive in fractals. However, what they failed to realise is that condis are not made equally. The burstiest condi, burning, made condi firebrand oppressively strong. That's further compounded by prestacking shenanigans using the mistlock. Firebrand has been since nerfed somewhat, but I felt like they should have just removed the players' ability to prestack ashes/venoms which was super cheesy.

Grouch gives no context behind that number. Is it based on successful kills or is it based on playtime in raids? While Wingman does have its own biases, it is much more obvious to us. Wingman is focused on more tryhard groups while Grouch's number applies to all raid groups in general (we can assume). The main argument from the pro power mech people seems to be "power mech's dps is fine because it doesn't have the highest benchmark", but in reality mech has an even higher representation in the tryhard groups (who bother to upload their logs to wingman). Often times in training groups, the less experienced players are just told to bring what classes they're comfortable on. Regardless, even Grouch himself says 20% is pretty high (based on their internal numbers) and promised incoming changes to help fix that.

Take another look my guy, in the data no other era had a single spec that had over 30% representation. Right now, we have the greatest number of elite specs available and yet one single spec accounts for 32%.

Or have that as f1 and f2-f4 your mech skills, to be consistent with pretty much every other class mechanic. I don't want to find a new button to bind for f6 or f7...

Hello, I thought according to a change a while back, all stat selectable items should have stats that are available to you from the expansion you have bought. This is from the wiki. Right now I can't find any of the new stats from the raids ascended weapons I have, nor from the stat selectable trinkets that I bought from past living stories. These stats are only available on the legendaries that I have.

This post is still laughable though. Their reasoning doesn't make too much sense when you examine it closely. They want to downplay the importance of mystic coins from fractal cm's and saying how they only make up 1-2% of the overall mystic coin supply. But at the same time it is somehow important enough to warrant removing them? And then they sign off with this gem... Like really? Pretty much nobody has an issue with strikes getting better rewards, because as things currently stand the reward system for strikes is convoluted and just overall super slow in getting anything worthwhile. Anet needs to get off their high horse and stop trying to make people who are questioning this decision into self centered elitists. Why not have mystic coin sources in both strikes and fractal cms? What this is telling me is that there are other reasons that Anet won't admit to regarding this change, this is mostly just a PR/damage control answer and yet they still manage to screw it up somehow. Reading a bit between the lines here From this part I'm speculating that Anet, for some reason unknown to me, wants to push people towards more 10 man content instead of 5 man content like fractals. This is the vibe I'm getting from reading this part, but of course they can't outright say that and cause more outrage similar to when they killed off dungeons.

If you actually want to do damage on diviner renegade you need to learn how to manage your energy efficiently while juggling all the skills including your weapon skills and f3-f4. It is a much more involved build to play. Otherwise you're just an alac bot doing 5k damage. Even berserker that you seem to dismiss as a simple build has a lot more complications. You have to constantly drain and replenish your adrenaline and sometimes for different bosses you even want to change up your rotation depending on phase times. Warrior is the one class I don't play much and I can tell you the difference between my level and some of the warrior players I know is huge. On staff mirage you just auto attack and spam dodges when they are up. If you want to be extra tryhard you might even do a f2 shatter and summon a few clones every 20 seconds.

Lol people keep bringing up alac renegade. On alac renegade your dps will be pretty garbage if you play as you described (press f4 and auto attack in sword). Whereas on staff mirage, you will easily be top dps if you just summon 3 clones and chain your ambushes properly on SH, Cairn, and Largos Twins. Even on condi RR renegade, sure you can do the same same dps and output 10 man alac for about half the uptime too. But it is also a much more involved rotation that uses 2 legends and 2 sets of weapon skills. Here we have staff mirage that uses 2 weapon skills, a dodge button, auto attack, and I guess throw in an f2 if you feel like it. You're using like 30% of your kit and you're already at 90% effectiveness. Do you really think a good build?

Lol you're going to take 2 different renegade builds and cherry pick their strengths to justify that staff mirage is bad? Swapping to staff on diviner rev is a pretty big dps loss unless your group has mediocre cc and dps so you can swap back in time and have more dps uptime in sword. The problem with mirage is that while it's pretty average on most fights, on the few confusions bosses (largos, soulless horror, and cairn to some extent) it's far and ahead the best choice there is. Axe mirage was already king on those bosses and now you introduce another mirage build that outshines even that by a wide margin, that was mostly the problem. Now after the nerfs it's still arguable which mirage build is better (depends on your team comp and skill level).

Not really...you can easily swap out signet of domination for feedback or stability mantra or whatever skill you need. You only lose out on 180 condi damage. Furthermore if you want CC said signet is also a 3 second stun and you have your f3 built into your kit. So it depends on which renegade build you compare it to. Condi RR renegade will bring very little of the utility you mentioned. Diviner renegade will bring more support and CC but you'll watch your dps drop when you have to swap to staff or burn energy to cc.

Tanking in this game is slightly different than what you might expect from an MMO. Most of the mesmer's prowess in tanking comes from damage mitigation. If you use mainhand sword, your 2 skill (blurred frenzy) will allow you to evade attacks for 1 second. You also have access to invuln with mesmer f4 for now. Later on when you unlock chronomancer you will also have a shield that allows you to block attacks. If you are looking to be a tank/support chronomancer is a pretty fun elite spec to play, you're able to have a lot of control over fights and give boons to your allies. If you're just looking to absorb attacks, there are other classes that are good at that. Revenant is able to stack up a lot of damage reduction and be almost invincible for example. You also have necromancer whose elite spec scourge will have access to lots of barriers that will absorb hits for you.

Giving the same build to "poor players" will not allow them to play at the same level of "talented players" in PvE. There are 4 or 5 people in my raid static who have geared up staff mirage, and the difference in performance is pretty big depending on skill level and familiarity with mirage. Good players are not concerned about "poor players" outperforming them lol. The reason why this build is overpowered is because it provides 10 man alacrity (I got about 50% squad alacrity uptime today on SH by myself in full dps gear), might, and the dps is still amazing after 2 nerfs on confusion bosses. Sure you can play axe mirage, but axe mirage is a way more complicated rotation, you have to dash through the boss's hitbox instead of staying at a pretty safe range, and your axe 3 randomly teleports you. So now axe mirage might be able to edge this build out in some cases, but unless you're a top mirage player it's still close even after 2 consecutive nerfs.

Yeah no this isn't fixed at all. At this point this skill just needs to be reworked lol...

Chaos Vortex: When cast by a clone, the duration of the applied confusion condition has been reduced from 8 seconds to 3 seconds in PvE only.

Yeah precasting clones barely give you an advantage... For power chrono the best case scenario you get a free 2-4 clones to shatter. For boon chrono you can pretty much fit everything you want into a one clone continuum split so precasting saves you the trouble of using a 0.5s skill to spawn that clone I guess.

I mean this is mesmer's weakness just because of its core class mechanic, mesmers have always been kinda bad at dealing with trash mobs unless you can reflect their attacks. So unless they make an elite spec that's the mesmer equivalent of soulbeast (take away your clones for more dps), this won't change.

Oh right I forgot about that since they're not traits/abilities I use, but yeah it's very annoying when you can't summon your clones on the target that you want.

After recently reading and posting on this mesmer forum, it seems like a good number of people here don't realise the real issues regarding this class. Yes staff mirage is very strong right now, but overall mesmer is getting more frustrated to play in PvE content such as fractals and raids. So here I will list out a few issues that mesmers are facing in PvE content. The videos I linked are from Luxroy so all credits to them! 1. Clone despawning bug/feature. Below is a video demonstrating this bug. Basically in the May 11th patch, Anet added in a mechanic where if your clones are not able to attack anything within 4 seconds of being spawned, they will self destruct. In theory this was probably done to prevent people from prestacking clones on encounters such as Slothasaur, Mursaat Overseer, Conjured Amalgamate, and Qadim the Peerless. In my opinion, prestacking clones doesn't really give you that much of an advantage gameplay wise so I'm pretty ambivalent about them taking it away. However, this is affecting the gameplay of all varieties of mesmers. I'm noticing my clones self destructing on bosses such as Ai (fractals 100) and Twin Largos where the bosses can move out of the range of my clone attacks. It is very frustrating having your clones randomly disappear and having to burn more skills to summon them, especially since clones are a pretty big part of your dps as a mesmer. So I have stopped playing mesmer altogether on 100cm and instead playing other dps classes. 2. Phantasm mistargeting bug. I have also linked another video below demonstrating the bug from Luxroy. This has been a bug for a while now. Not only does this bug decrease your personal dps but targeting trash mobs, it can also lead to raid wipes on bosses such as Slothasaur and Qadim. On Slothasaur if your phantasm decides to go after the friendly slubling it can easily lead to a wipe, and on Qadim I have seen power chronos accidentally break the lamp prematurely more times than I can count. 3. Self-Deception targeting So now we are getting into the quality of life changes that I would like to see for the mesmer elite specs. The first one is the Self-Deception trait for mirages.This trait is pretty much always taken by mirages in PvE. The idea is after you shatter your clones, this trait allows you to have 3 clones back up and running as long as you are able to get at least 1 of them from your weapon or phantasm skills. However, the issue comes from who the clones from your deception skills target. The tooltip and wiki doesn't offer any hints, but from my observation it's the closest enemy target to you when you cast the deception skills. This is very clunky when you are dealing with several mobs or when you are fighting a boss with adds. Your clone from your deception skill can target some random trash mob that dies almost instantly and you would be down a skill as well as a clone. Ideally, the clone spawned from deception skills should target the enemy you have selected similar to your staff 2 skill. 4. Quality of life issues for power chrono Power chrono was supposed to be very strong in the last patch, we got to see all kind of raid records done with them. However, for the more casual players and raid groups, there were already a lot of reasons why I would hesitate on playing it in such settings. First of all, slow uptime can be hard to come by if you run Danger Time. Slow is a scarce condition that only a few classes have access to and you often need to get other people to change their builds just so you can get 15% crit chance. Danger Time doesn't even give the extra crit damage anymore, so why not make the trait easier to take advantage of. Currently on the benchmark, the difference between running Danger Time vs Improved Alacrity is about 3k dps. Second of all, a good portion of chrono's damage comes from phantasms, and as seen from the previous video, phantasms can be very unreliable. For example, the sword and focus phantasms will root itself in place while doing the blurred frenzy attack. So often for bosses that move around I would opt to just play a different class.

OP linked 2 raid logs, I wonder what they could be talking about hmmmmmmmm. 🤔