Buran.3796

So OP that in the last MAT the European winner team ran 5 catalyst and the American winner team ran 2 Catalyst, 1 Tempest and 2 Spellbreakers. That's 8 Eles and 2 Spellberakers toping the 10 best slots on the Earth. So Rev has to be nerfed, to grant that in the next MAT the Ele and Warrior nerfs still cover the whole hall of fame. Which by the way are the mains of the current balance designers.... I only saw one Vindi and one Herald in the whole EU MAT roster, both of whom were easily trampled in their short sailings. The damage nerfs are irrelevant since Rev doesn't have a place in serious contenders for the MAT, but the chill removal from Imperial Impact is criminal, since changes what the ability does in different game modes (the main reason I stopped playing Firebrand). The patch is garbage, as were the two last ones.

I think that this kills the myth of the new balance team being "better" or "any different" than the ones before, or that "they care PvP" at all. With a single change in Engineer's Rifle AA they made it overperforming (in terms of performance x input, but not in terms of raw power output) in PvE to the extent that they were worried about most of players ditching other classes, and that permeated to PvP to a extent. Then they nerfed it. Now they nerfed Ele's scepter and became broken in PvP. The same as happened with Willbender, then Specter, Bladesworn, etc. Since the release of EoD (at which they devoted 0 time to PvP) ANet have been hitting blind, specially in PvP, where half of the new specs were underpowered, and the balance patches have been a rollercoaster of random specs going from S tier to B or C after each patch

I don't understand the question; one of the great things of obtaining the legendary items in PvP is that you always make progress, doesn't matter if you win matches or get curbstomped. Can't be easier...

1) Was not a mistake, using the 80 boost is fine, you can manually level any character in 24 hours at most nayway.. 2) Get ascended ring, ear ring, back piece and undewater respirator from the quaggan vendor in Bitterfrost Frontier, ultra easy to farm the currency. Get ascended amulet, ring and back piece from the vendor Bloodstone Fen map (harder to farm, but those allows the stats to be reset for a small price). Get ascended amulet, ring and ear ring from Dragonfall or Sanswept Isles, and also you can get ascended earings from the Ember's map bay. Get ascended amulet and earing from Bjora Marches. I would also advice to buy the permanent nodes in your hometown to daily farm the mats from Dragonfall, Sandswept Isles, Bloodstone Fen and maybe Ember's Bay (Bjora and Bitterfrost are so easy to farm in the maps that a hometwon node isn't needed). 3) Get the legendary amulet from the Living Story, get the legendary armor pieces from either PvP, PvE or WvW. After that, work on the legendary trinkets. 4) Weapons: get the ones for each spec from PoF, HoT or EoD (I think that there is easier in that odeder); craft the ascended ones you need, and after having the legendary armor value to either craft legendary weapons or legendary trinkets. There's tokens to exchange for ascended weapons in PvP, WvW and PvE, but I would save them first for the legendary items, then use them in weapons. 4) Stats: since trinkets of ascended quality are ultra easy to farm in those maps, you only have to worry about stats in ascended weapons and armors. Typically: power dps: berserker, condi dps: viper. Celestial is massive in some hybrid builds, is not meta in instanced content but works wonders in some "do it all" builds.

1) Double staff Mirage (celestial or traiblazer stats): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PijAYZlRwiYVsEmJWyP9PNA-zRRYVRFPZEMFSmpaHVQIBlwHCBNFK8TFkHNgYaDA-e A single weapon, you use the swap mostly to refill endurance; you have lost of interrupts, projectile blocks and i-frames, and you don't need to use the F skills (or even the heal skill) in most of OW content, even soloing some bounties. Works at range and your clones are a nice meat shield. 2) Rifle Mechanist (marauder): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PeQAQlxycZdsXWMOuLfxfA-zRJYiRRfZEYCURBo/AA-e Really simple to play, a single wepon (plus the flamethrower if the enemy reflects projectils) lots of cc and very good tools; a bit boring after the nerf of the AA animation, but still super chill to play. 3) Hybrid Vindicator (celestial): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PmzAkeZlhQmsI6kJRpMIClBSqMBqkjyzasF-zxIY1ojvMyMB6oA8+AEue41AipNQFA-e A single weapon set (mace + axe), you use 3 weapon skills (+ aa) and 3 utilities, and you're immortal. Really easy to play, only disadvantage is a dps a bit lower and that you need to spam those 6 skills and evade oftenly, because you're constantly on mele range (doesn't matter because you can facetank). Of those, I would say the Mirage is the laziest one to play, but any work.

Darkrazor Daring provides stability.

Use "sell junk" oftenly to ditch lots of garbage the game will spam to you. Check any orange and yellow items you get to see if they are valuable in the black lion market, and if the value is low salvage them to get ectos, runes/sigils and unlock the skins. Sell everything you get unless you're actively using them to a specific goal (as crafting an object). As for the dragonite, empyreal fragments and bloodstone dust, just stack at most ~1k units of each if you plan to craft some ascended gear, you can ditch everything else. The 5 bag slots x character avaliable to any character from a paid account and the few bank slots is MORE THAN ENOUGH to maneage every item the game throws to you. You should either sell, salvage or convert to sell every item you get, and manually ditch the few annoying ones you can't sell and have no interest to transform in other things (to sell). You should use (at most) 1 or 2 bags x character to carry alternative weapons, armors, runes, consumables, etc. The rest is space to temporaly carry loot for a few hours of gameplay, then sell/salvage and start again.The end goal is running in full legendary gear, and there's no reason to spent money in extra bags in inventory or in the bank. The "need to carry all" and "fear of losing" are just psychological tricks, and having 12 bag slots with 32 spaces each wouldn't solve your problem. Take a look at how Mighty Teapot and Mukluk have their mains oftenly filled with garbage, whereas Mela has his inventory slots almost entirely empty. That's the way to go: the important (valuable) things in the game are the in your shared currency bag and outside of that very few PvE/PvP/WvW tokens have real value and should be stacked for future use. Free your mind.

Didn't post since the topic was about Renegade iterations with short bow and I didn't want to derrail the conversation, but since Cell expressed interest in OW "easy and effective" I must say: I recently played Hizen's condi Vindicator build and that thing can solo the Balrog of Moria, I swear. Albeit the dps is modest, easily reaches burst of 46+ stacks of torment and the self sustain is pre-tormenting runes nerfs IF not higher. If you have acces to EoD you should check it out: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PmzAkeZlhQmsI6kJRpMIClBSqMBqkjyzasF-zxIY1ojvMyMB6oA8+AEue41AipNQFA-e Essentially, any foe which lacks a mechanic which insta-kills you or delivers over 25k damage across 2.9k armor in a single hit... You can face tank it.

PvP legendary armors are cheaper and the Grandmaster Marks can be crafted to circunvent some of the time limitations, albeit the big advantage of this method is that there's no way to "fail" in PvP: even if you lose all your matches you still get a good chunck of progress every time which grants you the tokens needed to complete ascended/legendary gear in that game mode. Raids, on the other hand, can fail. That's why getting legendary gear there is popular: you need no one, and you're always getting progress.

Celestial has 7 stats with the same raw value in the minor stats as in a 4 stat gear. This means that an ascended staff in viper stats will have 215 points in power and condition damage and 118 points in precision and expertise, whereas trailblazer will have 215 points in thoughness and condition damage and 118 points in vitality and expertise; meanwhile celestial will have 118 points in each of the 7 stats, so has the same condition damage duration as viper or trailblazer but tons of boon duration. In damage, will outpace the dps trailblazer Mirage but be lower than the viper one, but in exchange will be way more tanky while retaining the same crit chance. You can test a exotic version of this build (you can replace Nightmare rubes by Perplexity ones for similar results): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PijAYZlRwiYVsEmJWyP9PNA-zRRYVRFPZEMFSmpaHVQIBlwHCBNFK8TFkHNgYaDA-e From a solo point of view I think that that and the celestial Vindi are the strongest contenders, but Mirage has the advantage that for group instanced content Virtuoso is one of the best condi & power dps out there while retaining the ranged viability of the Mirage, whereas for instanced content Vindicator has to move to a way riskier power build (or Herald build) which are mele and very different from the facetanking condi Vindi. In other words: condi Mirage is a powerhouse at soloing which deals big damage while being tanky due range and clones to distract the enemy, and when goes to instanced content Virtuoso loses the clones but still has tools to deliver huge damage at any range. Meanwhile condi Vindicator is a unstoppable solo mele machine a bit slower at killing but with uncany sustain, but with very low damage in teams. That in instanced content forces them to move to power builds which are decent but have terribad sustain (specially Vindicator, which needs to spam evades to buff his damage, so sometimes you can't dodge when you need it). That's funny due condi Vindi can solo things that power Vindi would die against while playing in a 5 or 10 players group...

Fun is subjective, and professions gameplay change quite a bit from spec to spec, so I would give some advice which is entirely personal: 1) To boost or not? Both choices are perfectly fine; in this game leveling is relatively fast: If you have materials or a bit of gold from other characters just leveling a crafting ability from 1 to 400 rises your character level from 1 to 80, so you can do that in a hour or two if needed. There's also plenty of knowledge tomes provided from PvP and WvW if you're in to that. But remember that everything in the game gives xp: exploring, gathering, reviving allies, killing foes, doing open world events, doing dungeons, etc. Mining a iron ore gives you a 1% of a level, a point of interest is ~3% a vista ~7%, a heart ~10% and a dungeon a 70%, etc. I recently rised a new character from 1 to 80 in 23'25" just exploring maps (no boosters, no tomes, no dungeons, only 2 personal history chapters and the use of mounts). Now, boosting a character won't let you to learn how it works, but that is easier just enetring in the PvP hub and trying builds vs the golems to figure what the skillsm traits and stats do. What I mean is that you can manually level a character for 80 levels and still miss how they work, specially since before level 80 a lot of runes, sigils and stat combinations doesn't even exist. So, if you want to play a fully leveled just now without using time in the proccess that's fine. 2) Which one to level? The answer used to be Necro in light armor due was easy to use, tanky thanx to the large HP and the shroud mechanic and the minions for tanking; Ranger in medium armor due easy to play and a pet to tank, and in heavies while both Warrior and Guardian were easy to play the Guardian was "more meta" for end game content. The think is that they were mist first two mains and I died a lot leveling them ten years ago... There's also the question: which gameplay you prefer? Mele? Ranged? A mix of both? Relaxed low number of inputs x minute or demanding rotations with a lot of combo fields? Tanky but inexorable, bursty but frail? Feel free to express what you want to run, so we could help you to guide you better... But now the things are different, due both specs (which can't be used before reaching 80 and unlocking all the core skills and traits) and stacked knownledge over the years. For rising a level 1 character to 80 in Open World those would be my main choices: Light armor: a Mesmer, running staff + greatsword and using condition and vitality stats up to 80. Unlocking Dueling 223, Chaos 233 and (mostly) sigils skills Then as soon as you hit 80 start to unlock Mirage to run a double staff build. Advantages: can kill things at range at very good pace while the clones and cc deal with most of menaces, has high amount of blocks, reflects and tools to deal with both single targets and crowds without being too much exposed to risks. Rising this one was a walk in the park, and once you get the Mirage you barely would need to even use the heal skill again. If you opt to boost it, the celestial stats works wonders, also. Mid armor: Engineer is more combo intensive, and Thief is oftenly a glass canon. I would say that Ranger is easier to level due the pets tanking and better AoE, but didn't tried by my self. Once at 80, Mechanist is the easiest to play and most powerful for the lowest input ratio. Soulbeast is also easy to play and quite effective, bu I'll still pick the Mesmer over any of those. Heavy armor: if you have access to Revenant, get it, if not maybe Guardian. In both cases a condition build. The only drawback of Revenant while leveling is that is a mele build, and you should avoid fighting crowds (specially those with archers or other ranged attacks) untill you get your second weapon (level 10) and second legend. Once you have Jalis + Mallyx on your pocket and mace + axe and the the hammer or a staff you're fine. Corruption 131, Retribution 133 and Invocation 121. Condition and vitality stats, once you reach 80 unlock Vindicator and you'll become prety much immortal. The best thing is that celestial stats works for Herald, Renegade and Vindicator, so you don't need to swap stats nor runes, just the weapons...

I would argue that is either heavy (condi Vindicator) or light (double staff condi Mirage). Condi Mirage does more damage, works at range, is prety much immune to projectiles, has tons of defenses, cc and versatility (most of the time doesn't even need to use the heal skill), but on the other hand the self sustain is a bit lower (not like would matter if you play well your cards). Condi Vindicator is different: kills slower and is pure mele, but can facetank almost everything and ignore plenty of mechanics; the self sustain is godlike. In heavies Warrior does more damage (Bladesworn) but is harder to use. Guardian has a Firebrand with plenty of tools but has low dps and is nowhere near V in self sustain; Willbender kills faster but just a badly used stability or Litany heal can kill you. In medium armors Thief is mostly a single target specialist with rotations a bit repetitive. Engineer is better, but not S tier. Ranger is a condi mele with better dps than Vindi but lower sustain and higher skill cap. In light armors both Necro and Eles are a bit harder to use than Mesmer. I'll suggest you to use exotic armor pieces from the PvP/WvW to test the builds (celestial for both Mirage and Vindicator, albeit trailblazer do work) and find out which gameplay you like the most.

Too bad the meta now seems to be 5 eles x team, so you'll be out of luck for a while...

You can use karma + eternal iceshards (daily farm the big chests) from Bjora Marches map to buy season 4 materials (like mistborn mote or difluorite crystal) and consume those materials to earn volatile magic and use gold + volatile magic to buy trophy chest or leather chest in season 4 maps, and sell those at gains (albeit the value fell over 60% in the last 3 months): https://gw2lunchbox.com/IstanShipments.html Is not terribly lucrative, but at least the conversion is easy and fast. But personally I think that stacking throphies for legendary crafting is better due you save the taxes of the transactions.

I agree with AliemRationem. That last two weeks I chose to manually level up a Mesmer from 1 to 80, without the use of any booster, knownledge tome or crafting abilities. The only advantage was that I had access to mounts and gliding, so the pace was faster, but aside from that was a vanilla character. Took me 23 hours and half to reach 80; my only xp sources were map exploration (vistas, teleports, Hero Points and points of interest, which are % based and the most time effective xp sources given the circumstances) a bit of gathering (each tree, ore or crop collected is 1% of a level) and less than 20 hearts. Did a few OW events: they give nice xp but usually are slow, so just exploring felt faster. I ran a staff + greatsword build, first using Chaos traits and adding Dueling at lvl 31. I started around low level maps and cities, then expanded on the next levels... Around level 65-70 the small number of high maps means that you will find out sometimes a bit overleveled by the enemies, but if the difference isn't above 5 levels would work fine: Mesmer has plenty of tools. I only died twice: one one-shooted crossing a 35 level map with the character at level 12 (should have been more aware) and other at level 72 fighting a HP without having cleansed the area before. I did wear the armor and trinkets provided by the game, and only bough weapons 2 times in the whole leveling ~30 and ~60. Some of my gear at 80 was single stat and most of it two stats. Anyone moaning about Mesmer being "too hard to level up solo" is wrong. Easiest solo leveling I remember in 10.5 years playing GW2.

Vindicator can have permanent access to fury, quickness, 25 might stacks and have 100% crit chance and over 200% crit damage, with big AoE bursts and solid sustained damage... against a golem. As a Vindicator, when in PvE you are engaged in fights at which you are forced to defend to avoid enemy mechanics your dps falls like a rock, and you will often be forced to block/evade/retreat oftenly. Preventing dangerous attacks from foes usually requires cc, and as a Vindi with a greatsword + Alliance the cc available is close to 0. Moving to legacy cc sources (staff's #5, Jali's Forced Engagement, Shiro's Jade Winds...) not only degrades the basic damage but also interrupts the whole perma quickness/fury/might stacks which ends in much lower dps numbers. So that big AoE bursts and high sustained dps are there mostly vs regular creeps or bosses which allows you to tank their hits due aren't dangerous enough to be a treat. Another problem is range: once you you meet a fight which requires to move away at some phases your dps either falls to 0 or demands you to wield a hammer, arguably one of the worst PvE ranged weapons in the game. But some times you need a ranged option even in OW large events, like Dragon Stand or Domain of Istan: in domain, if you run a pure mele build and you arrive 8-10 seconds late after a champion have been focused (because a mob hit you after killing the previous champ and you lost seconds getting out of combat to ride your mount) the chances are it will be killed before you even touch him. The same happens in Dragonfall: the big event is mostly a ladder of speedruns vs every new event, and you have very narrow windows of seconds to tag every enemy you can before the zerg of players delete the targets and move to the next event. Is also not like we get a big reward (damage) in exchange for the risk: fighting a champ with no special mechanics/defiance bar and which lacks one-shooters, as the Mordrem Vinetooth in Auric Basin: usually takes me ~70 seconds to kill him with my Vindi, whereas is less than 60 seconds with my rifle Mechatist (post nerfs) and 52 seconds with my traiblazer Mirage. And I known why: I'm manually leveling a new Mesmer (no tomes, no crafting, no boosters) and is being a walk in the park, the clones do the tanking for me and my blocks/evades don't slower my damage due they are part of my attacks and the condis keep proccing. Another funny example are the Bristleback veterans (specially the buffed ones in WvW): they have no value per se, but are good milestones to check weakness in builds. They have high HP and armor, and a 7 seconds super hard hitting channeled attack wich auto tracks released each 15 seconds, which can prevented breaking the defiance bar: a sor of mini-boss. Most builds can't one-shoot them, so you have to either disable them and do as much damage as possible in a short period or use a lot of defensive tools. Of course is a bisased choice since for a Auramancer Ele they are like ants, but for a lot of builds they are big troubles. Best Vindi PvE build I saw against a WvW Bristleback in the pre-grestaword-nerfs Vindi betas killed them in like 20 seconds (and almost dying) whereas my Willbender tears them in 11 seconds and my condi Herald and condi Renegade does it around 22 seconds (fairly safe). My power Vindi or Herald? They usually die. This is not a moan, anyway: I known that the design of each spec is different and would make no sense to make them entirely equal (despite ANet is clearly making some classes to lose a lot of personality since they realized that every class needed to have access to quickness, alacrity, aegis and so on...). Vindi and Herald are fine; is just that since they don't work as they did (Herald) and they seem extremely complex for the final output/performance they deliver (Vindicator) I see no reason to keep using them in PvE. So they are now alt parked characters in my book.

You can level instantly with the 80 lvl booster, or you can get up to 60 levels with the higher birthay booster, and of course both PvP and WvW reward tracks provide large amounts of knownledge tomes to rise 1 lv x tome. Outside that, rising a crafting skill from 0 to 400 rises a character level exactly to 80 (ideal for alts). While leveling your first character it takes you like an hour to reach 10 (when you get 10 hours of the raptor mount for free) and you'll reach 15 in less that 2 hours (at that point the experience boost switches to "normal". From 15 to 30 you can rise 1 level each 15 minutes just completing low level maps (without hearts) with no xp buffs. Once you reach level 30 you can do Dungeons and get 70% of a level x run x day, but that means that that method is only better (faster) than exploration if you close the dungon in less than 11 minutes. The overall process to rise a new character from 1 to 80 with no boosters, no crafting and just exploring is around ~24 hours, which is faster than in most MMOs but still could be better since you really don't start to play the game untill you have a full core character and start to try builds, unlock specs and to craft/gather some exotic (or bettr) gear.

Drizzlewood for overall gold earnings. Dragonfall is also interesting since outside farming events for keys for the main rewards if you spent a few gold coins for the map boosters you'll get very good karma & volatile magic returns farming the gosthly knights in the scorched peaks at the northwest.

The thread is old and the first replies are now out on context, but imo the topic aged well in the sense that the PvP decay along 2022 did nothing but increase the gap between what was meta and everything else. Vindi had two ninuscle 733 HP heals designed to be used very often, each 10 seconds, which now have a 30s cooldown in PvP, making it easily the worst Rev heal in the game. Whereas in the past (summer) we saw some bold MAT Vindicators running gs + swords, you now only find out gs + staff which rely on disengage from fights and the stack of blocks and evades fumbling around untill they release Eternity's Requiem, exactly every 20 seconds. That's the only "good" PvP build Rev currently has, since power Herald is unable to endure a fight vs any other meta build, and while has better cc than Vindi lacks the AoE damage. Renegade not only is hard countered by the projectile hate of the meta, but also is severely lacking in mobility and cc vs EoD specs. Both Herald and Renegade were nerfed pre EoD to assert EoD specs dominance and grant sales, and I think that ANet had success in the strategy since I didn't touche power Herald in PvP in tha last 12 months... In PvE things are different since Herald is now meta in instanced groups, delivering offensive support with quickness + alacrity. My problem is that I don't play instanced content, and in OW PvE power Herald is just a mediocre build (same with Vindi). Condi Mirage does the thing faster without even using the heals, and I don't even known what the Mesmer skills do... WvW is probably the place in which Rev works best: Herald is still a thing in zergs and Vindi is viable in roaming (albeit professions with stealth or ranged characters as Harbingers or Virtuosos easily will crush you. Our game is slow and predictable, our moves are weak... Pre nerfs Renegade felt much better, honestly. Now there's no reason to chose it outside doing camp-flipping speedruns. And even that, once you have rank 1226 and the WvW abilities are fully unlocked, the game mode doesn't have much more to provide: WvW has been the same since PoF, and I think that The Alliances will do for WvW the same as EoD did for PvP: to kill the game mode. You can only starve with lack of content for so much. Recapping: PvE: Renegade has some uses due has range, but there's better choices. WvW: Vindi is playable but you lack cc so vs some specs you don't have any chance. PvP: Rev has a single card (Vindi) and I don't like how it moves in that game mode, which also don't touch too much lately.

^ Shamans of the Flame Legion (and then from others) acepting magic from the Titans to fight humans and their deities ended in the Flame Legion becoming the ruling cast for a long and traumatic period which not only marginalizad female Charr from the battlefield but also culminated in the Foefire curse than since then plaged Ascalon lands with the phantoms of the humans. That instigate a rebellion which defeated the Flame Legion and since then Charr earned a ingrained distrut for magic. The most representative traits of the Charr culture are their orientation to war, in the form of Warriors, Engineers and their war machines their spies. Of course you can justify any choice, but lore wise a Charr spell caster in the modern Charr society should be as rare as a Guardian or Engineer Norn.

I would say that from a lore perspective the races fit to the Necromancer profession in this order: Asura > Human > Norn > Silvari > Charr.

Firebrand is pretty bleaaaaaaargh...

The exact speeds were posted several times in Reddit, is not that hard to find out them. I can't remember the exact amounts but were noticeable, and this is the resume: * Consortium, Molten and any sickle with the "golf animation" are the fastest gathering tools for crops; they have also the property so you can move after 70% of the animation was cast without losing the reward. The most useful glyphs for them are industrious (for max efficinecy in speed) reaper (for max efficiency at gathering rich nodes and in Bitterfrost Frontier winterberry farms) and volatile (sickle + volatile glyph is the best source of volatile magic in the game, up to x6 times better than using volatile with a chopping axe or a mining pick). * Unbound has the fastest logging tool. Best glyph in that case is industrious. * Unbound has the fastest mining tool. Best glyph in that case is industrious. https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/8bbwcm/science_exact_gathering_tool_speeds/

I'm aware about some mercenary regiments succesfully using flamberges and other gs variants against pike formations, but that were more exceptions than the norm across the history. Not like has any relevance in a high fantasy mmo which combines the use of torches with magitech. My point was just a joke about how swords are as overrated in media as underrated are armors and shields.

I oftenly do solo Hero Mastery point runs in the Heart of Thorns maps, and usually use builds as condi Herald, condi or hybrid Renegade, power Vindicator, condi Willbender, hybrid Firebrand, power rifle Mechanist and condi double staff Mirage. I run solo builds, I don't run meta builds for instanced content since I don't need instanced content and those builds designed to deliver in a team with permanent 25 stacks of might, permanant quickness, alacrity and protection + heals, stability and other shared support features tend to work very bad when you try to solo conent with them. In my experience: * Condi Herald and condi Renegade do similar damage; the Renegade is a bit faster and has the advantage of range but that's a handicap vs some foes which reflect projectiles as the Chack champion at the Southwest Entangled Deepts Hero Point. Herald is more tanky; usually ramp up to ~35 torment stack with him. * Condi Mirage ramps up beyond 60 condition stacks (NOT including vulnerability) and I usually solo the HPs without using the heal skill. Only disadvantage is that visually what the mesmer does most of the time is hanging the staff in the right hand while projecting beams from his extended left arm. But it beats pre-nerf rifle Mech in killing speed, plus any of my Rev and Guardian builds, and I don't even known what most of the Mesmer stuff does... I've seen also condi Virtuosos stacking over 80 damaging conditions, but Virtuoso is not as good as solo OW spec due lack of clones & AoE damage. So: condi Mirage allows to kill foes remaining untouched despite I'm unaware of what most of Mirage's skills and traits do. The FX looks nice albeit the animations are a bit boring. But boring + being able to solo legendary bounties and fractal/strike bosses is better than running a flashy spec which dies oftenly if yiou try to solo hard content. I've seen some players doing impressive stuff with Eles, as Leonidex, but I suspect that the keystrokes x minute in Eles is way higher... I main Rev and generaly dislike mid & light armor classes but imo Mirage is darn high effective at the moment and if He mains Mesmer don't see a point to advice him to run a class which is more demanding and less rewarding.