Curse

Outerworld · May 14, 2011, 03:22 PM // 15:22

Quote:

Originally Posted by LexTalionis

@Outerworld: None at all. If you want to keep your bars like that, don't bother with BiP. I was just answering the question about how to fit BiP on the build, and not why.

Simple Keybind also for PS isn't so hot when Necromancer is perpetually casting Death Nova. That's my problem with it. I usually want PS now, not 2.25 seconds later.

He would cancel DN and use PS is how I always observe it.

Plutoman · May 14, 2011, 06:44 PM // 18:44

You should consider that mesmer e-management is inefficient. Regardless of having power drain and WNWN, I consistently see the mesmers run out of energy. At times they pop back up, but I do see them running dry quite often. Particularly with the more copies of the interrupts you get, and again, when calling targets, they focus on one target - there's only so many interrupts to go off. BiP is guaranteed energy when you need it, the AI is pretty smart in using it. In addition, when he drops in health, the AI of other healers/protectors immediately protect him, and then heal him, so the health sacrifice is rarely an issue. The healers (I typically use UA) never run out of energy, either, so a single heal isn't a stretch.

The Josip · May 14, 2011, 08:12 PM // 20:12

Aneurysm seems promising in a team with multiple copies of E-Surge. And it's probably the only way a mesmer can see nice 200+ numbers. Unfortunately it seems that hero waits till enemy energy goes down near minimum, which means he will miss many opportunities for good damage and not use the skill frequently.

Plutoman · May 14, 2011, 11:52 PM // 23:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Josip

Aneurysm seems promising in a team with multiple copies of E-Surge. And it's probably the only way a mesmer can see nice 200+ numbers. Unfortunately it seems that hero waits till enemy energy goes down near minimum, which means he will miss many opportunities for good damage and not use the skill frequently.

Hadn't put any serious thought to that, but that really does have some potential with 3 sets of E-Surge. It's nice repeatable armor ignoring damage, because if enemies close like mobs tend too, the energy lost will keep them from doing anything, and they'll take repeated high single target damage. It's also cheap, and a high energy drain.

HigherMinion · May 15, 2011, 09:43 AM // 09:43

Aneurysm is a very nice skill in this team. I had actually replaced Spiritual Pain with it just after posting. If you're afraid something is going to run out of energy and esurge deal pitiful damage; Aneurysm to the rescue, or a Finish Him! style single-target damage. It's just Discord with an easier condition to meet.

@Lex; I'm not sure if I was clear enough about the suggestions I was after:

Imagine I have BiP instead of AotL. Same Minion Bomber bar, but with BiP in the elite slot. Right. Now we have infinite energy accross the whole team; remove PD/WNWN and what 8 skills would you replace them with?

LexTalionis · May 15, 2011, 11:06 AM // 11:06

@HigherMinion:
Um, well, you're asking me for my opinion so be warned that it's not necessarily going to be the same as what you might like but -

If you're not a Mesmer and doing interrupts yourself, you might need a bit more disruption in that party, so I'd reserve one slot for the following: Cry of Frustration, Power Spike, Guilt or Complicate (usually inferior to Cry but better against mass casters). It's true that interrupts don't stack particularly well, but they're still very useful especially if you lock different targets. Power Spike is a favourite of mine. Cry/Complicate can also deal with Giant Stomp, but you pretty much have to force it since for some reason, heroes don't like to interrupt this skill. If you have Guilt and Mistrust and about 10+ FC, you can usually completely lock down any caster boss in HM with heroes since Guilt steals rather a lot of energy (though your 2 Mistrusts can handle it). Might have synergy if you use Aneurysm.

As for the other slot, this is completely a cop-out answer, but I usually assign some slots on my charas to "meta slots", and change skills out as needed.

Like um, some areas will be hex-heavy, so I'd put in Shatter Hex, some areas have lots of Dervishes or Orot monks, so Shatter Enchantment would be good spike dps (it doesn't look great, but it has a practical recast of around 15 seconds with 8 FC). Some areas would have barrage rangers and tons of non VoS Dervishes, so Empathy would kill those instantly... at this point in GW's lifespan, I'm pretty damn familiar with Guild Wars' areas and enemy types; so I tend to cheese things by going with counter skills, which mesmers have rather a lot of. Even Diversion or Backfire can be occasionally useful.

BiP definitely has its drawbacks though, the BiP user is really an incredibly high priority target, which is why I'm so addicted to Dark Bond. I can see the appeal of having energy management on all Mesmers instead.

My reason for BiP is not because of SKILLS though. The primary reason I use BiP is so I don't have to go into inspiration at all and can pump FC higher - Thanks to the nature of additive percentages, the higher the value of FC, the greater the effect you're going to get from it per point of increase. At 8 FC, you have a 24% recharge, so Esurge is going to be up around every 11.25 seconds. At 11 FC, 33% recharge would make it up every 10 seconds. At 16 FC, you'd have 48% recharge and that means one surge around every 7.5 seconds (and Guilt will recharge in about 12-13 seconds instead of 20ish at 8 FC. It's kind of a drastic change in gameplay.)

I'm perfectly aware dual superiors isn't usually a great idea, so I usually settle on a happy medium of 2 majors - 14 FC and 15 Domination give pretty good results and less of a HP hit than 1 superior would, though if I was using E-surge I'd probably go 16 Dom 13 FC instead.

Sorry, it's probably not the answer you wanted.

The Josip · May 15, 2011, 01:03 PM // 13:03

Blitzkrieg setup:
9 Command instead of Inspiration. x3 Fallback, x3 Signet rez.

Defensive setup:
9 Prot. x3 Aegis chain. x3 Renew Life.

Quote:

Originally Posted by LexTalionis

At 11 FC, 33% recharge would make it up every 10 seconds

10FC, 40/40 set. Recharges half of stated. (Shatter Enchantment more like 11sec on average, E-Surge more like 8sec, etc). Don't know what sets others use.
If Wisdom used, cca 80% cases - the recharge is halved (someone do the math pls).

LexTalionis · May 15, 2011, 01:26 PM // 13:26

The guide currently isn't comprehensive enough, so I've updated the first post with the following information:

Further notes on the nature of interrupts

Mesmers are for interrupting. This is one of their fortes - however, have you ever wondered why your heroes love letting random Meteor Showers slip through the cracks?

There are two default settings for AI. "In combat" and "Out of combat". It's easy to tell when you're in combat as heroes will start autocasting skills that aren't usually maintained, such as Dervish Avatars and glyphs.

When a hero is out of combat, it will interrupt skills when set on Defensive mode, only provided the caster is in range of the Mesmer and the skill in question targets an ally. This means it will not interrupt preparations, enchantments, forms and so on.

When in combat, the hero will attempt to interrupt most skills that the enemy uses (with occasional random lapses) provided the enemy is the mesmer's current target. In combat, your mesmer always has a current target, even if it is not locked. If Enemy A and Enemy B are casting meteor shower on a mesmer who is currently nuking or wanding enemy C, the mesmer will NOT interrupt enemy A nor enemy B. Note that calling targets will lock every nonassigned mesmer onto the called target.

Interrupt choice: Similiar to nuking, when presented a choice between multiple options, Heroes will use viable interrupts completely at random.

Special cases for AI Interrupts:

Power Return: Very short recharge time, the only reason I mention this is because it makes for a good choice if you're worried about the diminishing returns from interrupt stacking harming your ability to interrupt.
Leech Signet: Heroes will only use this to interrupt spells and will never use it to interrupt non-spell skills.
Signet of Disruption: Heroes will use this correctly if target is hexed
Web of Disruption and Power Flux: Heroes use these as if they were normal hexes and will not attempt to interrupt foes with them.
Mistrust and Friends: In addition to what has been said about Mistrust-type spells, please note that these cause skill failure and do not constitute interruption. This means that they will not cause the failed spell to initiate its normal cooldown and that they will get around anti-interrupt effects such as Mantra or Glyph of Concentration.
Complicate: Note that due to the above behaviour, if your heroes do not blow Complicate simultaneously on the same skill, Complicate stacking tends to severely maim enemy groups when you call targets, since a single Complicate-ed monster will rotate through its available skills. Most enemy skillbars are partially or completely nonfunctional when 1 or 2 of their skills have been locked. (This is usually a good time to hit them with Wastrel's Demise)

Many thanks to the groups of Hydras in the Ring of Fire and the silly elementalists outside Fort Ranik which made testing these observations easy.

Edit: This is kind of random and extra (I didn't want to make a new topic nor bump this thread gratuitously) but if you're using an Illusion mesmer, it's kind of possible not to make Assassin Heroes kinda cool (but not very). Generally, you want a Crit Barrage build something like this:

Bring in a 15-16 point Frustration, Splinter and possibly Fragility and call targets. If the targetted enemy drops below 50% health, it's usually dead in about 3 seconds (unless it's standing or running around and not doing anything).

update: Poisonous Bite and Scavenger Strike (or even Dshot) seem to work better, but the main idea is that Frustration and Disrupting Needling churn out ridiculous dps (about 75 damage per needling shot on attackers and 125 damage if it interrupts skills).

Aria Frost · May 16, 2011, 03:09 PM // 15:09

How about this solution regarding e-management?
Channelling is optionally there as a cover enchantment to avoid Symbolic Celerity stripping.

Has the drawbacks to being forced /N as secondary prof and may be subject to enchantment removal, but SoLS it's a stackable (and quite reliable) source of energy/healing and also allows for a full 12-12 FC-Dom/Ill spec.

Daesu · May 16, 2011, 03:49 PM // 15:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aria Frost

How about this solution regarding e-management?
Channelling is optionally there as a cover enchantment to avoid Symbolic Celerity stripping.

Has the drawbacks to being forced /N as secondary prof and may be subject to enchantment removal, but SoLS it's a stackable (and quite reliable) source of energy/healing and also allows for a full 12-12 FC-Dom/Ill spec.

Heroes suck with Symbolic Celerity. They don't always recast it when they should and sometimes they would use SoLS without it. I guess, you can always micro it if you really choose to take that.

LexTalionis · May 16, 2011, 04:11 PM // 16:11

I've tried it. It's not too great primarily because Symbolic Celerity is a 15 energy skill and isn't maintained out of combat - you're only seeing a 9 energy return per activation, meaning you need to wait at least 16 seconds before you get any meaningful use out of it. BiP is a lot faster.

Daesu · May 17, 2011, 02:18 AM // 02:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by LexTalionis

I've tried it. It's not too great primarily because Symbolic Celerity is a 15 energy skill and isn't maintained out of combat - you're only seeing a 9 energy return per activation, meaning you need to wait at least 16 seconds before you get any meaningful use out of it. BiP is a lot faster.

SoLS is not a bad skill provided you are willing to micro symbolic celerity, which implies hitting a key that is bound to that skill every 30 to 60s, not that bad.

The problem with BiP is that it takes an elite slot and has a steep life sac which tends to make your BiP necro a target. It would have been great if heroes can play the role of a 1-hp BiPer well, but they don't. In most case, you only need BR, which is not as good as SoLS.

LexTalionis · May 17, 2011, 02:24 AM // 02:24

I'm quite well aware of the limitations of BiP. What I meant when I said "faster" is that BiP returns 20 or 24 energy over a 12 second period while SoLS would return 9 energy over an 8 second period. One is more than the other.

Also, note that BiP's higher target priority can be abused.

Plutoman · May 17, 2011, 03:38 AM // 03:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daesu

SoLS is not a bad skill provided you are willing to micro symbolic celerity, which implies hitting a key that is bound to that skill every 30 to 60s, not that bad.

The problem with BiP is that it takes an elite slot and has a steep life sac which tends to make your BiP necro a target. It would have been great if heroes can play the role of a 1-hp BiPer well, but they don't. In most case, you only need BR, which is not as good as SoLS.

It would be great to be sure - but hey, AI limits are always annoying when you get down to it. -.-

I'd venture to argue for BiP, I've used it quite extensively as of late and not been disappointed. The AI is friendly towards it; after the health sac, protects go up. The enemy AI focuses on him, but then he's protected and getting healed and pressure comes off of other heroes and onto the protected target. In a way, though, I dislike myself using it because I find myself using it more and more as a crux when I don't want to deal with the complex issue of party e-management.

The mesmers, which are really the ones that need the e-management (I tend to have poor luck with power drain and WNWN, because of calling targets), are then free to shut down and destroy much of the group without regard for energy regen. My experience was that the weakest point of mesmers was the mop-up - the cleaning up of the warriors, rangers, etc, who lack casting, were out of damage range for mistrust, and etc. I also found that they would be out of energy then, too, because of missed chances for e-gain. So I used BiP, and was amazed.

That's not to say BiP's the end-all - but more to say that it does a job well, providing energy regen to a party as needed, and aggro control if you prepare. It's not for an inexperienced player, though, because of the drawbacks and considerations. All in all, I'd put it as a relatively balanced skill - it's got a definite use when you consider it and plan other builds around it, but just plugging it in doesn't always work, and you need to know how to use it.

Also, there's usually plenty of mesmer skills that can fit in to replace e-management, but they are usually conditional on the area (shatters, caster/melee hate and etc), while the core can usually remain. I usually leave one skill just in case, too, because on the off-chance the BiP goes down the group goes too (but this has only been a problem in elite areas). My couple cents on the skill. Almost done with work for the semester so I'm taking some time to make a post :P

bhavv · May 17, 2011, 04:33 AM // 04:33

I've been running a few variations of this triple mesmer setup, and it seems to be working great for me:

I put all my main interrupts on the Domination bar. The elite can be either PI or Panic, both are just as useful to have.

Micromanaging the Domination and Keystone mesmers is easy - You simply target and lock whatever you want interrupting onto the Domination mes, and then you call a different target for the keystone sig mes.

I dont think that the hero AI prioritizes using keystone signet to interrupt, it just spams the signets for the damage, and if stuff gets interrupted then thats just an added bonus, so you just micro and lock the domination mesmer.

The Illusion Mesmer doesnt have any problems with energy management using Arcane Conundrum and WNWN.

These builds are just a general guideline and can be changed however you like. One thing I like to do is to put Prot Spirit, or even Prot bond on the keystone sig mes instead of hex eater signet. Also some people might want the Domination bar to have a res skill, in which case I would drop Power Spike.

Having Complicate, CoF + PI or Panic should be hugely powerful shut down for AI casters, and the Illusion mesmer also helps slow them down with Arcane Conundrum, and ofc eats melee and ranged mobs alive for breakfast.

I tried adding a fourth mesmer mercenary and played around with trying to make something with both Panic + PI plus Ineptitude and Keystone Sig, but I quickly found it very unfavorable without even trying it - damage output and interrupts from two domination mesmers would be very diminishing, and also we all know that hero AI sucks with the wastrels spells.

So I think that Mesmers are just like Necros, 3 of them is the magic number, but then anymore than that creates diminishing results.

I've been running the triple mesmers with two spritway rits, an Invoke elly with Enfeebling Blood + Weaken Armor, and Intensity / Invoke / EBSOH on my skill bar:

Healing is put onto half of the SoS rits bar, and then on the last hero for which I've currently been using UA as I am grinding FoW. One and a half healer, plus prot spirit on the Keystone Sig mesmer is completely adequate for healing with this setup.

Plutoman · May 17, 2011, 06:02 AM // 06:02

How does the ele hero use weaken armor? I've been running into AI issues where the AI prioritizes the other damage skills over weaken armor.

bhavv · May 17, 2011, 10:45 AM // 10:45

I dont think he uses it well at all tbh, it might be better to manually click it.

I would prefer to have Spirit Rift instead for the cracked armor, plus Ancestors Rage + Painful Bond, but I need one of the rits to heal as well since I'm not running heals.

It tears through stuff a lot faster than I can manage when I'm E/Mo protting.

Aria Frost · May 17, 2011, 10:59 AM // 10:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by LexTalionis

I've tried it. It's not too great primarily because Symbolic Celerity is a 15 energy skill and isn't maintained out of combat - you're only seeing a 9 energy return per activation, meaning you need to wait at least 16 seconds before you get any meaningful use out of it. BiP is a lot faster.

Please note that with [email protected] SoLS returns 10e per activation. However I should say that I've only briefly tested it having also Channelling and a BiP hero in the party too.

About BiP: it has probably the best energy gain per second. But I think it's too stressful for a single BiP to serve up to 7 mates even though using Unholy Feast with it helps a lot. I'm figuring how turns out using 2 BiPs to split their effort. I'll probably go to test it in the next few days.

LexTalionis · May 17, 2011, 01:06 PM // 13:06

@Aria: Unfortunately, I don't usually find going up to 15 FC too practical unless I'm using a Keystone build, which usually has few to no energy problems.

The easiest way to ease the burden on your BiPper (who doesn't really have to be a necromancer) is simply to give him fewer targets that need his attention. My most recent build, for example, runs with a Dwayna Dervish (Never needs BiP), an Assassin (Won't get hit by BiP) 1 SoS ritualist (Rarely ever needs BiP) and thus he only really has to take care of 4 people, which is quite reasonable given that Soul Twisting has decent energy management. Instead of Soul Twisting, I could use an ER elementalist, which has no trouble with energy at all too.

Daesu · May 17, 2011, 04:51 PM // 16:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by Plutoman

The AI is friendly towards it; after the health sac, protects go up.

And that's the point.

In Dwaynaway, he had to add 2 self preservation skills (Dark Bond+Taste of Death) to his BiPer. If you don't then the BiPer would have to add load onto the prots and heals from the team because of the steep life sac.

All these in addition to using up an elite slot and becoming a crutch for energy management. If the BiPer dies, then the energy management capability of your team drops significantly.