Curse

octaviancmb · Sep 03, 2005, 04:23 PM // 16:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by Spura

Fragility build doesn't kill in one spike. Even with 0 death magic there is 3 second window in which target can be healed.

Three *whole* seconds? Since when did this become a significant amount of time? That, of course, assumes the Monk under Fragility never even tried to cast a spell through his Backfire. If he did, he's already dead, no need to wait for the Virulence to end. Add to the equation that *all* the Monks on your team get Backfired...at the same moment, as well as your team's token Mesmer. That generally gives the Me/N's a 10 second window to own whoever they want.

In other sites around the battlefield, your Hammer Warrior can't gain any adrenaline, the other warriors' targets cause them to lose all adrenaline and a hefty amount of energy for the privilige of attacking them, and your Ranger is blind and moving 50% as fast as he normally should. All of them have health degen (the Ranger *did* try to Troll Ungent, but, oops, Cry'd away). Your El/Mo smiters? After a couple Monks die (10 seconds in -- oh, look, the Me/R dropped Frozen Soil...), their enchantments start dropping, they get diversioned, they become worthless.

Yeah, I think the "crappy" Me/Mo's can keep up with this level of healing...even on a bad day...stealing your team's energy when they need to cast their Healing Seeds (in virtually 1 second). Of course, they need an enemy team to steal from, and...you're all dead...

This is all just theory, though. Most theoretical discussions about GW are utterly worthless due to the chaos of actual battle, human error, and the unexpected (surprise doubleteams, disconnections, etc).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Spura

The only characters not doing subpar job on an 8 mesmer team would be the shutdown one's, because that's what mesmers are for.

Clearly, Mesmers are utterly worthless outside of shutdown (which, lets not forget, Rangers are *always* better at, anyway). There's absolutely no other build worth considering for them at all. Ever. I hear ArenaNet's going to get rid of them in Chapter 2 because they're so pointless, replacing them with "Owners," a profession with no disadvantage and no counters. </sarcasm>

Lets look at a few of the tactical advantages and disadvantages of such a team.

Advantages:

1) No clear target. The enemy team will not know who to initially target from among your Mesmers. This buys the Mesmer team a few precious seconds at the critical beginning of the battle.
2) Disruption. The enemy team can count on *several* of their strategies being shut down. No profesion combination or strategy is safe.
3) Hex and enchantment removal. Everyone on your side of the battle can potentially remove 2-6 hexes and enchantments, and has hex-defence built in should they chose to include it.
4) Elite swapping. Everyone on the Mesmer team can share and trade elites back and forth throgh Arcane Mimicry. All your elites can be doubled/trippled.
5) Overall energy advantage. Unless you're facing a very bizarre team (like your own), your team probably has an overall energy advantage. (Addendum due to Smite: This assumes you can stop the Ether Renewal advantage. I am assuming this won't be an issue for an 8-Mesmer team. I could be wrong.)
6) Raw speed. All your casts are faster. You can accomplish more than the other team can in the same amount of time.

Disadvantages
1) Lack of access to other professions' primary attribute. The energy management attributes won't hurt as bad (Mesmers can compensate for lack of Energy Storage, Soul Reaping, and Expertise, at least in terms of energy management, if not skills), but lacking access to Divine Favor and Strength will mean that, for your monks, each and every heal has to count and you'll be somewhat disadvantaged in melee.
2) Skills. Similar to 1, above, the all Mesmer team might as well not take any skill tied to another profession's primary attribute unless that skill has utility at 0 attribute points. Also, they're limited to a 12-attribute ceiling (13 attribute 20% of the time) for all the other second profession skills. This lowers the efficiency of their second profession skills, sometimes by a non-trivial amount.
3) Armor. Several professions can wear better armor than Mesmers. Mesmers have only a couple of armor-increasing skills within their profession, and these armor buffs are always conditional.
4) Non skill/spell damage. Most of your team will have no access to bows or melee weapons. Your non skill/non-spell damage will be lower.
5) Primarily hex-based skills. Outside of shutdown, energy denial, or the second profession, a Mesmer is tied to hexes (and in some cases enchantments). Using a single strategy for offense can sometimes be easily shut down.
6) Difficult profession to master. The Mesmer is not a simple profession. You'll need an intelligent team.

An all-Mesmer team will have to capitalize on its advantages and minimize its disadvantages in order to succeed in a robust environment like high-level PvP. After examining these advantages and disadvantages, I think it is likely an all Mesmer team can accomplish that feat. Thus it is likely an all Mesmer team can be successful in high-level PvP.

However, I think you're likely better off with a balanced group.

cmb

LightningHell · Sep 03, 2005, 06:54 PM // 18:54

The Mesmer, in my opinion, is the best support character, but totally sucks in the primary slot (except for Me/N). HEY DON'T LET ANET DELETE IT!
Me/E: Exhaustion owns you. Unless you go Hydro or Aeromancing, and they aren't that effective.
Me/N: I Like it. But you can't have a full team of that.
Me/Mo: No Divine favor, as said above.
Me/R: I never said this was bad, but it's quite...well, you'd have to have a lot of creativity.
Me/W: I'll pretend I didn't hear that.

Mesmerists own as a secondary, but a FULL team of Mesmer primaries? I Sincerely Do Not Think you will have a chance against a balanced team. You might kick some moderate teams if your friends are really good, but, as octavian said, you'd be better off in a balanced group.

Sorry if I offended anyone.

xpuppetmaster · Sep 04, 2005, 01:57 AM // 01:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanis Imperium

2 Me/W IW Builds, with Inspiration Magic Armor creation spells.

Might as well be 6v8 when playing organized teams.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanis Imperium

2 Me/Mo 1 Fast Cast Healer with Inspiration Energy Stealing. 1 Protection Hexer, keeping the IW's from recieving much harm.

Who the hell is going to attack the IW's?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanis Imperium

1 Me/E This design should be built like any E and be made for straight damage. My paticular set up uses things like Energy Burn, Energy Surge, Conjure Phantasm, Phantom Pain and Air Spiking abilities.

Air causes exchaustion, mesmers have 50-60 energy, see any problems? After 2 min its down to a 5v8.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanis Imperium

1 Me/N Well Creator for to keep up the energy of the group, could also do hexes.

Hexes would make more sense than wells.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanis Imperium

and now 2 pure shutdown Mesmers to take out the casters on the other side.

The matches would have to play out like this, the Shut Down Casters would start by taking out the Monks and the other Casters on the opposing side, the Prot Monk would cast a spell on the entire group to protect from damage. Because the Casters have already been shut down, there is no way to strip the enchantment right away. The IW builds should then begin working on the tanks, and the Me/E should work on killing the monks on the other side.

Have you ever played the game or are you suffering from what I call zoo mom syndrome? For those who aren't aware, zoo mom syndrome is when moms at a zoo read signs about animals then turn to each other and pretend they have PhD's regarding the matter. Honestly, there is no way two shut down mes can take out more than 2 casters and its highly unlikely that would even be sustainable other than by constant blackout or constant diversion spamming. Please don't bring up backfire because that skill is a joke. Energy denial mesmers could possible take out 2 casters each, but that is assuming they are pretty good or their targets blow. Don’t start with the “I know a mesmer that can take 3 or 4 casters out of the game” either because they don’t exist against good teams. The best mesmer I ever played was from iQ and he could barely handle two casters.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanis Imperium

With Fast Casting the primary concern here, Mesmers would be able to cast their spells before being able to be countered and could very easily take out most competition.

How on earth is fast casting the primary concern? When has fast casting ever killed anyone? At the VERY most the other team will have 2 dedicated interrupters with maybe a skill like disrupting chop stuck on a war.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanis Imperium

Reasoning behind this failing: A group that contains too many casters to shut down. Too many warriors for the IW's to handle. Other than the team set up would take down quite a few teams.

Reasoning behind this failing: NONE - Conjure Phantasm FTW!!!

Spura · Sep 04, 2005, 09:40 AM // 09:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by octaviancmb

Three *whole* seconds? Since when did this become a significant amount of time? That, of course, assumes the Monk under Fragility never even tried to cast a spell through his Backfire. If he did, he's already dead, no need to wait for the Virulence to end. Add to the equation that *all* the Monks on your team get Backfired...at the same moment, as well as your team's token Mesmer. That generally gives the Me/N's a 10 second window to own whoever they want.

You know what? My monks pack hex breaker. You've failed to address that. Backfire hits hex breaker, which I reapply, so fragility does too. Other than that, when I get backfire as a monk, I just start running. GG. And of course I call backfire. So other monk casts smite hex. Which hits backfire or fragility. Because you chain cast, it will probably hit fragility. If it hits phantom pain, you will shatter delusions on fragility. Anyway, hexbreaker and hex removal throughout the team owns you. Btw in my latest build 5 characters pack hex removal. There is no way you will shut them down with only 2 shutdown mesmers. And yes 3 second is gargautan ammount of time to heal someone. Espeically if someone calls fragility and I know it will be coming. Overall Me/N with fragility = crap. If you do it on hex breaking monk who calls his hexes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by octaviancmb

In other sites around the battlefield, your Hammer Warrior can't gain any adrenaline, the other warriors' targets cause them to lose all adrenaline and a hefty amount of energy for the privilige of attacking them, and your Ranger is blind and moving 50% as fast as he normally should. All of them have health degen (the Ranger *did* try to Troll Ungent, but, oops, Cry'd away). Your El/Mo smiters? After a couple Monks die (10 seconds in -- oh, look, the Me/R dropped Frozen Soil...), their enchantments start dropping, they get diversioned, they become worthless.

Ok, you talk the talk, but do you walk the walk? Write up a group that has all that and I'll believe you. Of course you can't, because you just listed practically all counters mesmer has, ignoring the fact that you have limited amount of slots. Also I would like to see those shutdown mesmers switch from monks to ranger for cry. Yea, that'll happen.

P.S. Frozen soil can be killed in 3 seconds.

Quote:

Originally Posted by octaviancmb

Yeah, I think the "crappy" Me/Mo's can keep up with this level of healing...even on a bad day...stealing your team's energy when they need to cast their Healing Seeds (in virtually 1 second). Of course, they need an enemy team to steal from, and...you're all dead...

NEWSFLASH! Mo/Me is stealing your energy too, and not much less, while healing a lot more. I don't give a shit about 1 second cast Healing Seed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by octaviancmb

This is all just theory, though. Most theoretical discussions about GW are utterly worthless due to the chaos of actual battle, human error, and the unexpected (surprise doubleteams, disconnections, etc).

No shit sherlock, it is a theory. Try writing such a team down to a skill. Not so easy is it? You keep assuming each of these mesmers has every skill available to mesmer in the battle.

Quote:

Originally Posted by octaviancmb

Lets look at a few of the tactical advantages and disadvantages of such a team.

Advantages:

1) No clear target. The enemy team will not know who to initially target from among your Mesmers. This buys the Mesmer team a few precious seconds at the critical beginning of the battle.
2) Disruption. The enemy team can count on *several* of their strategies being shut down. No profesion combination or strategy is safe.
3) Hex and enchantment removal. Everyone on your side of the battle can potentially remove 2-6 hexes and enchantments, and has hex-defence built in should they chose to include it.
4) Elite swapping. Everyone on the Mesmer team can share and trade elites back and forth throgh Arcane Mimicry. All your elites can be doubled/trippled.
5) Overall energy advantage. Unless you're facing a very bizarre team (like your own), your team probably has an overall energy advantage. (Addendum due to Smite: This assumes you can stop the Ether Renewal advantage. I am assuming this won't be an issue for an 8-Mesmer team. I could be wrong.)
6) Raw speed. All your casts are faster. You can accomplish more than the other team can in the same amount of time.

1. Wrong. When you see 8 Me, there are very clear targets. Me/Mo. This is so obvious.
2. So? You won't be able to keep it up against a team with good hex removal and a few counters themselves. Because that other team actually has damage.
3. Why would that be any huge advantage? If you run into a team not running any hexes or enchantments, you have bunch of useless slots. Besides with 2 Mo/Me and one Me and one N I can get very good enchantment and hex removal.
4. Energy cost(15), recharge times(60 sec recharge, works 20 sec), dubious benefits, requires additional micro and works just as well with secondary mesmer.
5. You are again assuming all mesmers have points in inspiration and a few skills slots devoted to energy management.
6. Doesn't help much with the exception of necro hexes, because they are mostly 2 or 3 sec.

So basically you assume all mesmers have 10 or more inspiration about 2 slots go to energy management skills, 1 slot to hex breaker, 1 slot to arcane mimicry, 1 slot to enchantment removal. So that leaves you with 3 slots to do your business.

So stop with theorycraft and post a build. I'd like to see you cram all this stuff into 64 slots.

rii · Sep 04, 2005, 08:18 PM // 20:18

An all mesmer team is for a start gimicky and stupid. But if you were going to make one, fragility is a stupid thing to use for damage output against, as spura has pointed out, organisation. So in fact is hexing. Except probably diversion, which I just like anyway. Surely a more effective way would be straight up energy denial. Its hard to counter, the main points made against it being foci switching and e management skills, but a couple of characters dedicated to the process would be a lot more effective than casting *backfire*.

i second the point about mimicry. under oath shot then maybe, but 60s is a long time to wait for.... anything.

However, most mo/me e management (healers at least) rely on non enemy targeting, i.e. inspired hex and channeling.... a few are drainers but most consider it a bit too much hassle.

me/mo healers.......... i just, dont see the point. your saying that an all mesmer team cant be stopped (who knows all rangers cant.... not all combos have been realised), but insisting on me/mo for defense is a waste.

Me/E are good duel attunement, the existence of which means you simply spam things that dont cause exhaustion. A continous chain of orbs is more useful than most ex. causers, especially since chain got nerfed.

Arcanis Imperium · Sep 05, 2005, 07:42 AM // 07:42

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