Curse

Eaimirth Etaivella · May 24, 2006, 04:03 AM // 04:03

So you can kill a boonprot? Indulge me in your divine knowledge. SOTA stood for a week trying to formulate a counter and the farthest we got besides e denial was to luck-chance powerblock a RoF. Other mesmers...hmm that is disturbing. A pure anti cast mesmer should definatly win against a multi-talent mesmer; unless they are asleep at the switch or so to speak.

Anyway; you must admit having 2 mesmers split in attributes is not as powerful 2 mesmers specializing in individual attributes. Thus enabling a more productive point pool and a more efficient team.

Hella Good · May 24, 2006, 06:27 AM // 06:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eaimirth Etaivella

So you can kill a boonprot? Indulge me in your divine knowledge. SOTA stood for a week trying to formulate a counter and the farthest we got besides e denial was to luck-chance powerblock a RoF. Other mesmers...hmm that is disturbing. A pure anti cast mesmer should definatly win against a multi-talent mesmer; unless they are asleep at the switch or so to speak.

You know, you and I, get into these forum 1v1s that I'm not sure ever produce anything effective but "I stand here, you stand there" situations. But yea, I will indulge you with my ahem... "divine knowledge."

What do you mean luck-chance powerblock a RoF? You know there is Guardian... if you wanna PB a Boon Prot, aim for the Guardian, not the RoF... But you know my position on PB, I think it's a limiting skill. I'd rather take PD and knock off the Guardian and the Mantra/Drain.

For my part e-denial is enough to kill a Boon Prot (Surge/Burn/SoW/Tap/Feedback is quite a lot of nrg destroyed in a very short amount of time), if you have serious problems with it, just take Diversion, Blackout, or Power Leak in one of the flexible slots- I know you like those skills. I'm pretty happy with the pure e-denial.

May I remind you that you are going in Mesmer Wonderland again with the whole team situation?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eaimirth Etaivella

Anyway; you must admit having 2 mesmers split in attributes is not as powerful 2 mesmers specializing in individual attributes. Thus enabling a more productive point pool and a more efficient team.

I think this is out of question. No one here is saying 2 mixed e-denial Mesmers are going to do a better job than 2 specialized ones (although iB did run 2 mixed e-denials instead of 2 specialized for quite a long time). But... no one here is talking about 2 Mesmers anyway are we? We are talking single Mesmer e-denial build, in which case I think the mixed e-denial (I feel weird calling it that, you take Domination and Inspiration ANYWAY) is superior to both CasterHate and WarHate Mesmers.

Seriously, are you just arguing for the sake of it here, or are you going to make a point that isn't part of Mesmer Wonderland or natural counters?

fatboyslimerr · May 24, 2006, 08:14 AM // 08:14

Quick note about CoP, which I believe is why they haven't nerfed it. If they don't have an enchantment to remove its useless. Perhaps a team coordinated enchant remove + shadow shroud or shame or something to prevent them casting enough enchantment would do the job. I've seen a few shadow shroud mesmers in top end PvP and they seem to work a treat.

As for our loveable debaters, Hella and Eaimirth, I would say specialization or generalization were totally dependant on the rest of your team. I would say 2 mixed mesmers would suit a team with little else warrior management but 2 (or even one, MoR/p.leak ftw) total energy denial mesmers would work if their additional role of warrior/ranger/assassin hate weren't required. Say you have a blurred vision ele or a curses necro instead.

I will tell you what my guild run, or hope to,
1 MoR full energy denial mesmer potential capable of taking out 2 monks -- played by yours truly
1 Illusion hex spammer -- able to take warrior hate, IoR, distortion, shackwrack (low points in domination if any because damage from degen will be enough.
and the ever popular blackout, cripple, poison ranger to run the flag but also to help with adrenaline spike from 2 warriors by using blackout on selected monks etc.

I don't think 2 people such as yourselves will ever agree on the same thing (for now) simply because there are almost an infinite number of playing styles each one with weaknesses and strengths. If Hella likes playing a universal build and really playing the crap out of it, he'll be no less affective than Eaimirth using 2 different mesmers with the same job as Hella, he will just have a different effect. Also GvG builds that use universal builds tend to only use one mesmer as they've got their mesmering requirements in one neat little package of a mesmer, meaning they could bring in some loveable ritualist spike or elemental power. If Eaimirth's team uses 2 mesmers to do the job that Hella could do himself (Eaimirth + co. will obviously be more affective) it will mean that Hella's team could have an additional damage dealer instead of the second mesmer and this would have an overall balance on the whole team.

Think outside the box please gentlemen...ladies.

michaelp68 · May 24, 2006, 03:27 PM // 15:27

All interesting thoughts for someone like me new to playing a Mesmer, which I'm really enjoying.

When using Shack, does the enemy energy loss upon attack include the casting of spells?

Thanks.

fatboyslimerr · May 24, 2006, 04:33 PM // 16:33

no, a spell is a spell. An attack or attack skill such as eviscerate count as an attack and its these that will make the enemy lose 5 energy.

michaelp68 · May 24, 2006, 04:45 PM // 16:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by fatboyslimerr

no, a spell is a spell. An attack or attack skill such as eviscerate count as an attack and its these that will make the enemy lose 5 energy.

That's what I thought. Thanks.

Eaimirth Etaivella · May 24, 2006, 06:38 PM // 18:38

Energy denial is...well you know me and my praise of focus swapping.
You also know my take on diversion.

What I'm saying is you cannot disable their monk without blackout; guardian is not used in high end pvp (and for a very good reason; besides with PD RoF would still be active while with PB it would be disabled...just wanted to point that out)
You said yourself that you cannot get warriors or high energy elementalists; add this to the monks, and mesmers, this makes 4 classes non-counterable (and I still do not understand how you claim to counter assassins running CoP...but anywho for the sake of my point we will ignore that for the moment)

In short; you somewhat~ disable ritualists (which I assume you do via denial which is also somewhat countered via focus swap), necromancers (no arguement here; easy to counter as hell with their slow spells and no in class energy management worth mentioning), assassins (will assume your shackwrack idea works for the case of the arguement), rangers (solely rely on energy); or 5 classes aka 52.5%

Yet if you went completely anti-caster you would still reach 5 classes; and would be better at countering those 5.

fatboyslimerr · May 24, 2006, 07:47 PM // 19:47

To whom is this addressed Eaimirth, I'm a little confused.

As straight energy denial:

against a Prot I would spam shame (using MoR of course), burn and feedback and they will definitely have one spell that is 3/4 second or 1 second.. when they cast it BOOM -24 energy thank you very much , against a high energy elementalist I could use power leak every 10 seconds, you get the idea. If I incorporate shackles (not mind wrack but my team mate will use suffering or at least cover it so it won't be removed easily) then that will sort out rangers/assassins and some warriors. Against necros - power leak - and e. burn (and e.tap if its in the build) anyone I missed out ??

I believe you can be full energy denial only using one additional skill, Shackles. I can't believe I ever doubted shackles, its such a universally useful skill (Hella you da man). If a monk gets blackouted they might use wand, spirit shackles anyone ??? Its soo easy to catch them off guard if they are blackouted or low on energy or just crap.

Power block is good but its costly, long recharge and duration isn't fantastic (not bad though) and only works on spells meaning you actually have to interrupt one (tricky on boon protters), PD is good but its too specific a skill. Personally MoR all the way (don't knock it till you've tried it because I will defend the crap out of it if someone tries to flame it)

This is a confusing post and I dunno if what i've written is even relevant lol.
Oh well.

Hella Good · May 24, 2006, 08:06 PM // 20:06

Focus swapping is nice and all but it's not rly smth to sweat about. I'm not saying it's not an issue but you can see them doing it and can choose when to hit with your skills and when not to. E-denial works perfectly well. ~50% effectiveness? That a bit... conservative. If you believe that e-denial is only ~50% effective then why are you arguing against it in a thread that is about a revised version of classic e-denial, not about e-denial versus other builds? Just things that get me...

Eaimirth Etaivella · May 25, 2006, 03:37 AM // 03:37

What I ment was you could become more focused towards casters or melee; and thus maintain the same amount of classes you could counter but would be a ble to counter those more effectively.
However I must admit, por altur lado, that focusing on one type of class can backfire. Say you end up facing an iway team; all the interrupts in the world will be useless against that. So in that case your strategy is clearly the stronger of the two.

Powerleak on a energy drain will make the monk lose very little energy. 9 out of 10 times; the monk knows that energy drain is the longest casting time spell he/she has in his inventory. Because of this, they are likely to focus swap so their current energy is very very low. If they have 7 energy before casting, then get interrupted, they only lost 2 (and the fact that their spell was interrupt + the energy they lost due to regen during the process of casting and assuming you interrupted it at .99999999 seconds it would be about 1.33333333 energy so it would be more or less 3 1/3 energy points lost to power leak) anyway the point being the effectiveness of powerleak is greatly decreased. Instead of 25+ energy lost it is now 3~ energy.

fatboyslimerr · May 25, 2006, 07:20 AM // 07:20

For this reason I usually start with power leak, closely followed by shame. If they both trigger its like -41 energy. If it means having to wait a few seconds for a decent spell to interrupt then so be it, there is no other combo that can deny this much energy in 2 spells. If I've been e-denying for a bit, power leak would only be useful as an interrupt and will lose its e-denial useful if the monk has below 10 energy. In this circumstance I would just use e.burn + enchant removal etc then switch target briefly and do another p.leak and shame on a different monk, then switching back to the first for a quick e.burn.

Thus, the 2 at a time e-denial mesmer

Eaimirth Etaivella · May 25, 2006, 02:56 PM // 14:56

Shame is nothing but a shutdown skill; monks should not fall into it (if they want to cast they will simply cop; otherwise you have wasted your enegy to some extent). Do not count on it to steal/replenish your energy by any means.

Short Background on monk e management:
Monks start the battle with their -energy gear on in the first place; and swap to higher energy gear as needed; then swap to their -gear just before they die.

The best way to deal with this is mindwrack (focus swap that!) and non-conditional e denial skills/spells.