NBI Wrapup

It is without question a fact that if it wasn't for the Newbie Blogger Initiative I wouldn't have started this blog. Thanks Syp for carpet bombing the internet to such a degree that even I, who before this month only read one gaming blog, got the blogging bug. And now every weekday for the last 2 weeks I've written something. If you discount work emails and job applications, that's more writing than I've done for the last 2 years. Easily. And that's what I find is really cool. Initially I was afraid that getting into blogging I'd just stumble around with nothing to say about much of anything. As it turns out I actually have a whole lot more to say than I initially thought, and surprisingly some people actually read it.

Thank you mysterious people, you're awesome.

What have I taken away from this month the most? Probably These two posts:

If you remember Nothing Else .... WRITE! -JadedAlt

Hey, Newbie! Stop Writing! -ProfessorBeej

Notice an connection here? All the advice that's meant the most to me has simply been "Get out there and put what you're thinking down into words!" You can do all this planning, and over think every word of your posts, but in the end what really matters is that you're blogging. Sometimes it is prudent to do some research, but generally what people want about your blog is a real person talking about their real experiences. If you glossy it up with too much polish then there isn't any real left for people to enjoy.

And that realness is what I enjoy the most about blogging. It's knowing that what I'm reading is actually coming from someone out there in the world and not a printing press worth of publishers and editors.

If you want a full list of all the bloggers from NBI go check out Syp's wrapup, but I'll warn you there's a whole hell of a lot of new bloggers now so be prepared to do some reading. Some good, interesting, enjoyable, luscious reading.

GW2 Building a Mesmer pt.3

Now that you have a good idea of the history of Mesmers, and how Mesmers fit into GW2. It's time to get more analytic around here and go into the gritty details of traits, and builds, and stats. This will most definitely be the longest post of the ones to date, but I promise if you read through it the information will be well worth your trouble.

(Note: I realize it's probably worth mentioning that until Guild Wars 2 actually releases the trait lines will most likely change, so take this information with a grain of salt. Depending on when you're reading this it may or may not be completely accurate to the current state of the game. Because of this I'm going to try and be as general as I can with the builds and trait suggestions. That way if the trait lines change during the course of later Beta Weekend Events, and the eventual Release sometime in 2012, at least some of this information will still be pertinent.)

Starting out, and leveling


I'm a firm believer that when leveling up in PvE you should always put your first five points into the Chaos trait line. Metaphysical Regeneration is simply spectacular for starting out leveling. The regeneration this gives you means that you can run through larger mobs, and even higher level mobs, without having to worry about your health as much. Furthermore, you have the freedom to be a little more careless with the encounters you engage in. If you take an extra hit that puts your health below 75% the regen can almost completely negate the damage you just took.

After those first five points the rest of your point allocation has a lot to do with how you plan to flush out your character. Keep in mind though that until you get to level 40 you'll be limited to 10 points in any one trait line, so at the earlier levels it can be fun to diversify a little (you're somewhat forced to, actually) and find out what some of the trait lines you hadn't been considering have to offer. Once you unlock the major traits at 10 points you are free to change them whenever you're not in combat. Go ahead, experiment around, use all the major traits and find out which ones work best for you. It doesn't cost you anything. One person may really enjoy the traits that give them bonuses for interrupting foes, but if you find that interrupts are a little challenging for you then maybe it would be a better idea to go for some of the passive abilities. A 30% bonus to your Mind Wrack damage can definitely finish off mobs quickly with a well timed spike.

With all that being said though, here's some basic builds I've put together that should serve as a good starting point for pretty much anyone who wants to give Mesmers a try. I feel that there's enough utility and variety here to cover pretty much everything, but if you've got a great build idea that isn't covered here feel free to let me know. I'm always open for ideas and suggestions.

So without further ado, let's get right to it.

The Melee Mesmer
30/30/0/0/10
Primary Stats: Power, Precision
Weapons: Sword + Torch // Greatsword

Many of you have read my previous post about the Melee Mesmer so this may be more of a refresher, but for the sake of completeness I figure it merits including so everything can be together in one place.

Initially I had thought up this as a PvP build. The rational was that the Mesmer has enough survivability and escape options that if you used good tactics it would potentially be possible to stand toe to toe with any class. Furthermore, the ability to use dodge as a method for Illusion generation meant that you could free up some utility slots for escape skills. I still have to do some testing with some of the more specific aspects, especially whether or not the stealth at 25% trait will allow you to survive one of the many "one shot warriors" running around right now or not. The questions is that if a warrior slaps you for a 17k crit, or a serious hundred blades hit, would the stealth override it and negate the damage that goes past 25% of your health? Or would you straight up die? I feel it's worth some looking into, because if you can survive their initial hit then I feel the Mesmer has a distinct chance of taking a warrior on straight up. Though it definitely wouldn't be all that easy and you'd have to be a boss at utilizing Distortion at the right times. It's possible, that in the current meta game a warrior would probably be the hardest 1v1 match up right now (probably for anyone actually).

At any rate, when I thought up this idea I was mainly doing PvE content with my guild I figured I'd branch out a little and see if maybe I could get a Melee idea to work in PvE. And it did. Since most mobs don't have the capacity to one shot you, apart from some bosses, you don't need to slot in as much survivability and can instead focus on increasing your damage output, though having a high vitality and toughness is definitely a good idea. Other things that change in PvE is that you no longer need to focus heavily on traits that drop conditions, or increase mobility since mobs generally don't kite you much. The one issue with this build is that given the prominence of ranged classes right now in GW2 it can be tough getting a hit in before everything dies, which can potentially limit your 'contribution value' for dynamic events. Once ArenaNet fixes Illusionary Leap, and the subsequent swap skill, I don't think that will be as much of an issue though. If it was up to me the range could be increased as well, I feel it's a little short to act as a true gap closer and as it stands right now if I keep running at my target then by the time the Illusion has leapt I'll already be on top of the mob anyway.

Either way I've still been having fun with this build. It definitely gives the Mesmer some good straight up damage potential. It also feels like something you shouldn't be doing, which I really like.


The Condition Mesmer
10/0/30/0/30
Primary Stats: Toughness, Vitality
Weapons: Staff // Scepter + Pistol

Without question I was using a build like this for much of my leveling. Back in my WoW days I had fantasies of playing a warlock, but for whatever reason I never stuck with leveling one up much past the 50s. This build definitely feels like it fills that void. It's got some serious survivability (so much so that I could even argue that with some minor tweaking it could be great in PvP) you just have so much toughness. It can, however be rough starting out because it won't be until you get to lvl 60 where your toughness will start to contribute towards your condition damage. But after that point you get some serious damage output. It's pretty stupid actually. Though, even at low levels (~25) I've soloed champion mobs with some effective use of kiting.

Something worth pointing out is that you absolutely have to get Illusionary Elasticity. Remember the primary staff attack is actually a bounce attack, so that extra bounce means more conditions on your foes or an extra might on an ally. Also because of this if you're soloing mobs it's actually a good idea to try and stay just outside of melee range that way the bounce of your staff will bounce off of you as well and really mess some stuff up. You don't really have to worry about getting hit because with all that toughness you've been stacking you're going to have a lot of damage reduction.

As a final note I've got a plan to play around with Decent Into Madness in PvP. On paper it sounds like it could make for a lot of fun. There's enough height in the Battle of Kyhlo that you could easily take fall damage when you initiate on someone. Land on someone's face with a surprise chaos storm and then start wrecking. It might work?

The Healing Mesmer
10/0/30/30/0
Primary Stats: Healing, Vitality/Toughness
Weapons: Staff // Scepter + Focus

ArenaNet lied. There are totally healers in GW2 and I feel like there's a lot of merit to the healing Mesmer. If you're running a lot of dungeons, or dynamic events you can help out a ton of people given that there's no upper limit to how many people can currently benefit from the Phantasmal Healing, they just have to be in range.

With the right Phantasm generation skills you could essentially keep regeneration up 100% which is super awesome in fights that have constant DoT pressure such as the Lovers in Ascalon Catacombs. You just have to make sure to take Persisting Images, that way your Phantasms will actually stay alive long enough to help. I also recommend going with ranged Phantasms, they tend to do a much better job of not getting dead.

Then if you want to further go crazy with the healing you can take advantage of mantras, which are super fun by the way, as a way to actually heal your party. It takes a little bit of planning, but since the Mesmers have mantras up the wazoo you can really start going crazy with the healing. And with a mantra for a healing skill combined with being able to trait most mantras to activate twice it can get totally nuts. Heal yourself, heal your party. Interrupt the boss, heal your party. Remove your conditions, heal your party. Kill a mob, heal your party.

Talk about Synergy! I Love It! It's like being a freaking priest. A confusion generating, damage dealing, phantasmal arcane death priest. Totally Boss.

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And there you have it. Hopefully by now you'll have some ideas on how to go about playing a Mesmer, or maybe I just confused you even more. Heck there's so many options that honestly I don't even know which way I'll end up going in the end, but that's half the fun. The ability to have so much diversity in one class is simply amazing. And that's what makes GW2 worth playing. Regardless who you are there's guaranteed to be a class that fits your play style.

Have fun out in Tyria my Mesmers! From here on out Madame Valerian will be on Sorrow's Furnace. Don't be a stranger!

GW2 a Mesmer's Role pt.2

Previously I went through a small history on Mesmers and Guild Wars so in part two of this Mesmer bonanza I'm going to look at the new Mesmer and how she fits into GW2 ecosystem.

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If you're part of the 13% of the Guild Wars 2 population who's already decided that a Mesmer is the class for you then that's awesome. I'm glad you're here. But maybe you're on the fence and haven't decided? Maybe you previously played a heavy class and are considering changing it up with a caster this time. Maybe you really love casters, but are put off by the complexity of a Mesmer? Worry not weary traveler by the end of this you'll have a better idea of what a Mesmer is and be fully capable of experiencing one of (IMHO) the most rewarding classes in GW2. So hang on to your butts kids because we're going for a ride.

Mesmers, an Introduction

Mesmers are casters and as such they aren't specifically designed to stand on the front lines and deal with their foes directly That being said, they sure do have plenty of ways to evade, redirect, interrupt, and avoid damage. I've even made an argument for their viability in melee before. But in their purest form Mesmers are actually unique form of hybrid support class. I feel that best way to put it is as follows.

The Mesmers' primary role is to prevent their foes from fighting effectively and to increase the effectiveness of their allies.

Though their support methods can be strange at times primarily Mesmers function to distribute boons, spread conditions, interrupt attacks, or trick foes into killing themselves. There's a number of different ways Mesmers can achieve this goal and Illusions are definitely one of my favorite.

These are not the Mesmers you're looking for

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Illusions are amazing. Illusions deal damage, cause conditions, and can buff your allies. They love distracting enemies, and they're more than willing to die in order to save you. Through traits Illusions can be augmented to do any number of awesome things. Some Illusions even tank damage for you. And the best part is you don't have to get your hands dirty to use them.

Say your party is getting annihilated by Ettins? A timed diversion will interrupt their attacks and prevent them from doing anything for another second. Plenty of time to send them to the grave. Or you could change it up and run for the hills while your Illusions act as a distraction to help you escape. OR you could start the fight entirely differently. Summon the Illusions first and then make your party invisible and sneak up on the Ettins. Kill em before they saw it coming! That'll show those pesky Ettins!

The options are endless. I love having options. The problem is, for a new Mesmer, understanding how to make sense of all this madness. There's currently 17 different skills that create Illusions. Many of them are bound to weapons, but plenty of them are utility skills? Mesmers have a TON of utility skills. Heck, you could fill your bar with just Illusions and still have some leftover. So how do you even make sense of all this?

Well here's a good rule of thumb I've developed.

Focus, Focus, Focus


Find a play style you like and focus on it. Despite what your mother always told you. Do put all your eggs in one basket. Don't diversify your portfolio. Specialize on one thing and do it right. If you're ok at everything, you'll be great at nothing. Be great, be amazing, be spectacular! As an example, if you find yourself always rushing headlong into fights then pick skills that work for you. Fit in skills that stun, stealth, interrupt, and daze. Make sure that your foes are attacking you for as little time as possible. That way you can stab them in the face without retaliation. Lovely!

And when in doubt. Turn it into a moa. Everyone loves roast moa for dinner!

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Originally I had only planned to make this a two part series, but in my writing, rewriting, and revising, I realized that I had enough different content to merit a third part! Lucky you! So stay tuned, next time I'll be looking at how to maximize your Mesmer and even give you some build suggestions as you level through Tyria.

GW2 Rumor to start your week

File this under 'unsubstantiated rumors' but I figure I'd bring it to your attention all the same.

Usually the first thing I do when I get up is check Google reader and get up to date on what's rumor milling around the internet and surprisingly the things have been relatively quiet these days. That was until I loaded up the GW2 beta client and it started downloading something.

See for yourself.

Noted, the download was pretty small. Somewhere in the realm of 35-40mb. And the content text from last week's Stress Test hadn't changed, but could this be a sign of an upcoming Beta Weekend Event? Possibly. We do know that during the first BWE the beta clients from earlier were updating as much as 2 days before the client was released to the public and we also know that ArenaNet has stated that they're aiming to have a BWE once a month. While last Monday's stress test was fun and all it wasn't a BWE, and factor in that there's only one weekend left in May, so if ArenaNet want's to keep up to their word it reasons to believe there's a good chance of a BWE this coming weekend.

Though, as I'd mentioned at the start, this is all just unsubstantiated guessing.

In the meantime you should go check out GW2Guru. There's an awesome post showing all the armor sets we know of. It's great eye candy.

UPDATE: There was a post on the GW2 Facebook a little bit ago regarding BWE and their frequency. I think this part gets to the point:

"We're going to adhere to a monthly schedule as much as feedback and development allow, so it may be a little more or a little less each time, depending on how things progress. For now, we will have more information on upcoming Beta Weekend Events and stress tests as soon as we're able, and we thank each of you for being an important part of the creation of Guild Wars 2. ~RB2"

So while it's possible that there might be a BWE this coming weekend, I'm definitely not going to get my hopes up.

GW2 Mesmers and Melee

I figured I'd preface this post with a little bit of background, over the last few betas for GW2 I've been playing a Mesmer almost exclusively. Sure I've leveled up some other classes (Guardian, Warrior, Engineer...) but the class I've been having the most fun with has definitely been the Mesmer, which honestly surprised me a lot. Back in the original Guild Wars days I went full tilt with a warrior (40/50 Hall of Monuments and all that jazz) and definitely enjoyed every minute of it. I had tried plenty of other classes, but the warrior was one that I always kept coming back to. So going into GW2 I was almost convinced that for sure I'd end up going with a warrior or guardian. I just like heavy classes, even in WoW I had warrior a deathknight mains. There's just something about plate mail that gets me excited, maybe it's the shoulder pads. Also I definitely enjoy hitting like a freight train. With that in mind, you can imagine how it would be hard for me to fathom playing a caster, a cloth wearing, squishy, fragile, paper thin caster. And not only that, but a support caster no less. Up until this time my entire gameplay experience has been based around getting up in the thick of battle and carving my way through the horde like Paul Bunyan felling a forest of bodies. I enjoyed the feeling of combat. All this wishy washy magicy stuff just never was my thing.

Boy was I wrong. What I had not considered is that it tuns out I enjoy deception EVEN MORE.

Now, for those of you who haven't quite gotten your feet wet in Guild Wars the Mesmer is what's being referred to as an "Arcane Trickster" and they are amazing. It's a class that revolves around controlling the battle, through either conditions, clever use of invisibility, or the ability to control who has boons and who doesn't. They also have the unique advantage of being able to create Illusions, clones of themselves, which can be used either for straight up damage or can be shredded to confuse, daze, or spike your enemies. The best part of the Illusions is that they're more than willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, and with the right build they're never in short supply. Of course you're limited to only 3 illusions at a time, so you do have to be clever about how and when you use them, but with the right decision making shredding your illusions for a clutch daze can change the tide of battle in a millisecond. It's a highly complex class, so maybe the Mesmer isn't for everyone, but I'm always up for a challenge, and the satisfaction of being able to completely get into the head of your opponents in the way the a Mesmer only can is simply astonishing.

Now that you have some idea about how Mesmers work you might recall that I'd mentioned at the start I'm the most comfortable getting right up in the face of my enemies, and recently everyone and their mother has been complaining about melee in GW2 being underpowered. I figured, this being the beta, I would take that as a of challenge and see if Mesmers could actually hold their own in melee. Noted being a melee caster you can't tank a mob straight up unless you like being gibbed in a second so I wasn't getting my hopes up for some stellar performances, but with the Distortion mechanic you can completely negate the bigger hits mobs can dish out, combine that with the main hand sword abilities like Blurred Frenzy or the torch's ability to make you invisible Mesmers have a surprisingly high level of melee survivablitiy. Furthermore the sword's auto attack applies stacks of vulnerability and removes boons which gives your party a hefty damage boost. So far so good, it would appear that building up a melee Mesmer wasn't completely out of the question and actually complemented some of the other classes quite well.

For weapon and gear suggestions what I was tending to lean towards a sword/sword or sword/torch primary set with either a greatsword or scepter/focus secondary set. The sword/sword main set gives you a good level of damage output and distortion with a block option on the offhand to negate even more damage. Having the torch offhand grants you the aforementioned invisibility escape and a phantasm that stacks retaliation on all the allies in the area which can be useful in the right scenarios. Personally I felt that from a playstyle perspective the sword/torch works much better in the pvp realm than it did in pve given that invisibility isn't the best escape mechanic for pve and having the extra block from the offhand sword makes staying around in melee range much easier. The secondary set really depends on how your trait build is, if you're heavily stacking power and precision then the greatsword is a good option for it's damage output at range. The greatsword also has a good cripple and knockback for those 'oh shit' moments when you absolutely have to get away. On the other hand if you're leaning more towards a truer 'melee support' role then the scepter/focus option shines for its illusion generation and confusion stacking. You can also take advantage of some of the Inspiration, and Illusion traits to get some more utility out of your Illusions than you would normally. Since this build doesn't rely on conditions to do it's damage you are primarily going to want to look for toughness, vitality, power, and precision on your gear to make sure you can stay alive when you're in melee range and still be able to dish out enough damage to merit getting in close.

So for those of you who are looking for a little bit of a challenge, and something quite a bit different, I highly recommend trying out a melee Mesmer. You might be surprised at how much fun you end up having. And definitely keep checking back, in a later post I'm going to break down traits and builds to really get in and show you how to optimize your Mesmer.

Server Psychosis

The internet is going crazy. They can't get their fix of digitized mayhem, gore, loot and gold. If you know what the significance of the number 37 is then you're right in the middle of it. The Lord of Terror is causing devastation and death and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Barred on the other side of the wall, helpless, hopeless and filled with desperation.

It is happening now, it has happened before, and it will surely to happen again.

We've all been there in the past, when the servers crashed. Feverishly smashing 'log in' and hoping that the servers had fixed themselves in the 5 seconds since the last time and instead, without realizing, guaranteeing that our focused DDoS attacks would keep Blizzard down even longer. Kotaku summed it up nicely earlier today, and the gravity of the situation persists. This is, as it stands, not just a problem with how Blizzard has decided to structure their servers for Diablo III. It's a problem inherent in the online gaming world, and the problem is not going away. There is an extreme demand for online gaming, and the demand is growing, as casual games attract larger and larger markets the entry point into "gaming" has become so accessible to anyone that it's entirely possible your next door neighbor is cursing Error 37 right along with you.

Page Questing

I feel like I'm on a quest, but all the objectives are hidden. I have this overall goal, talking about gaming, or MMOs,  or something... Though, there aren't exactly any flagstones that say what to do, so I'm just going to talk about whatever I feel like, and maybe it'll be worth reading (maybe not... either way the content will probably be interesting). Hopefully I can keep this updated with some kind of frequency.

I sure do play enough games, mostly MMOs but I'm also huge into StarCraft, as well as various FPS titles (Portal, TF2, Borderlands, Halo...), so I'll probably have a little bit of a unique gaming perspective given that I pretty much try to play everything I can so long as it's fun. I've spent the most of my time divided between WoW and Guild Wars, but my entire highschool life was deep in StarCraft: Broodwar and Warcraft3 so I have a fairly good grasp of the RTS genera as well, especially on the competitive end.

Recently I'm starting to lean heavily towards Guild Wars 2, so that's definitely going to be a primary focus around here once it goes live. It's an awesome game, definitely go check it out if you haven't already. Though if that's not your fancy don't worry I plan to discuss a lot more than just GW2.

Deckard Cain said it best, "Stay a while and listen."

You might get rewarded.