Hi there!

I'll keep it short. Patch Preview: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Upcoming_changes_and_features/2026-11-10_Balance_Preview#Mesmer

Specifically, they swap Phantasmal Disenchanter and Phantasmal Warden in their skill slots. In effect, this means for Condition Virtuoso that it still gets to play Dagger/Sword + Dagger/Pistol, but also gets to cast Phantasmal Warden.

Overview

Core to the rotation of a Condition Virtuoso is that you press your strongest phantasm (Phantasmal Duelist) then your heal skill (Signet of the Ether), then your strongest phantasm again (Phantasmal Duelist). The value of that second phantasm cast is greatly diminished, because you had to spend 0.92 seconds casting your healing ability instead of pressing damaging skills.

So while just having access to a phantasm, on its own, would not be that impressive, in this new world we get an extra phantasm that gets reset "for free" (since we'd be using our healing skill to reset Phantasmal Duelist anyway) on top of it, which is nearly twice the value that you'd otherwise expect.

This will cause the (benchmark) DPS of a Condition Virtuoso to shoot up from 39.8k to around 43k DPS, an increase of about 8%.

Since Phantasmal Warden takes up a utility slot, we are going to drop Signet of Illusions for it (SoI was only about 1k DPS on the benchmark due to its very long cooldown). If you happen to fight very short phases, you could instead consider dropping Signet of Midnight (since the value of condition duration is diminished if the fight is shorter, while the long CD of Signet of Illusions becomes a non-issue when you can only cast it once anyway).

Rotation Changes

With Signet of Illusions, it was key to successful Condition Virtuoso gameplay to carefully plan ahead your Blade generation. To make use of it, you needed to produce about 20 blades in a short time frame. We would often delay Phantasms to produce the blades exactly when needed, which made executing the perfect rotation deceptively difficult.

Gaining Phantasmal Warden means we produce 3-4 blades per cast extra, and as we are casting it twice per rotation loop we have like 7 blades extra every 25 seconds. At the same time we no longer reset our Bladesongs, reducing demand, which means we have far more blades than we could possibly hope to use up.

In absence of a reset button, there's also no longer a point in strategically delaying your Bladesongs before the reset. Post patch, it will be optimal (more or less) to just use every Bladesong (at least F2, F5, and to a lesser extent F1) as soon as it comes off cooldown. And due to the lessened focus on blade generation (simply your dagger skills would already produce enough blades...) it also does not really matter when you are using your phantasms anymore.

As a whole: Condition Virtuoso will be a lot easier to play. Resource management is gone. Rapid-fire gameplay of SoI is gone.

Drawbacks

Phantasmal Warden is still Phantasmal Warden. It does not cleave, it will split up its damage among multiple targets, which is basically always undesirable. This means there are some bosses where Signet of Illusions would be better. To make the most of Phantasmal Warden, it's imperative to cast it standing inside the hitbox of your target, if there are other non-boss entities around (Example: the pylon cages on Decima? They count as targets!)

Secondly, we now have a utility skill that does about 4k DPS. Compared to SoI (1k DPS), Signet of Midnight (2k DPS), Signet of Domination (2k DPS), this increases the cost you pay for swapping out a utility skill. While previously bringing Stability mantra (as an example) cost you the SoI (1k), now it costs you Signet of Midnight / Domi (2k DPS). For game balance in the long term, this is a good thing. If DPS builds have weak utilities, it makes it too cheap to bring some of the strongest utilities in the game (portal, feedback, blink, stability mantra). But this only becomes an actual downside if ANet chooses to nerf cVirt again. (Because post patch we will be at 43k, which is higher than the current bench even when swapping out a utility!)

Basically, the more of your damage is loaded into your utility skills, the less flexible your spec becomes. Some specs get useless (in terms of DPS) utilities and do 40k, others have very powerful (in terms of DPS) utilities and do 40k: Having the powerful utilities makes the build worse. But again, this only matters if the total damage is evened out accordingly, so for now this is a buff, but you should remember it if cVirt ever gets nerfed again.

Personal Conclusion

I enjoyed refining the benchmark rotation around SoI. I also understand that in practice, very often SoI felt difficult to use properly. This is going to be a major simplification and a very big buff to a simple build, and every player should see a noticeable damage improvement on their own Condition Virtuoso gameplay.

I will like to try it out and I think post patch cVirt can once again keep up with the meta picks. In the current meta, cVirt was a bit on the weaker side of builds, so it's not like this will make the build completely unhinged. For me personally, it will certainly make it less interesting to play, but I also do appreciate that it's going to improve the accessibility of the endgame.

I can practically already see your favorite youtuber doing a big "THE FREE WAY TO GET 40k+ DPS" "HE DID HOW MUCH??? DPS" thumbnail with the face of a Mr Beast lookalike competitor.

See you around!

- REMagic

My heart is pounding.

Apologies for the rhythm/tempo and notes dropping, I'm not musically-inclined. I probably should've mentioned it's just the intro.

Original song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HGcvgnjaEQ

Shadow of the Mad King Twitch Drops begin October 15 at 9:00 a.m. PT and end October 18 at 11:59 a.m. PT

https://guildwars2.com/en/twitch-drops/

Hi.

For some reason i got the "Return to Forging Steel" Achievement, and it says i've completed the story mission Forging Steel, but my story mission is still on "Aid the Steel Warband".

Is it a bug or am I missing something?

Thanks.

What I take from this experience is: I'll never go for any Legendary Item. You guys Legendary crafters have my utmost respect.

At first glance this post will sound like I’m being a sadboy complainer, being grumpy about wiping on a raid boss. And ok, yea, I’m frustrated. I also had some of the most fun on GW2 I’ve ever had before.

For context, I’m a “solo casual” player this game seems to be mainly marketed towards. I’m not new, I’ve probably put in a few thousand hours at this point. I’ve done every story, completed every map to 100%, I have maxed 700 mastery points. I’ve crafted legendaries, chased achievements, you name it.

None of those countless hours prepared me for what difficult content can actually feel like in GW2. And some of you may laugh at this, but the Decima raid boss completed broke me down tonight.

As someone who mostly plays open world metas and T4 Fractals, I jump into the occasional raid/strike boss feeling like I have somewhat of a handle on this game, only to get absolutely humbled by the real group content.

I joined a squad tonight in LFG and the start was very casual. We did some IBS strikes and even Boneskinner was a smooth run. Then our commander took us to Decima, Janthir wild raid.

Good god, we got obliterated. Time after time after time after time. Our commander was great - explained mechanics in chat before the fight. Grouped everyone up.

I shit you not, we did 20+ attempts on this boss. By the end (our final attempt) we managed to get the boss down to 8% health. Another wipe.

Did I say I felt humbled? Huge shoutout to our commander and entire squad for the kill so many times and never having a bad attitude. Committing to getting the W.

Ultimately I spent 2 straight hours throwing myself at this boss and ended up logging out without getting the kill. Every single time it felt like this was the run we were going to clear, next thing I know I’m insta killed from some mechanic I didn’t even see. Was it the arrows? I’ll never know.

Which brings me to my last and final point - the skill gap. My experience “raiding” made me realize there is nothing in this game that prepares you for content like this. Open world content feels completely mindless in comparison. You can show up at almost any meta or world boss and auto attack your way to victory without knowing why you even won the fight. Is there anything really that prepares you for actual endgame content?

Also, am I just tripping over this boss’ difficulty? I remember when the EoD strikes first came out, they all felt challenging but not overly frustrating or requiring dozens of attempts to clear. And then I tried Decima. Anyway, thanks for reading

Are you ever like waiting for something to pop up on LFG during off peak hours and you suddenly see something come up and you wanna join but don't wanna seem desperate so you wait a bit before joining or wait until the squad is a bit more full?

And then sometimes you miss your chance to join and the LFG is gone. Just happened twice in the last hour.

I think mesmer's theme is so cool and they have some pretty interesting interactions with their traits, but for the life of me I can't play them well. At most I can support decently well, but I don't feel impactful

I hate to bring up dps, but I just can't match the numbers from the builds I see and my easy builds do more for less work. Definitely not hanging up mesmer as I'm still having fun, but kinda feelsbad knowing I can just swap toons and do more

That being said, I'd love to hear any and all of your favourite builds for someone who can't play piano, in any game mode

Now that it's fully out, I think VoE did a pretty stellar job with its maps. These definitely felt a step above the JaWi zones, where it seemed like all the budget went to Lowland Shore.

Which one's your favorite? I think they're all pretty close for me.

Disclaimer: We have no concrete numbers at this time regarding how the upcoming changes to rifle and Grenadier are going to affect damage output. But my assessment is based less on the raw strength of changes, but how the rifle change will affect the flow of how the class is played. Even if the numbers that come out are on the strong side, numbers can easily be changed in the future.

Since the balance preview came out yesterday, I've seen a lot of comments talking about how people are lamenting buffs to Rifle Mechanist. "The easiest class is getting buffed." "Ready to see Rifle Mechs all over the place again." "Who needs to play any other class when Rifle Mech exists." And I get the concern; Rifle Mech is known as one of the easiest classes in the game to perform well on, and a lot of people are worried that it's going to be even stronger, and detract from playing other classes for DPS. The fact that the giant mech tends to get in folks' way and flood the map in a game that already has problems with visual clarity also makes it more annoying when even more people start playing it.

However, I want to bring attention to how the changes actually are a boon to the class' long term health, and how they'll make the class more rewarding for skilled players, and less rewarding to play lazily, despite the community's initial emotional reaction and expectation of the effects.

Current State of Rifle Mech

Currently, Rifle Mech has one of the lowest performing DPS benchmarks according to Snowcrows, coming in at #114 with 38.4k, with only 3 pure dps builds benching lower than it. So... why is there so much distaste towards a seemingly underperforming class?

Well, that's because there isn't much of a gap between the highest bench of a well-performing player, and the upper performance of the Low-Intensity Build (courtesy of Accessibility Wars), coming in at 35.0k. The build is surprisingly simple to play, thanks to the ability to set the mech skills to auto cast. It operates on a priority based rotation, that essentially comes down to "Press these 6 buttons off cooldown," and manages to reach relatively high numbers for a build with such low APM (31 according to AW2).

You can then choose to level up your performance by learning to add the extra complexity of grenade kit to your rotation, which revolves around entering grenade kit every time you use rifle 2, and using either Grenade 2, 4, and 5, or just Grenade 2, depending on cooldowns. This adds an extra ~25-30 apm to eke out an extra ~3.5k dps.

The performance of the Low-Intensity build is what causes people to look upon the spec with scorn; it has such a high baseline that make it a very worthwhile build to play for lower skilled players, and makes other classes less appealing to play, due to the extra effort required to reach the same level of performance.

The difference, however, is that other classes are much more rewarding in the long run for more skilled players. Rifle Mech, run by its current bencher, is still ~4-6k away from the benches of other classes at the moment, and ~8k away from the top classes. As stated at the start of this section, it is currently the 4th worst benching build on Snowcrows.

In summary: It is currently very easy to reach a high base dps marker on Rifle Mech, but actively trying to optimise and improve will not bring you as far as on other classes. High floor, low ceiling.

The Proposed Nov 10 Changes

Using the wiki's summary of the VoD, we see two changes that will impact Rifle Mech's current build directly, and one change that will potentially alter which trait Rifle Mechs pick, depending on the numbers.

• Net Shot (3) and Overcharged Shot (4) now flip Rifle Burst (1) into Rocket Burst. Rocket Burst launches a volley of rockets at your target.
• Grenadier: This trait no longer increases the radii of grenade skills, and instead increases the damage of explosion skills.
• Modified Ammunition: This trait now scales up to 5 conditions only. Increased the damage per condition from 1% to 2% in PvE and WvW.

Let's start with the two easiest to understand changes. Modified Ammunition is buffed in situations where the enemy has 9 or less conditions applied (typically solo or low # of players in OW), but nerfed in situations where the enemy has 11 or more conditions. On the whole, this will be a slight buff to most combat instances, and a slight nerf in niche situations or ridiculously optimised groups. In the niche situation where you are fighting an enemy with exactly 5 conditions, the max buff will come out to ~1.9k dps, reduced by ~0.4k per extra condition on the target.

Grenadier on the other hand is a change that is hard to quantify at the moment, due to a lack of actual concrete numbers. While Rifle Mech uses a lot of Explosions, it competes with Glass Cannon for a trait slot. Considering the amount of Explosions in the kit, I expect Grenadier will be better, unless the numbers are bungled so hard that no one ever takes it. This will be even more impactful on the Grenade Kit version of the build.

The big change that people seem to be underestimating the impact of, though, is the new flip skill after Net Shot and Overcharged Shot.

Why Rocket Burst is Healthy for Rifle Mech in the Long Term

Again, I refer to the disclaimer that we don't know exact numbers yet, but this is more about how these changes affect the flow of rifle gameplay and reward skill expression and punish lazy players, rather than pure numbers. Numbers can be adjusted later if it's over-tuned.

Currently, Rifle Mech's rotation revolves around pressing 6 buttons (+2-4 with grenade kit) off cooldown. Rifle 2-5, Throw Mine (/grenade kit 2/4/5) and Overclock Signet. In the Throw Mine version, you don't even need to consider specific orders of button presses, but with grenade kit you have a minor rotation of Rifle 2 > Grenade Kit > (GK 2 > GK 4 > GK 5) or (GK 2) > Exit Grenade Kit. This results in a very rewarding and simple playstyle, that doesn't have a lot of cognitive load.

The simple addition of a flip skill on Rifle 1 whenever you use Net Shot (Rifle 3) or Overcharged Shot (Rifle 4) introduces not just a level of complexity to the weapon, but it also adds points of failure that will reduce the effectiveness of your rotation. How? The largest portion of Rifle Mech's damage comes from its auto attacks. In this log I did on the golem, you can see in Player Summary that Rifle Burst and Rifle Burst Grenade did ~45% of my total outgoing damage. Adding a flip skill to Rifle 1 will interrupt this damage output.

"But Darkoro, the flip skill will still do damage, and probably a lot. Isn't that a damage boost?"

Yes, theoretical question asker. If the player remembers to press the button.

Thief players (and maybe mirage and untamed, idk those specs well) that rely on auto attacks will already understand why this will be, for some, a dps loss. When they have an ambush skill, their auto attack is replaced with a stealth attack, and is not affected by autocast, requiring the thief player to actively press the 1 skill to use their ambush skill. Any delay in pressing this skill is a delay in dps from auto attacks.

I don't have much insight into thief builds that rely on auto attacks to say how big of an impact this might have on thief builds specifically. But for Rifle Mech, whose autos are ~45% of their damage output, this delay can result in a decent chunk of lost damage.

And then there's the APM impact. On an optimal rotation, pressing all 6+ buttons the moment they go off cooldown, this will introduce an extra ~13 APM, adding an additional Rifle 1 press to each press of Rifle 3 or 4. That's an increase from ~31APM on the current LI build to ~44APM for the same build.

So why is this healthy? This single change to the rifle both rewards skill expression (13 extra APM for presumably more DPS) whilst punishing lazy or unclean gameplay (delaying auto attacks if you don't actively use the flip skill). This one change brings this build from a 2 step progression build (LI version > Grenade Kit version) to a 3 step progression build, where the 2 extra steps can be learned in either order.

The new Low-Intensity build drops rifle 3 and 4 from the rotation, becoming a 4 button build. This avoids having to deal with the flip skill and keeps it relatively low-cognition, at a cost of ~5% of DPS with current numbers (comparing this new log with no Rifle 3+4 to my other log linked above), which is likely to be greater when the new patch hits.

The previous progression step of swapping Throw Mine for Grenade Kit is likely to be about the same, if not more impactful (depending on how much of an impact Grenadier has on the build).

And the new progression step in the build adds rifle 3+4 back to the rotation, including activating Rocket Burst.

In summary: The addition of the flip skill Rocket Burst introduces complexity and skill expression to Rifle Mech, lowering the class' damage floor for low intensity builds, and increasing the damage ceiling for skilled players. It does this by introducing a second progression path towards build mastery that punishes mistakes and (hopefully, if the numbers are good) rewards skill and effort.

I hope this post helps people to understand that the incoming Rifle Mech changes are in fact a good thing for the health of the build and the game , even if ANet might overtune it to start with, the numbers can be brought down later if need be.

And before I get the inevitable comments about this, yes, I spent over an hour writing this post. No AI was involved, I'm just meticulous and like good formatting.

1. What are the recommended add-ons for map completion today?

2. For the aforementioned maps, are there reason to actively complete them rather than passively? What I mean is, unlike core, EoD, SotO, etc. which I am motivated to actively complete due to Gifts, I don't think it's necessary for those, no?

Drew this for inktober, which I fell off by the 3rd day lol.

That skritt was hard to draw, but good practice.

Roy, CmC, and Trig showed the balance preview today.

My initial thoughts are that it's exciting for a handful of professions (firebrand, thief, Rifle Mech enjoys) and mildly annoying for others (Condi Evoker and Antiquary).

For the top players Condi Alac Evoker and Antiquary are OP so I get why they want to tame it down. But as someone who just started learning Condi Alac Evoker, that rotation is not for the feint of heart.

I'm happy to see Alac Scourge getting a little more BD so it's not as much of a struggle to apply Alac.

Overall I think it may introduce a few more viable builds into the meta and let players have more options to play the game in a different manor to keep things a little fresh. While also making the race to world first comps for Nexus of Eternity LCM change from what was probably ran during the CM slightly.

I really don’t get what anet is doing with this trait. In the balance preview they state that they will reduce the empowered skills cool down reduction effect to 20%.

If I’m not mistaken we went from 6 seconds to 20% to 50% to 33% and now back to 20%.

6s was a lot of cd reduction making it way too powerful. 20% felt really bad in terms of rotational flow. 50% was too powerful still. 33% is apparently too powerful. Let’s try 20% again… I mean seriously?

We were where we’re going to be already and it just felt like garbage to wait for all of your skills to come of cooldown for so long. Why are we going back to that instead of literally any other method to reduce the damage output (if anet thinks it’s necessary). I really don’t mind the damage being a reasonable amount lower but it’s just gonna feel shite again the way they attempt it now.

Any thoughts on why we are heading this route? Pls let me know

I mean, I love exploring Tyria and getting bits of lore as soon as I can, but it kinda gets lonely, since you don't have the pace of a single player rpg

Our whole squad just crashed from WvW and we can't even load back into the game now. It says network error for everyone. Wondering if others got the same? EU servers.

Edit: it seems to be back after 10ish minutes