Guild Wars 2

I posted a similar thread a fair while ago, but it went a little off topic and the main point didn’t show up until a few replies below. So here’s a nice simple summerised version for the devs.

Phantasm skills can be negated too easily.

After the patch they can now be negated by:

1) blind/dodge/invulnerability/block on casting, which will force a failure in phantasm spawn
2) blind/dodge/invulnerability/block of the phantasm’s attack
3) even if failing to initiate the above two solutions, you can kill the phantasm before it attacks.

This is ridiculous. No other skill in any class gives you three chances to negate a skill, 2 of them after it has landed.

As for specific cases such as phantasmal berserker and warden which do multi-hits over time, no other multi-hit skill becomes cancelled outright just because the first attack was negated.

2) and 3) were there before the patch, and it was fair. With the exception of phantasmal berserker spawning out of LoS, the phantasm skill mechanic wasn’t broken and did not need to be touched. 1) has gone overboard, especially with the buggy LoS system where ‘obstructed’ will pop up even when nothing is blocking your target that all ranged weapon wielders have suffered from (thank you clipnotdone for the vid) or they are on the top of some stairs right in front of you in clear view. The phantasm skills are not and never were so overpowered to warrant this kind of disadvantage. All skills should retain a level of reliability to perform its full function instead of relying this heaviliy on chance.

There are simply too many chances for the phantasm skills to fail, and even when it does suceed in the first check, fail to do anything by subsequent ones. Considering how illusions are tied to the class’s core mechanic and how important phantasms are for many utilities and dps they bring for the mesmer, this change was unnecessary.

The simplest solution would be to revert the changes to remove the 1) check.
Or if phantasm skills absolutely must be treated as an attack, do so by making 1) the only check like all other attacks. It is only fair. Once the casting attack hits, phantasms should spawn, do their thing while being invulnerable and untargetable, ignore 2), and disappear after doing their first full attack so that it cannot be used for shattering. Some changes in the utility phantasms such as the defender is needed for this one though.