Guild Wars 2

I’d like to engage in a discussion about the Mesmers Portal ability.

In my book it is the single most powerful and useful ability in this game, by a long shot.

A Mesmer is by far my favourite profession to have in any group. Not only because the Mesmer itself is a really powerful profession but because the Portal ability trivializes content that would otherwise require coordination.

Let’s just see what the Portal enables:

WvW
-Portal bombing in WvW is a completely unique tactic only made possible thanks to this skill.
-Rapidly transporting Alpha Siege Golems across the map.
-Porting entire armies into a keep should the Mesmer manage to remain undetcted inside.
-Porting people up the jumping puzzle because you’re nice
-Servings as a fall-back option when you’re ganking the Jumping Puzzle because you’re a kitten.

Jumping Puzzles
-Almost every Jumping Puzzle is trivialized as long as the Mesmer is patient enough to wait for the cooldown.
-Porting people through parts/entire Jumping Puzzles

PvP
-Various Portal tricks to quickly jump between contested points.
-Probably more tricks I don’t know about.

Dungeons
-Transporting the lights in Arah Expl. is incredibly easy with a Mesmer.
-Any content can be skipped as long as the Mesmer gets through.

Fractals
-Swamp Fractal becomes so much easier with a Mesmer
-In all Fractals a Mesmer Portal can help carry players through content (jumping stuff) they can’t manage by themselves.

There’s probably dozens of other bullet points you could add to the list of tricks and tactics that evolve around the Mesmer Portal.

Now most of the time it’s great for you because it works in your favour. Who wants to bother with tactics when you have and “easy mode” available?

In a way, using the Mesmer Portal feels a lot like cheating. Yeah, sometimes it’s nice, especially if you’ve done content dozens of times before, but it also cheapens the whole experience.

And that’s ignoring the balance implications where the Portal is just dozens of times more useful than any other utility or skill any other profession could ever bring to the table.

While i agree with you, whats your conclusion on this?
Whats the message?

working as intended?

i dunno, i always wondered what the true intent of the portal skill was.

Asum.4960:

While i agree with you, whats your conclusion on this?
Whats the message?

The message every forum ever has to say about us. “Nerf them” ¬_¬ – the reason we can’t have nice things, is that if they can’t have the nice thing, they’ll cry for it to be removed. Even though we share our nice things with our parties.

It’d be nice if its mechanics were at least applied somewhat fairly across the classes. Why doesn’t my flesh worm for example give me true teleport as a necromancer? Mesmers get way too much special treatment when it comes to mechanics.

So a mesmer is your favourite profession to have in a group because it trivializes content? I thought you hated mesmers…

Go to Dee Jay’s profile and sift through all of his messages. Many times where he’s had something to say about mesmers, it’s usually inaccurate e.g. stealthing a zerg for 20 seconds.

It has already been nerfed and so is no longer viable as a skill to slot regularly. This constant complaining about other classes is part of what leads to professions being nerfed every single patch. Even though I get annoyed by burst thieves, I don’t go onto the forums to whine and complain. Because it seems that the devs listen to the very vocal PvPing masses and make changes based on QQ. If I complain enough, they might actually take me seriously and nerf another profession and make the game less fun for other people. Idk why you can’t just get over it and stop crying out for professions and skills to be nerfed.

Portals are not gamebreaking. They require some coordination. If people don’t read chat, which they often don’t, then they don’t use the portal and you end up with some puny little group inside a keep that can’t possibly take it back alone.

@Fungalfoot Because classes are not meant to be the same. What would be the point of giving all of the classes the same skills, just dressed up differently? Why don’t you give me pets, shields, warhorns, burst damage, shadow step, AoEs etc?

I’ll trade it in any day for my pve ability to be half as good as a warrior……….

Is this a problem because mesmers can carry people, or is it a problem that people need carried?

Fungalfoot.7213:

Why doesn’t my flesh worm for example give me true teleport as a necromancer?

Why can’t my illusions for example be triggerable blast finishers? Why can’t diversion give me death shroud? Why do we have cooldowns instead of spammable abilities like a thief?

The answer is that the classes are different and asking for them all to have access to the same skills makes for a boring game.

The reward for not having an aoe to spam the walls.

It’s a perk for bringing a support heavy class with you over a damage heavy class. There’s issues for WvW, but really, for Fractals, I use it to rescue people who fell, or get sent back to checkpoint by any means. I willingly dive off of cliffs to get my group back to where they were if I was the last one standing. If people die when they fall (Colossus anyone?) I run down, rez, and portal them back up.

Much of the Fractals content, such as Rata sum, demands a group at least kill their way through the jumping segments, and for the parts that don’t, it prevents people from getting frustrated. Sure, it makes it “Easy” if the mesmer can do it, but doing it alongside the mesmer makes it faster, and many parts take exponentially longer without one.

As for jumping puzzles, it’s there if the mesmer is willing and you want it, but never forced on you.

Portal should only allow a limited number of players to port. Portaling 100 player zergs needs to stop..

I think the Necromancer Flesh Worm skill was brought up because it IS a teleport skill just like the Mesmer portals. It is for the Necromancer only and has other differences as well. I think the point was that it doesn’t function even remotely as well as the Mesmer teleport, and in fact, the way it is implemented now, it is entirely useless. It can’t go up or down elevations, nor can it go across even a small gap in the terrain, let alone go through barriers. The only thing it’s really good for is if the game freezes you in place, which it does to me all too frequently (I think it’s a problem with Necromancer spell animations) I can use the Flesh Wurm to move again. I don’t have any problem with different classes having different abilities, but when different classes do have an ability of the same type, there shouldn’t be such a huge disparity in the way it is treated.

I do think the Mesmer portal ability needs to be restricted in WvW. The way it can be used now, basically eliminates any strategy where the game mechanics have already reduced strategy to a minimum.

I believe a mesmer’s portal is actually core to many strategies and speedruns, and I would like to see it stay simply because it’s such a neat tactic for advanced players.

Mesmers are not masters of damage. They are support. Having such utility like this is part of what makes them such a big team player even though their damage is minimal.

Eirik.9145:

I think the Necromancer Flesh Worm skill was brought up because it IS a teleport skill just like the Mesmer portals.

It’s much more like blink than portal. Blink can’t cross gaps or elevations either.

Well, the Necromancer skill says teleport
“Sacrifice your flesh wurm, teleport to it, and poison foes.”

Both it and the Mesmer Portal are 6 point skills where as Blink is a 1 point skill.

I’m not saying it should be able to go through barriers. It can’t as it’s a line of sight spell in GW2 where as Portal obviously is not. In GW1 things were different, but then again so were a lot of things (like things actually working, but that’s another story).

Should it be able to be cast across a divide in terrain or at a change in elevation? I would argue without a doubt, yes. The last time I checked minions don’t care where you summon them at. The point is clearly moot anyway. The ability actually allowed such things to start out with in the game and they were taken away. Much like the well spells had their range reduced to 900 from the 1200 that most classes have for utility attacks. Necromancers don’t like the changes, but we nod our heads and walk away. We satisfy ourselves with the knowledge that when all things come to an end we’ll be Lich Lords and the rest of you will just be our undead puppets.

Kain Francois.4328:

I believe a mesmer’s portal is actually core to many strategies and speedruns, and I would like to see it stay simply because it’s such a neat tactic for advanced players.

Mesmers are not masters of damage. They are support. Having such utility like this is part of what makes them such a big team player even though their damage is minimal.

Also, they’re the only class with no traits or utility skills that offer movement speed. The best they have is 50% swiftness uptime from focus 4… which of course gets in the way of using other weapon combinations. They’re the slowest class when it comes to getting from point A to point B. On the other hand, they’re the fastest at getting back to point A.

You can count the number of skills that mesmers can make real use of in a siege on one hand. (Portal, Feedback, Focus 4, and Greatsword 4 are far more useful than almost anything else – Focus 5 isn’t bad if you have the reflect trait, but it’s nowhere near as good as 4 or Feedback at it)

People will whinge about anything

Eirik.9145:

Both it and the Mesmer Portal are 6 point skills where as Blink is a 1 point skill.

The tiers in utility skills was done for one purpose and one purpose only, to give those grinders a “sense of progression”. Back in BWE1 there were no tiers of utility skills, artificially preventing you from picking them up in whatever order you want. The utility skills are not balanced around how many skill points they costed.

Having not tried out that skill on my low level Necromancer alt, I cannot really say much about it, but yeah it sounds like it has the same workings of blink/lightning flash.

Polaritie.4851:

You can count the number of skills that mesmers can make real use of in a siege on one hand. (Portal, Feedback, Focus 4, and Greatsword 4 are far more useful than almost anything else – Focus 5 isn’t bad if you have the reflect trait, but it’s nowhere near as good as 4 or Feedback at it)

As of the latest patch, all Phantasm skills all depend on the super buggy LoS requirements. Therefore GS4 is about as useful as a melee attack most the time for a siege.