Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, Mesmer tPvPer here. I’d like to talk about a few things here to do with Mesmers. To begin, I’ll state that I agree about the fact that Mesmers are overly important to have on a successful tournament team, although perhaps because of slightly different reasons than what everyone is complaining about right now.

Topic 1: Shattered Strength
This is the big gripe with the new patch. I agree that it was a rather silly change to do, considering that it directly buffs what was already by far the best, and possibly the only viable build for high end tPvP (shatter). However, it’s not as bad as people make it out to be. First of all, as far as I can tell, instant 25 stack might is a myth. Every other top mesmer I’ve talked to agrees with me on that. The best you can do for a shatter combo executing within 1 – 2 seconds is 18 stacks of might. Furthermore, if you want to blurred frenzy, either your first shatter has to be mind wrack, or you’ll only be mind wracking with 2 images. Alternately you can wait until after your immobilize/blurred frenzy and try to set up just the mind wrack for higher damage, but that’s unreliable and much less bursty overall.

So in reality, your mind wrack is either going to take a # of images hit, a reliability/burstyness hit, or only actually be affected by the stacks of might that it itself generates, which is obviously very few. What shattered strength DOES do very well is allow you to continue pressuring a lot harder after your burst with auto-attacks. Signet of inspiration to share the might stacks could work very well, but it would have to be at the cost of blink, decoy or illusion of life (whichever you run in your 3rd slot, since portal and mirror images are required), which are hard skills to give up.

Another thing you can do is use up a random shatter when preparing for your burst and get up to another 9 stacks, but then you’ve used up illusion summoning and possibly a defensive shatter, not to mention that the prep time for your shatter combo has just more than doubled.

Topic 2: Countering Shatter Combos
This is just a quick educational section in which I’ll explain how to beat mesmer burst. Basically, a mesmer relies heavily on the pressure put on by a shatter combo. If it misses, he really can’t do much at all for the next 10 – 20 seconds, and can’t do another full combo for 45 seconds. Also, mesmers in general like to get that combo off as quickly as possible before you have a chance to start pressuring them. So, what to do? Lure it, and watch for it.

Example: warrior. 1v1 situation, war vs mes. Run in on the mesmer, but keep a bit of range at the start to see what he does. If he has sword/pistol out, he’s almost certainly going to open with a shatter. He’ll summon a phantasm, cast his 3 illusion which will slide along the ground towards you, then dodge and shatter combo you. Switch to shield sometime along there, and shield block when he teleports to you. A lot of mesmers will actually use their full combo on you while you’re immune, particularly if they are using a macro. Great, now do whatever you want, you’ve probably won or at least got a neut on his point. Can’t swap weapons? Shield block down? Use endure pain. Ele? Mist form. Eng? Use that aoe blink thing… this one is particularly annoying because it’s harder to catch on to. Etc, etc.

Obviously this leads into mind gaming each other and trying to lure defensive cooldowns vs luring burst, but you still don’t even see a whole lot of that at high end tPvP. There are also several builds/classes which straight up counter mesmers, especially in a point defense scenario, such as staff ele and certain offensive guardian builds.

CONTINUED…

Topic 3: Shatter Mesmer Popularity
Why are shatter mesmers so popular for tPvP? Against stuff like rangers, caltrops thieves, and eles it’s often a lot more effective to run a tankier phantasm build for 1v1. You’ll even live longer in 1v2s and 1v3s. However, the role of a mesmer is to defend the side point and then support anything within portal range. That means that the mesmer is running in and out of fights quite a bit, so burst > attrition. It’s simply much more effective to run into a team fight, shatter everything and leave again than to run in, cast some phantasms and …. leave i guess.

Those shatter bursts are also just insanely effective in big AoE situations, although I’d argue that necros are even more effective, and possibly thieves if they can get high ground on somewhere like keep. And of course time warp is ridiculously powerful if used at the right time. In contrast, even moa bird is now pretty terrible considering even if you do get it off (can be dodged or blocked pretty easily or just be chance), the victim can run away at high speed and come back when it’s over unless immediately CC’d with something else anyways. Mass invis is just bad; fighting happens on points, and it simply doesn’t make sense to invis your entire team in the middle of the fight, because then your opponent will be capping the point. It’d be awesome to see a rework of mesmer ults to make other choices more viable, and time warp less insane.

Naked clone week was an interesting time, because even though mesmers had a very hard time winning any 1v1s, they were still used constantly in tPvP. Because portal. Essentially, them having ANY use at all, plus portal, made them worth taking, Otherwise you have to leave a teammate on your home point to provide comparable protection, which is a complete loss of a player, rather than a partial loss of a player that the dulled mesmer was. Which bring me to…

Topic 4: Portal
So, the problem here is that we’re allowing a defending team to guard two points without fully committing a player to each of them. This is producing a distinct defender’s advantage, along with huge popularity for mesmers. Of course guardians are just as required, if not moreso, but that’s a whole other issue. Without portal, mesmers actually have some of the least mobility in the game due to severe lack of swiftness, but with it, they suddenly become what you need for a side point defender. The only other viable option I’ve seen so far is, hilariously, a guardian running double teleport.

I think we can fix this. Let’s keep portal as a really awesome skill with some great potential for cool stuff, while at the same time preventing it from being the end-all of side point defending. Right now, it takes about 10 – 15 seconds to travel between points as a mesmer, giving you 20 – 30 seconds of dead time if you expect to run back and forth between points. What if we severely reduced the viability of using a portal to “guard” a point by reducing the duration from 60 seconds to 30 seconds? To keep the skill useful, also reduce the cooldown to perhaps 45 seconds.

Now you can still use portal to defend a side point for short periods of time, but having only a mesmer defend your side point with it all game will turn out to be extremely inefficient. On the other hard, you could use a portal to attack a team that has 2 points by dropping a portal near one of your opponent’s points, then attacking the other with most of your team. If you meet heavy resistance, portal your entire team back to that first point to catch your opponent off-balance. This is just one example, but proves that portal would still be a cool and useful skill with more dynamic use cases.

As for side point def, the entire game would hopefully become more dynamic as players rotate in and out depending on who is available, and if you think there is a possibility of your side point being pressured.

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Alright, that’s all I feel like writing about for now. Feel free to correct any logical errors I may have made, but do so in a way that will encourage discussion instead of flame wars.

good post but for the portal issue, personally, i disagree with your suggested “fix”.
I would recommend something along those lines:

1- you cant teleport items through it, repair kits…etc
2- The distance should be reduced to lets say 900, anything more and your portal wont work. CDs, duration…etc wont change the fact that the mesmer will still be able to defend two points or, in a good strategy once used, port the whole team in foe-fire from mid point to on top of the lord of the opposing team and finish the game in 10seconds….

I dont have a problem with might generation as it can be stripped or countered by an opposing team, but the portal is a lot trickier

I promise you that a 900 range on Portal would cause every Mesmer player on earth to hurl their monitors in a blind rage. I don’t play one regularly and I can tell you that.

A duration reduction would make a lot more sense, because it would still maintain its full functionality in PvE and WvW, but would effectively tone down its use in tPvP, where it’s the most imbalanced.

Right now a Mesmer can help his team at mid while still guarding their close point. The primary reason for this is that he has a full 60 seconds to get from close to mid and to engage in combat.

With Dolmur’s suggestion, the Mesmer would only have about 20 seconds to engage in combat (including the 10 or so seconds it takes to get from close to mid.) With a 45 second cooldown, the Mesmer could maintain a similar Portal uptime, but it would require more maintenance on his part, because he’d have to keep running back to close to redeploy his Portal.

This would make Mesmers slightly less dominant in the role they currently fill in tPvP (which would be a good thing) and would actually be a buff in PvE and WvW because of the reduced cooldown.

Seems like a pretty legit suggestion, imo.

yes Mouse i agree, however that suggestion will not affect the meta. Mesmer will still be functioning the same way it is now. Anyhow, things could easily be separated between sPVP and PvE/WvWvW…..

Deathcall.2104:

yes Mouse i agree, however that suggestion will not affect the meta. Mesmer will still be functioning the same way it is now. Anyhow, things could easily be separated between sPVP and PvE/WvWvW…..

The shorter cooldown should change the meta entirely, since with 20-30 second round trip you’ll barely get to the other point before you have to turn around and go back and wait for your portal cd, making constant portal uptime unviable.

Dolmur.2573:

The shorter cooldown should change the meta entirely, since with 20-30 second round trip you’ll barely get to the other point before you have to turn around and go back and wait for your portal cd, making constant portal uptime unviable.

exactly my point though, you will still be able to get to the other point, drop time warp, chaos storm, nullfield…etc in the 5~10sec window you have and port back. I just see it from a boring, and repetitive strategy

I could be wrong but so far its been 5 months, i missed 3, and meta is almost the same as it was in beta with minor exceptions