Guild Wars 2

On the forums there is a clamor to tone down warriors. Additionally there is a clamor to make Mesmers viable in the meta. Most recently there has been a flare-up of protests about how Power Block will be too powerful against certain professions (e.g. Necromancers).

Here’s a solution that will resolve all 3 issues at once.

Change the proposed Power Block to do the following:

Power Block: Interrupting an opponent’s skill places their signets on an X second cooldown. Y second ICD.

This gives a really good reason to bring a Mesmer. At the same time, it will not have as drastic effect against other classes than the currently proposed Power Block. Lastly, it will introduce counterplay against the warrior meta.

Feedback is welcome.

Perhaps a bit too specialized. Obviously, this is aimed at healing signet. What if instead of Signet Hate, which by design is kind of weird, Power Block put the enemy’s heal skill on a 4s cooldown when any skill is successfully interrupted?

also power blaock will kill ele whos already in the lowest tier amongs other class.

Chaith.8256:

Perhaps a bit too specialized. Obviously, this is aimed at healing signet. What if instead of Signet Hate, which by design is kind of weird, Power Block put the enemy’s heal skill on a 4s cooldown when any skill is successfully interrupted?

That’s not a bad idea either.
Signet Hate is not a particularly weird idea. It was something GW1 had for Mesmers: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ignorance

This is not aimed at just Healing Signet. Power Block would also have utility against thieves. Since thieves have no skill cooldown on weapons, the current Power Block is almost useless against them. The proposed version would be somewhat more useful against them.

Lord Hammer Hand.4815:

also power blaock will kill ele whos already in the lowest tier amongs other class.

That’s possible. However, many of the recent theorycrafted Ele builds I have seen are only using 1 signet. Additionally, ele’s can get quite a bit of healing in water attunement, so I beileve this would impact elementalists to a much lesser degree.

Couldn’t you just make an adjustment to dazes/stuns directly? Like a trait that allows a class’ (probably Mesmer) dazes and stuns to blackout all non-stunbreak skills for the duration of the CC. If you can’t use it, you get no benefit from it, and then it’d effect signets.

I think that kind of ability would be incredibly powerful against every profession.

Thedenofsin.7340:

Lord Hammer Hand.4815:

also power blaock will kill ele whos already in the lowest tier amongs other class.

That’s possible. However, many of the recent theorycrafted Ele builds I have seen are only using 1 signet. Additionally, ele’s can get quite a bit of healing in water attunement, so I beileve this would impact elementalists to a much lesser degree.

Given that the ele signet is getting buffed back to what it was, I think we’ll see it more frequently. Nullifying the heal you could get out of it for Y seconds could prove deadly to the ele, especially since you can do it several times.

No argument there. That would be the potential drawback against using a Signet for your heal. Keep in mind if you had to use the active on Signet of Restoration, the current proposed Power Block would be even deadlier than the one I suggested: it would kill the heal and put the signet on cooldown for 10 seconds with no ICD.

To be honest it would be just as worse with the Glyph or Ether Renewal since they are even easier to interrupt. Of course they wouldn’t be put on CD, but you still couldn’t use them at all. Let’s not mention Arcane Brilliance, shall we?

It’s a nice idea but it destroys the only possibility for the ele to get a heal that can’t be interrupted. It’s a downside of wanting to get a counter for HS warrior I guess.

To be fair you could get the Glyph, but it requires at least a trait to make it viable (III in air), and it’s still weaker than the buffed signet I think. As much as mesmer needs help, I’m not in favor of any idea that’s gonna end up in a big issue for ele because you want to counter warriors.

And btw, the current Power Block would probably never affect the Signet of Restoration since you’re probably already dead if you have to use the active.

There’s a thread in the Mesmer forum discussing this. It would probably be better to have this as an entirely different interrupt trait rather than replacing Power Block. The new Grandmaster interrupt trait for the inspiration tree is going to be pretty useless so maybe that would be a good location for some signet-hate on interrupt instead. Would also mean that interrupt Mesmers would need to sacrifice other important Mesmer traits if they really wanted signet-hate and a bunch of the other interrupt traits.

It would need to be something like 5 seconds of deactivation on interrupt with an ICD of at least 10 seconds. I think it would be more interesting if it only affected the passive part and did not prevent active use of the signet, so opponents can decide whether or not it’s worth using the active part of the signet to make up for the passive downtime, with the Mesmer essentially attempting to manipulate a target into using the active part of their signet.

if you’ve learnt anything from the past half a year of hambow it should be that Anet will never balance warrior.
they don’t want to.
it wont happen.
sadly thats just how it is.

This is probably the case. As long as Hambow Hugh is making the calls and shaving the professions about as frequently as he shaves his face, we’ll never see hambow be properly balanced.

Still, I’d like to see this happen. Power Block isn’t sufficient to make Mesmers viable in the meta. What it will, do, however, is make them even stronger against the classes they are strong against.

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this made me lol

Liewec.2896:

if you’ve learnt anything from the past half a year of spvp it should be that Anet will never balance anything.
they don’t want to.
it wont happen.
sadly thats just how it is.

fixd that for you :P

Thedenofsin.7340:

Change the proposed Power Block to do the following:

Power Block: Interrupting an opponent’s skill places their signets on an X second cooldown. Y second ICD.

Like some other people said, that would be to specialized if you put their signets on CD. And it would be to easy to counter: don’t use any signets (I know, warrior and thief need their signets but it would be still an option…)

Simonoly.4352:

There’s a thread in the Mesmer forum discussing this. It would probably be better to have this as an entirely different interrupt trait rather than replacing Power Block. The new Grandmaster interrupt trait for the inspiration tree is going to be pretty useless so maybe that would be a good location for some signet-hate on interrupt instead. Would also mean that interrupt Mesmers would need to sacrifice other important Mesmer traits if they really wanted signet-hate and a bunch of the other interrupt traits.

That makes no sense. O.o Why should they place an interrupt-relevant trait in the inspiration tree, which is about healing and phantasms, whereas the domination tree has a lot of interrupt traits plus all minor traits affect interrupts and dazes?
If they’d made a trait with “Healing on interrupt” or “Remove two conditions on interrupting an enemy” that would have made sense to put it in inspiration but the actual “Power Lock” trait is better preserved in domination.

Another reason they placed it there is the fact that another GM trait “Confunding Suggestions” is also placed in the domination tree. With that interrupt mesmers have to choose between PL and CS. Imagine how powerful interrupts would be if you could spec for 6/0/0/6/0 so they have 25% longer dazes, 50% chance to turn a daze into a stun AND put the CD of an interrupted skill on 10sec. That would be too much so placing two powerful interrupt traits in the same GM tree is the best choice they could have made.

Next thing is Anet already said that this trait will only affect interrupts of skills with recharge, so most signets are used for their passive effect so the suggestions of the OP would be useless.
That means, thiefs wont be affected by this trait because all their skills use initiative as a kind of CD but the actual skills don’t have any CD. I assume they loose the initiative but the skill will have no CD, maybe they loose twice the amount of initiative but that would be to much I think. And auto-attack is spammable too ( Don’t know how much it will affect the guardian hammer chain where you stand there at the last part to make the symbol….).

What I’m wondering about is that this trait has no internal CD which means if I cast a chaos storm in a bunch of enemies that fight on a point I will approximately interrupt everyone one or two times. So in the best case I put two skills of each on 10sec CD which is extremely strong – so maybe Anet will give it an internal CD of 5sec or 10sec so it’s not that OP.

Yunalesca.9850:

What I’m wondering about is that this trait has no internal CD which means if I cast a chaos storm in a bunch of enemies that fight on a point I will approximately interrupt everyone one or two times. So in the best case I put two skills of each on 10sec CD which is extremely strong – so maybe Anet will give it an internal CD of 5sec or 10sec so it’s not that OP.

It’s unlikely you’d interrupt anyone more than once. Even the least competent players know to get out of Chaos Storm right away.