“I’ve played around a little with mesmer post patch. People spam whisper me in game for my thoughts so here they are:
These are some of the laziest nerfs I’ve seen since the time when arenanet nerfed quickness by half. How is this a hard concept to grasp? If you completely halve the effectiveness of a certain thing you need to look at the skills tied to this and balance them around the current value.
Well of alacrity was a high cd utility slot skill for the extremely powerful alacrity tradeoff. It was 100% worth the util slot and could be argued to be too strong.
The entire chrono line was balanced around alacrity and was only a problem in pve and in tanky mesmer builds. Alacrity by itself was never overpowered, the wells gaining alacrity to the point they did were.
So what about shatter gives alacrity? What about the trait that makes alacrity last 50% longer? What about all wells that ends well?
You balance the entire chrono line with multiple traits ALL around your new little mechanic and then you kittenING halve it.
The obvious result? Every single skill tied to alacrity, from the well to the traits boosting your duration on alacrity all take a ridicilous hit in effectiveness.
To the dev who proposed and went through with this change: Would you design flow of time (3/4th of a sec alacrity on shatter) with the current state of alacrity? Would you design improved alacrity around this? When you first designed alacrity in the first place you balanced all these cds around the previous state of alacrity.
You would never, ever have nerfed Improved alacrity to 25% but that’s more or less what you did now.
The whole kittening point of chronomancer line is that you don’t get buffed stat wise but that it’s all in utility. Not a single trait boosts your damage, toughness or anything. The only stat modifier is the movement speed(utility) and the 30% crit on slow (trash).
I could type about this forever but here is the golden notes you only need to care about:
ESL added a rule that class stacking is not allowed anymore. I suppose this means that PU chrono could MAYBE see play. This build is literally inferior in every single aspect to DH/rev/thief and would never be picked if the latter two werent allowed to be stacked. The only reason I’d ever play this is because portal+moa can still be abused on it. Stealth, portal, moa. If moa misses you disengage and try again.
The shatter mesmer with duel is completely dead, don’t even bother trying to play it. The CDR hit on alacrity is so big that you actually gain more CDR playing illusion shatter mesmer over chrono which obviously isnt viable due to the powercreep of the game. I’d put that build on the same level as warrior.
Condition mesmer is shockingly not a thing despite the 5% scepter aa buff. Huh.
For those of you that don’t know about the quickness nerf mentioned above, a very long time ago quickness used to have double it’s current effectiveness. Warriors played a build completley built around this using the frenzy utility which made them take double damage but gave them quickness for a few seconds (Can you imagine that the game has powercreeped so hard that quickness for 6ish s while you take DOUBLE DAMAGE as punishment used to be a high tier utility?) and thieves used quickness in exchange for losing their endurance.
Anet nerfed the quickness without even touching those skills, wars still took double damage but now they had half the quickness effectiveness.
I guess it’s worse in this case since they butchered an entire traitline but yeh."
Sanctum of Rall
Pain Train Choo [Choo]
Mind Smack – Mesmer
On the other hand whoever made necro chances at least knew that when lowering the cooldown of an ability you also need to lower it’s effectiveness (and vice versa).
But whoever made mesmer, warrior, ele and some other changes has no idea how any of these classes interact with the game.
Don’t worry, guy.
ANet has it all handled! They’re going to do a CD…
oh wait. I just got a notice that they’re going to remain absolutely silent on this.
How unusual.
Attachments:
“Unused Development Initiative. We care so much
about your feedback, that we don’t even read it.” ~ Crystal Suzuki
faced 2 teams after patch that play in the pro league, both ran bunker mesmers. dont cry just yet, lets see how it works out
Oh god.
2 pro-league teams are testing something out?
Clearly not nerfed into oblivion enough.
Need to reduce protection from chaos armor to 0. Make alacrity increase cooldowns by 25% instead of reducing anything.
And decrease mesmer damage to 4-5 damage base.
“Unused Development Initiative. We care so much
about your feedback, that we don’t even read it.” ~ Crystal Suzuki
For those of you that don’t know about the quickness nerf mentioned above, a very long time ago quickness used to have double it’s current effectiveness. Warriors played a build completley built around this using the frenzy utility which made them take double damage but gave them quickness for a few seconds (Can you imagine that the game has powercreeped so hard that quickness for 6ish s while you take DOUBLE DAMAGE as punishment used to be a high tier utility?) and thieves used quickness in exchange for losing their endurance.
Anet nerfed the quickness without even touching those skills, wars still took double damage but now they had half the quickness effectiveness.
I guess it’s worse in this case since they butchered an entire traitline but yeh."
There’s a huge problem with these so-called pros talking about balance: Selective memory.
Just like todays’ buffs and nerfs are commented on in a completely hyperbolic way, the same people commenting and the community will forget the details of the changes and only remember their outrageous claims.
Frenzy for instance was an extra 50% damage damage taken (instead of 100%), lasted 4 seconds (instead of 6) and when they nerfed it and all other quickness sources simply because people would proc it and AA others to death before they could even react (on top of animation tells being meaningless under its effect), they halved their effect from 100% to 50% but not without increasing the duration of it. So quickness effects that lasted for 4 seconds were increased to 6 and so on, in order to balance the damage output out over time.
TLDR: Most changes are not as impactful as many like to claim on patch day. The claims persist throughout the years, right or wrong and usually the real impactful changes are forgotten, as they are discovered after a few weeks and months.
I’ve said it a dozen times now. But the alacrity change obviously is gonna be an issue. Yet all that woulda needed to be done “without breaking mesmer yet maintaining a nerf to alacrity” would be to nerf alacrity that is shared with teammates down to 33% and keep the alacrity on self at 66%. Bam. Now all mesmer builds still work but bunker isn’t as effective.
The alacrity change was a good one, as it did too much for the duration you could get. It is honestly MUCH easier to balance around alacrity that isn’t as powerful (although I don’t know if 50% reduction was right). The problem is that they didn’t also then change the balance of everything with alacrity to compensate.
Even more, they probably should have nerfed alacrity by 50%, and then nerfed EVERY elite spec by about as much to reverse the stupid amounts of power-creep ruining the game.
The alacrity change was a good one, as it did too much for the duration you could get. It is honestly MUCH easier to balance around alacrity that isn’t as powerful (although I don’t know if 50% reduction was right). The problem is that they didn’t also then change the balance of everything with alacrity to compensate.
Even more, they probably should have nerfed alacrity by 50%, and then nerfed EVERY elite spec by about as much to reverse the stupid amounts of power-creep ruining the game.
The alacrity change was a good one, as it did too much for the duration you could get. It is honestly MUCH easier to balance around alacrity that isn’t as powerful (although I don’t know if 50% reduction was right). The problem is that they didn’t also then change the balance of everything with alacrity to compensate.
Even more, they probably should have nerfed alacrity by 50%, and then nerfed EVERY elite spec by about as much to reverse the stupid amounts of power-creep ruining the game.
Tell them to not force Revenants into using half-functional skills too.
Sword 2 is even buggier than before and Hammer 2 doesn’t even work properly if there’s more than one Revenant.
Has anyone tried cancer perma block mesmer yet? If not, I recommend it. Makes PU look like a teddy bear.
I have, I feel like a decap druid does it better.
The biggest thing is that it pressures and decaps far point. But druids already do that.
I do think Mesmer needs light buffs, so don’t get me wrong. I just get confused when the community acts like its never played without alacrity before.
Whats your defense build btw?
Mine is Mercenary (trying to find runes/sigils but so far Guardian and Chronomancer ones are funny) with Dueling, Chaos, and Chronomancer (debating swapping to Illusions). Using triple well and the stun mantra. I got a penta kill yesterday from all the aoe condis that hit from 6 well bombing. Small moments like that make me really happy.
The alacrity change was a good one, as it did too much for the duration you could get. It is honestly MUCH easier to balance around alacrity that isn’t as powerful (although I don’t know if 50% reduction was right). The problem is that they didn’t also then change the balance of everything with alacrity to compensate.
Even more, they probably should have nerfed alacrity by 50%, and then nerfed EVERY elite spec by about as much to reverse the stupid amounts of power-creep ruining the game.
Has anyone tried cancer perma block mesmer yet? If not, I recommend it. Makes PU look like a teddy bear.
I have, I feel like a decap druid does it better.
The biggest thing is that it pressures and decaps far point. But druids already do that.
I do think Mesmer needs light buffs, so don’t get me wrong. I just get confused when the community acts like its never played without alacrity before.
Whats your defense build btw?
Mine is Mercenary (trying to find runes/sigils but so far Guardian and Chronomancer ones are funny) with Dueling, Chaos, and Chronomancer (debating swapping to Illusions). Using triple well and the stun mantra. I got a penta kill yesterday from all the aoe condis that hit from 6 well bombing. Small moments like that make me really happy.
It was different when alacrity wasn’t around. There weren’t Elite specs. And here’s Chrono, built around having Alacrity, now with its effectiveness halved.
Not unplayable, but definitely throws us down quite a few notches.
Well of precog change is definitely unnecessary and needs to be changed back to blur. Some alarcity time should be given back to certain skills to compensate a bit the huge effect nerf.
Mesmer/Chrono is actually still decent after the balance change. However, what makes it out of meta is that devs decide to create other OP monsters that completely overshadow mesmer/chrono.
They now need to apply the same balance standard they did to mesmer across all professions. Stop the powercreep and start to actually balance things.
Has anyone tried cancer perma block mesmer yet? If not, I recommend it. Makes PU look like a teddy bear.
I have, I feel like a decap druid does it better.
The biggest thing is that it pressures and decaps far point. But druids already do that.
I do think Mesmer needs light buffs, so don’t get me wrong. I just get confused when the community acts like its never played without alacrity before.
Whats your defense build btw?
Mine is Mercenary (trying to find runes/sigils but so far Guardian and Chronomancer ones are funny) with Dueling, Chaos, and Chronomancer (debating swapping to Illusions). Using triple well and the stun mantra. I got a penta kill yesterday from all the aoe condis that hit from 6 well bombing. Small moments like that make me really happy.
It was different when alacrity wasn’t around. There weren’t Elite specs. And here’s Chrono, built around having Alacrity, now with its effectiveness halved.
Not unplayable, but definitely throws us down quite a few notches.
That’s fair I guess. I personally think all of the elite specs (tbh the whole game) needs to get nerfed significantly. I just ran into a build that my Burnzerker is able to nuke 14 burn stacks in less than 1 second. And the target is stunned for the 1 or 2 ticks it takes for those to kill them. :C This is turning into Yu-Gi-Oh.
i don’t know why you guys are crying foul. one season of standing at the top necessitates a fall next season. simple maths.
Yes, because balance is not a matter of reaching equilibrium between the classes – thus a point where all classes can be viable in the meta with reasonable build diversity and a reasonable standing in a single season.
Balance is all about making one class OP for a season and others UP so that we can live in a perpetual cycle of revenge and telling the other to “**** it, its my turn to shine now!”
That certainly promotes healthy and non-toxic environments.
You should send a resume to work at ANET’s balance team, you have the right concept and would fit right in.
Small moments like that make me really happy.