Guild Wars 2

Anyone feel they went to far with the phantasm nerf?

They can be killed with ease, you can line of sight them or roll to avoid there initial burst then just walk over and 1 or 2 hit them. They die in seconds from almost all kinds of aoe. They stick out like a sore thumb, so why wouldn’t you go over and kill them?

This nerf needs to be accompanied by a buff that lets them take more damage before death and or makes them less noticeable, They should just look like one of your clones but with a different weapon.

Summoning a phantasm once every 20 secs was a miscalculation, please address this further.

Thoughts?

Please stay civil and on topic

I hope you’re referencing pve, because the “nerf” didn’t do jack for pvp.

Phantasm Builds don’t have easily killable Phantasms.

That was the problem though, not necessarily their cooldowns. Wrong nerf.

This isn’t really that big of a problem. You can still weapon swap to attain 2 Phantasms every 15 seconds or so, instead of 12 seconds. The change is minor, and only really affects the Phantasm build in situations it was already countered in the first place. The Shatter build is nearly untouched by this change. Not to mention, 3 to 4 seconds (once you’ve reduced these cooldowns) are almost nothing in GW2 PvP.

I agree with Pyrial. I don’t seem to notice an increase or decrease in sPvP of mesmers, however if this nerf went too far like you suggest, we would see a slight buff in the next few days so keep calm and work around the “nerf,” mesmers are far from un-playable.

It effectively did nothing. So no, it wasn’t “too far”. If anything, it missed the entire point of people’s complaints in the first place.

My mesmer game revolves around keeping out as many of these phantasms as possible and this didn’t hinder me one bit. There are simply so many other ways to summon illusions. I strongly feel the out-of-balance factor to be addressed is the illusions doing so much damage. Please take half that dps from the summons and give it to the mesmers themselves. Having 4 summons that hit as hard as another player is just too much dps. It already provides superior defense by taking your opponents mind from combat to a continual targeting chore.

The word you are looking for is useless, not outrageous.

I would LOVE to see the reasons behind this ‘nerf’, since it effectively done nothing. Just about everyone who has spent time in PvP knows that phantasms hit ridiculously hard and naturally people complain about this, so what A-net does is ‘nerf’ them in the most idiotic way possible.

It actually helped much. No more Phantasms spamming!
Your Phantasms now actually have a cooldown and you have to choose when it is the right time to cast them! Of course, in my opinion, the cooldown nerf should be harder, but this is a first step and we can’t say how this will affect the meta.
I know that it is hard at the first time but, you know, it is a L2P issue.

Yeah…um…some classes and builds might counter Mesmers fairly well but…yeah, no. This nerf still was fairly ineffective. It’s not hard to find a real mesmer among clones or anything really but even with this CD, people can toss out a lot of stuff still. It doesn’t do much.

The nerf of this patch addressed all the issues poorly, from what they did to Pistol Whip to this and even the Guardian changes. The affect on the metagame is negligible and the changes are not affecting issues properly.

Why did you remake this thread after they closed the last one?

And no. Phantasms themselves were outrageous. You could just sit and poop out illusions and absolutely trounce people because of the damage output. It’s still just as strong. Why are you crying?

Personally, I could imagine this change having a subtle impact on non-mesmer players facing a phantasm centered build. If they’ve heard of this cooldown increase, somewhere in their mind is the fact that each phantasm they see actually has a cooldown.

Honestly this could be passed off as a non-issue. However, I can imagine situations where people that before may have seen an iZerker stop next to them and think “just ignore it, they’ll pop another one out even if I do kill it,” instead recall the CD increase and give the tactic a chance. Aside from the mechanical change of additional seconds of downtime, it reinforces the idea that killing/disabling phantasms is a worthwhile activity.

I’m in no position to make calls on how balance is to be handled. I’m more than comfortable leaving it in the hands of ANet. I just want to share my perspective that there is more at play here, being such a new game, than just mechanical changes.

I was more successful in hour one of playing my mesmer than any of the 5 other classes I play, most of which I studied for weeks. I took a very basic approach by just trying to maximize illusions. Its the dominant synergy available throughout the weapon abilities, utilities, and trait lines, and it’s not hard to accomplish on a near constant basis (even after the nerf).

Besides refusing to use the portal or turn people into a bird, I tried to do what the average Joe would when I made my mesmer. This was the only class whose first build I didn’t even have to tweak to be very successful with, and nothing’s changed.

I don’t think we’re gonna see any marked results from the meta by this adjustment. For me this isn’t an L2P issue because my comprehension and execution doesn’t change much when I select characters.

Business aside, I understand it’s just good life practice to err’ on the side of caution. I believe the people at Anet will get this matter straightened out eventually. I just wanted to kindly restate imho that the last fix is probably chipping away at the wrong multiplier.

Better question is when designing a game that you want to become and e-Sport, why on earth create fire and forget mechanics?

That’s a mystery I’d like to be solved.

Master Charles.7093:

I was more successful in hour one of playing my mesmer than any of the 5 other classes I play, most of which I studied for weeks. I took a very basic approach by just trying to maximize illusions. Its the dominant synergy available throughout the weapon abilities, utilities, and trait lines, and it’s not hard to accomplish on a near constant basis (even after the nerf).

Besides refusing to use the portal or turn people into a bird, I tried to do what the average Joe would when I made my mesmer. This was the only class whose first build I didn’t even have to tweak to be very successful with, and nothing’s changed.

I don’t think we’re gonna see any marked results from the meta by this adjustment. For me this isn’t an L2P issue because my comprehension and execution doesn’t change much when I select characters.

Business aside, I understand it’s just good life practice to err’ on the side of caution. I believe the people at Anet will get this matter straightened out eventually. I just wanted to kindly restate imho that the last fix is probably chipping away at the wrong multiplier.

I believe less pooping out of illusions is a step in the right direction. Damage wasn’t nerfed, only the rate of fire.

totally justified, I am playing mostly mesmer atm.

however the thief nerfs are ridiculous. Thief and guardian need rebalancing quickly, the patch notes are quite insulting in that regard to be honest.

Master Charles.7093:

My mesmer game revolves around keeping out as many of these phantasms as possible and this didn’t hinder me one bit. There are simply so many other ways to summon illusions. I strongly feel the out-of-balance factor to be addressed is the illusions doing so much damage. Please take half that dps from the summons and give it to the mesmers themselves. Having 4 summons that hit as hard as another player is just too much dps. It already provides superior defense by taking your opponents mind from combat to a continual targeting chore.

This is exactly right.

People need to be careful what they wish for.. All these people calling for nerfs on classes don’t understand what nerf actually means. I can tell the way arenanet handles things in terms of class “balance” that things will hit the fan very quickly. So many people cried for mesmer nerfs and so they did it, and this is the result.

Mr Magoo.9065:

totally justified, I am playing mostly mesmer atm.

however the thief nerfs are ridiculous. Thief and guardian need rebalancing quickly, the patch notes are quite insulting in that regard to be honest.

Lol you mean this 1 thief nurf?

“Pistol Whip: Reduced damage by 15%.”

And this 1 thief fix which is a combination nurf/buff?

“Basilisk Venom: Increased stun duration to 1.5 seconds. Stun breakers now work on this skill.”

Spicyhash.7605:

People need to be careful what they wish for.. All these people calling for nerfs on classes don’t understand what nerf actually means. I can tell the way arenanet handles things in terms of class “balance” that things will hit the fan very quickly.

“I can tell”. What can you tell? They haven’t done hardly anything in terms of class balance for the exact reasons they have let everyone know in their posts. You can’t tell anything son.

So many people cried for mesmer nerfs and so they did it,

If anything is clear by now its that they are not influenced by people crying for nurfs.

They obviously nurfed the mesmer because they determined that it was op (finally). Which to any clear thinking individual it obviously is.

and this is the result.

And its a good result too, not sure why you phrased it like its horrible. A slight gentle touch with the nurf bat is a good balance decision. Mesmers needed it and its better than clobbering them to death with the nurf stick. Anet seems to be doing what they said they would and taking their time and making small and reasonable balance changes.

Dunno why people complain about the recent nerfs, now baddies playing mesmer…remain baddies and can be killed easily, while good mesmers are still good and still a pain to kill…the game works as intended, soon or later every profession will reach the ele level = bad player die – good player own

Meh, in my opinion this is yust subjective opinion. I play 2 character in pvp, elementalist and mesmer.. and after a couple of tournaments etc. after the patch i can say phantasm/illusion mesmer not only still is more then viable, but because of it we now also see a couple more mesmers more relying on their own dmg and survivability.
I think the nerf was a good thing, it made people adjust, creating more viable builds while still maintaining the viability of the illusion/phantasm mesmer.

and thats not the ele-part speaking.. since as staff ele i never had trouble taking out phantasms and illusions anyway :P

It didn’t really effect my playstyle other than I’m used to the old cooldown and find myself thinking the cooldown should be done when it isn’t.

The issue I have is that phantasms die too fast, and this change makes it a little more frustrating. There’s nothing worse than summoning a phantasm and having someone do a lucky AoE and kill them without even trying/knowing they did. They should be easy to kill for someone targeting them and being smart and taking out a source of our damage… but should they be as easy to kill from luck/AoE spam?

Why not add some sort of buff to them that reduces damage from AoE, or reduce the cooldown timer a bit if they die?

It didn’t hurt much at all. Granted I think the changes are an uninformed knee jerk reaction. If they wanted to nerf phantasm cds all they had to do was change the 1st minor trait in illusions so you have to get weapon traits to reduce phantasm cooldowns. (w/ only one trait per weapon rather than stacking 2). That would also fix some of the issues with staff (5s cd phase retreat). Instead they went strait for phantasms directly, which was laughable considering the one phantasm that needed a change wasn’t touched in the slightest. That being berserker on GS since it doesn’t require LoS.

They’ll make another sweep, and probably have a fix just as backwards as this one to screw the class over for a couple of months. At least we’ll have shatter builds to fall back on… hopefully.

It was completely justified and it wasn’t even a nerf. If this “nerf” is really affecting your ability to play a mesmer i suggest you play an easier class.