Guild Wars 2

Aomine.5012:

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

godz raiden.2631:

Ithilwen.1529:

Your personal attack is off topic. My point was and is that Mesmer bruises egos for two reasons; It has an image that isn’t hyper aggressive masculine.

Tell that to my bearded norn mesmer. But in all seriousness, I don’t understand this point that you keep trying to make. Is it because mesmer skills have a lot of purple/pink color to them or something? I consider mesmers hyper aggressive as a class, particularly on power shatter builds where the mesmer effectively wants to spawn clones as fast as possible for strong mind wracks, which usually leads to the mesmer using a lot of skills very quickly (also known as hyper aggressively).

Anyway, stop trying to make this about gender somehow. Keep that crap on tumblr.

I think the point attempting to be made, is that mage classes are seen as weak and feminine.
Which, if we’re speaking traditionally RPG wise, that’s pretty much true. White mages were almost always female. Mages were always weak physically.
Mages also always die easier.

It’s the last point that I think she’s hinting at.
If we go by old class statistics, it’s no real wonder that warrior & guardian were on the top of the player count.

They’re seen as the “tougher” & “easier to play” classes.

Where as mesmer was further down the line.

I don’t agree with her interpretation based on gender politics, but the underlining point that everyone expects mages to die when you sneeze on them still stands.

One of the big questions asked by a lot of guardian players in response to ChronoBunker, is how a light armor character can bunker better than them in heavy armor.

I feel like all these arguments are way off topic at this point.

It literally has NOTHING to do with it.

I don’t know about others, but I voice my opinion by my actual experience in high MMR fights, and base my point entirely on the experience I faces in the match.
No other stereotypical personal preference is involved.

“I don’t know about others, but I voice my opinion by my actual experience in high MMR fights, and base my point entirely on the experience I faces in the match.
No other stereotypical personal preference is involved.”

While I agree, I believe the point being made is that others have biases based off of personal preferences and stereotypes.
As well, it does seem like the loudest complaints are the ones usually answered.

I mean, I’ve seen complaints about ChronoBunker spamming blinds.
In which case, I have to seriously wonder what the heck that person was smoking.

Blinding dissipation is on dueling. If a chrono bunker traded either his heals & condi removal (Insp) or his stability (Chaos), then you really shouldn’t have much of a problem killing them. Just Condi/CC them to death.
Really simple, actually.

Unless, ofc, they were arguing for a shatter mesmer nerf in the middle of a bunker meta.

I’ve also seen absurd suggestions like reducing moa time to 3 seconds. Cooldown better be about 40 seconds then, because otherwise moa is literally useless for anything other than stopping rampage/lich, which Engineer does anyway.

“it has no counter play”
Moa’s freaking hurt. And unless a team focus’s you out, and no one on your team comes to protect you, you really shouldn’t die.
Shatter Mesmer really doesn’t have the damage to solo a moa kill if the moa times their dodges.

There does appear to be some legitimate attempts to completely destroy the class on the forums.

Then again, I see the same thing for every class.
shrug

Ithilwen.1529:

Your personal attack is off topic. My point was and is that Mesmer bruises egos for two reasons; It has an image that isn’t hyper aggressive masculine. and ; It can stop the ego strokes that come from “zerk” style instant kills.

Personally, I disagree. I only play warrior and thief in ranked, so perhaps I differ from the average when I say this, but my only frustration with bunker mesmers is that +1 against them is, or at least was, pretty difficult. I haven’t played much since the minor balance patch, however.

I never considered the masculinity or femininity of the mesmer class. Your observations are… the first time I’ve thought about it regarding any class.

I don’t believe that bunkers should be able to hold 1v2. Being able to hold a single person off indefinitely seems balanced enough, but being able to defend against two people shifted the game to be bunker-focused, which made the gameplay really boring. I prefer quicker fights, where it’s easy to get downed when you’re not careful – I guess that explains my class choice.

In any case, I don’t think nerfing a mesmer’s nukes is the right way to go with balance this January. Tone down their defenses a little more and give them some minor buffs to their offense – I prefer the shatter-based theme the class has. Trying to balance the mesmer into a defensive class for pvp seems unintuitive to me, and it makes the class a bit over-reliant on its elite spec…

Again, I was trying to explore the reasons that appear make people reflexively ask for Mesmer ( and thief ) nerfs.

So many times, I have been called OP if I managed to win on Mesmer. In my experience, people have no problem in general losing against a warrior or a guardian say.. They attribute it to being out played. If they lose to a Mesmer, it’s because the class is clearly OP.

I watched Grouch himself do this on twitch. He lost to a Mesmer on thief. It wasn’t because he got outplayed.. it must have been that the Mesmer was OP. BTW the build that beat him was completely removed from the game in the very next patch.

Ithilwen.1529:

I watched Grouch himself do this on twitch. He lost to a Mesmer on thief. It wasn’t because he got outplayed.. it must have been that the Mesmer was OP. BTW the build that beat him was completely removed from the game in the very next patch.

You’ve mentioned this several times now, and since I don’t really ever watch Grouch on twitch or remember this happening, I’m curious as to which Mesmer build he was complaining about, and which patch it was on. If it was after the 6/23 patch then it was because Anet did in fact make thief worse off than other classes, particularly mesmer. That patch actually managed to shift the advantage that thief used to have in 1v1 mesmer and give mesmer the edge on most builds (provided equal player skill).

Ithilwen.1529:

Again, I was trying to explore the reasons that appear make people reflexively ask for Mesmer ( and thief ) nerfs.

So many times, I have been called OP if I managed to win on Mesmer. In my experience, people have no problem in general losing against a warrior or a guardian say.. They attribute it to being out played. If they lose to a Mesmer, it’s because the class is clearly OP.

I watched Grouch himself do this on twitch. He lost to a Mesmer on thief. It wasn’t because he got outplayed.. it must have been that the Mesmer was OP. BTW the build that beat him was completely removed from the game in the very next patch.

Try hop off your Mesmer and face one instead and you’d probably know the reason.

Ithilwen.1529:

Again, I was trying to explore the reasons that appear make people reflexively ask for Mesmer ( and thief ) nerfs.

Yes. My anecdotal experience seems to differ from yours, but I appreciate that you’re performing your conjecture and investigation.

Ithilwen.1529:

So many times, I have been called OP if I managed to win on Mesmer. In my experience, people have no problem in general losing against a warrior or a guardian say.. They attribute it to being out played. If they lose to a Mesmer, it’s because the class is clearly OP.

That’s probably because mesmers are chosen more in the pro-league meta right now, whereas warriors and guardians are basically nowhere to be found. However, there is a fairly significant amount of “dh op” in lowers levels of play. It’s true that warrior and thief aren’t called “op”; this is because they are legitimately underpowered right now.

Ithilwen.1529:

I watched Grouch himself do this on twitch. He lost to a Mesmer on thief. It wasn’t because he got outplayed.. it must have been that the Mesmer was OP. BTW the build that beat him was completely removed from the game in the very next patch.

I don’t really pay attention to the scene, but it would be pretty irritating if Anet’s balance team incorporated some personal bias into their decision-making process.

@ Godz The build was Condi-clone death. This was during the time that thieves could pretty much eat Mesmers at will.

I feel that ANET’s balance team does make it’s decisions based on personal bias and internal dueling.

@Aomine. I have in fact been playing multiple classes trying to get my wins to get the achievements for PvP.

I can crush a Mesmer on another class I understand. For example, I can confidently engage on Thief.

sigh the underlying tone of the changes is that it actually doesn’t solve anything. We are just swapping one group of sustain based apex predators for another.

I as a Mesmer main am actually all for a good chunk of this but all I see is that bunker Chrono is going to be knocked off the top and every other Mesmer build will suffer because we refuse to fix the core issues of balance based on the game types.

The changes to quickness I think are good for the health of the game.

The alacrity changes being so vauge scares me. If they reduce it to much it would be like nerfing the illusion line pre specialization patch. It needs to be nerfed in a way that only affects bunker chrono or wells without hurting PvE viabillity if there is no splitting.

(Also A-net it doesn’t matter how “easy” it is to balance something, if your note even going to do it. Aka: updates being so infrequent or if you have to endure an entire season.)

Yep.. they made Mesmer as useless as they could without completely removing it. Why do you hate Mesmer, anet?

R.I.P. Mesmer – 2016.

What is with ANet always doing a 50% nerf to things?
I could understand 66% on alacrity down to 50%, and then seeing how things played out there, and change accordingly.
But half of its effectiveness? Jesus christ.

On top of the res nerfs.

On top of buffing Necro’s boon corruption.

On top of nerfing buffing Ele.

On top of making Well of Precog useless across the board.

Do ANet devs even play this game?

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

R.I.P. Mesmer – 2016.

What is with ANet always doing a 50% nerf to things?
I could understand 66% on alacrity down to 50%, and then seeing how things played out there, and change accordingly.
But half of its effectiveness? Jesus christ.

On top of the res nerfs.

On top of buffing Necro’s boon corruption.

On top of nerfing buffing Ele.

On top of making Well of Precog useless across the board.

Do ANet devs even play this game?

You should play this game first.

I see so many forum heroes only do the talking and not playing :P
If you don’t believe in pro-league, try do some matches without abusing the OP specs and you can see the world better.

Btw res nerf is not just a Mesmer thing. Everyone got hit equally.
Druid and Revenant suffered from this too.
Necro buff is more devastating to Druid, Tempest, and Scrapper compare to Chrono, since all 3 of them are much more heavily reliant on boons to survive, so it’s not really a mesmer thing too.

Stop playing the victim here.

OP was right. They did nuke it, lol.

Can I ask a question since we are discussing mesmer bunkers? When I bunker and I play against a chrono, I can easily counter their CC and condition damage with elixirs on my engineer. Since I never go invuln, all I have to do is wait out their rotations to slowly decap and cap the point. This is in a 1v1. I see where Chrono’s are great in team mid fights but 1v1, I find that chronos are easy to beat and can not maintain the point against better bunkers. Unless I am facing some bad chronos. If I see a Chrono take home, I usually cringe.

What is the exact rotation/combination that makes them OP?

ANET, there aren’t words for my disgust even though I expected it. Do you actually play gw2?

Which dev got beat by a Mesmer and is kittened?

They went beyond “Full kitten” I dont even play a mesmer but still could notice how kittening butchered it got.

Aomine.5012:

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

R.I.P. Mesmer – 2016.

What is with ANet always doing a 50% nerf to things?
I could understand 66% on alacrity down to 50%, and then seeing how things played out there, and change accordingly.
But half of its effectiveness? Jesus christ.

On top of the res nerfs.

On top of buffing Necro’s boon corruption.

On top of nerfing buffing Ele.

On top of making Well of Precog useless across the board.

Do ANet devs even play this game?

You should play this game first.

I see so many forum heroes only do the talking and not playing :P
If you don’t believe in pro-league, try do some matches without abusing the OP specs and you can see the world better.

Btw res nerf is not just a Mesmer thing. Everyone got hit equally.
Druid and Revenant suffered from this too.
Necro buff is more devastating to Druid, Tempest, and Scrapper compare to Chrono, since all 3 of them are much more heavily reliant on boons to survive, so it’s not really a mesmer thing too.

Stop playing the victim here.

Lmfao.
You’re talking to someone who’s other main classes are Thief and Engie.

You know what I’m going to do after these changes hit?
Play thief. (Not like I stopped playing it anyway. Staff thief and condi thief are actually pretty strong)

Jesus, the buffs they did to thief.

But no, the nerfs they did to mesmer are ridiculous. And if you can’t see that, I can’t help you.

Precog nerf hurts WvW more than it hurts PvP.
Alacrity nerf hurts PvE more than it hurts PvP. And it hits PvP pretty hard.
And quickness/slow changes are annoying.

and we don’t even know what all they’re doing, this is just a preview. It’s not the patch notes

@Ithilwen Interesting. You are trying to make mesmer out to be the victim when it is currently superior in PvP and attempt to use irrelevant issues to change the topic of this discussion into a gender issue ……. interesting. It really provides incite on your character, but I suppose that is irrelevant as well.

I am in favor of a nerf to chronobunker, but I do not want them to be nerfed exclusively. I think that most of the classes in this meta require some nerfs in order to bring PvP back into order. Most of the elite specializations (excluding berserker and daredevil) simply have too much defensive ability to justify the amount of utility or damage they provide. I am a reaper main in PvP and completely agree with people that say its condition damage needs to be toned down. Chronobunker is simply too strong at the moment and I believe that the nerfs being put forward are justified.

Saying things such as “why do you hate mesmers, Anet” is not helpful towards the issue. I saw that you had another thread concerning how Anet can improve base mesmer and this kind of constructive criticism is much better for the game. A QQ thread is almost always useless and does not result in any sort of progress.

Finally, concerning your points about how those who play DH and warrior are often commemorated for their ability to play well while chronomancers are called OP, this logic is completely justified. At the moment, DH, Warrior, and Thief are considered to be weaker classes that don’t really have a purpose in higher tier PvP. If a player is able to excel using one of these professions, despite its many handicaps, it is often due to the fact that these are skilled players. In the case of bunker chrono, it is a fairly easy class to play that thrives off of passive defenses and fast rezing speeds to dominate team fights. Playing a chrono bunker shows the strength of the build, not the player. This has nothing to do with its “feminine” design. If mesmers were currently in as bad a place as warriors or thieves, people would applaud those who play mesmers skillfully. Excuse any grammar or awkward wording; writing was never a strength of mine.

Tl;dr: I believe that the chronobunk nerfs are justified but I also think that base mesmer should be tweaked so that it doesn’t fall out of PvP use.

I’m in my fourth year in this game. For the vast majority of that time, Mesmer has been underpowered and an easy victim to most classes. It’s the class I want to play and I am sick of being second rate.

The word is “insight.” To repeat myself, I was trying to explore the reasons people reflexively whine for Mesmer nerfs when being beaten by another class doesn’t provoke the same response.

Chrono nerfed.
Shatter mesmer likely to be destroyed by the new thief.

So which mesmer build will be viable in pvp if any?

Silverwing.8750:

Chrono nerfed.
Shatter mesmer likely to be destroyed by the new thief.

So which mesmer build will be viable in pvp if any?

Condi or Lockdown.

Dire Condi might be able to survive a thief burst.

Marauder lockdown mes depends entirely on whether or not you get the jump on thief.

But even if you do, you’ll probably still die. Passive defenses and unblockable bassy venom…
sigh

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

Silverwing.8750:

Chrono nerfed.
Shatter mesmer likely to be destroyed by the new thief.

So which mesmer build will be viable in pvp if any?

Condi or Lockdown.

Dire Condi might be able to survive a thief burst.

Marauder lockdown mes depends entirely on whether or not you get the jump on thief.

But even if you do, you’ll probably still die. Passive defenses and unblockable bassy venom…
sigh

Condie builds are going to be ripped to shreds with the new necros. It’s already very difficult to play condie vs necros, and with all the buffs they’re getting, it’ll be close to suicide.

Lockdown…unlikely. The thief buffs mean they’ll be all over you, and so will the revs. Lockdown is already on the verge of being playable in most matches, and the alacrity and precog nerfs will be hitting it very hard on defense.

Ithilwen.1529:

To repeat myself, I was trying to explore the reasons people reflexively whine for Mesmer nerfs when being beaten by another class doesn’t provoke the same response.

Look across the class forums and you’ll see that every class has people who are screaming for nerfs. There are no reasons to explore because this does not exclusively affect mesmers. Elementalists and Revenant both get the same if not more QQ over this matter. Pre-HoT mesmer was still incredibly powerful with its PU build and was among one of the best 1v1 specs in the game at the time. Mesmer hasn’t been a sub-par class in PvP for well over a year. People beaten by Reapers/Revenants complain that condition spam is ruining the meta. People beaten by Druids/Chronomancers/Tempest complain that excessive support/defenses are ruining the meta. The point is that mesmer is definitely not the only class getting called for nerfs, and most of these calls are justified across all of the classes. I’ve actually noticed that people’s “egos” are more hurt after losing to a thief or warrior because they know that they did not lose due to a cheese build, but rather because their opponent was simply a better player.

The “balance” that anet just announced destroys chronomancer. Aegis is essentially meaningless because it will be destroyed by incoming auto attacks and aoe before it even takes effect. So that Critical defensive slot skill is gone.

To add insult to injury, anet buffs thief damage when they could already kill me more often than not , given a clean shot with a stealth heartseeker.

And then, to ice the cake… they give thief unblockable venom which is sharable with teammates and is an immobilize. If by some chance I survive the burst, I’ll be immobilized and dying anyway of the poison stacks.

ANET basically destroyed the shield’s defensive value along with that of sword and scepter.

It’s pretty crystal clear that anet wants Mesmer to fail.

The patch nerfs many of the passives available to chronobunker, meaning that if you want to play the class effectively, you can’t just spam invulns/evades/blocks on cooldown while providing 66% cooldown reduction to your entire party. Basically, it will take skill to play mesmer again, not just faceroll cheese builds. If you are sincerely suggesting that thief should not have been buffed, I cannot take you seriously. This is a class whose only role is to decap points and +1 fights, and becomes useless as soon as the enemy team has 2 decent bunker players.

I want to see the results of the internal testing that justified any of this as fair.

“We brought alacrity brought down from 66% to 33% so it is not useless.” IT IS FOR EVERY BUILD NOT DESIGNED TO MAXAMIZE IT!

Precog is useless against multiple hits, might as well be chaos armor or illusionary riposte.

Quickness/Slow changes hurt support. – but this alone was more or less fair.

Alacrity nerf makes Chrono as a spec useless outside of CS, speed boost, and not losing a phant to shatter. (Time catches up is just as easy to avoid as a normal shatter, and the master traits are worthless.)

Energy sigil puts the nail in the coffin for shatter specs

No counter to chill outside of full cleanse.

-

“has seen many a chronomancer survive a killing blow and seize victory.”

Scrapper will still do this better than chrono ever did.

Thief has historically done this and will now do it again, and solidify it’s spot to being an objective counter to mes as opposed to being a fair fight. even more so when now you can’t even block their stun ON THE SHIELD YOU ALREADY NERFED.

Ele will also continue it’s trend even with sigil changes.

DH will still effectively heal and be defensive during burst.

Don’t even get me started on Rev and Druid.

-

Back to the dark days of being thief food and struggling to be viable with mediocre damage and defense that only bads die to and team support only maxamized by coordination as the last slot taken by a full DPS team. Before people realize why bother we’ll just bring something better.

It was not hard to just kittening nerf bunker chrono. I’m happy to see the easy mode bunker go. But the rest was unneeded.

The only thing that would MAYBE justify any of this is a +100% buff to “Flow of Time’s” duration.

Shovel Face.4512:

Ithilwen.1529:

I just got done reading the balance changes preview. The language says Mesmer is to receive yet another nuke nerf.

Why do you hate Mesmer, anet?

Nothing to do with hate mate. You are being delusional if u think Mesmer is fine at its current state. As of right now, Mesmer is the “free ride to legendary” ticket.

so to reverse that and make the class a free kill for most classes, especially with thief being over-buffed, is right?

The attempt to pre emptively deny that the alacrity nerf makes it useless is a pretty transparent cover for the fact that they know it does make alacrity useless.

Aegis from well of precog? LOL that won’t last even 1/2 second with the incoming auto attack and aoe spam. Plus shield has been made essentially worthless. It won’t stop a thief one shot. It doesn’t provide meaningful defense from monster aoe.. and alacrity is no longer really useful.

This destroys my entire reason for buying HoT. I want my money back.

Just adapt to the new scepter condi mesmer meta, scrub.

Chip Skylark.2367:

Just adapt to the new scepter condi mesmer meta, scrub.

Ah yes, the meta formed because of a 5% attack speed boost to scepter put on a trait that’s objectively worse than the other options in the same tier.

In my opinion, this is a big middle finger in the face of every Mesmer player. It says “you will be dominated by thieves and anyone else in the arena. You will NOT be successful in pvp.”

Thieves were already capable of killing me very quickly if I wasn’t alert. Now they have unblockable god mode damage, condi and immobilize all in one package. Potentially, so do any of the thief’s teammates nearby. And if that wasn’t enough, they are getting a major increase in spam attack damage … and as if that wasn’t enough, they’re getting more sustain too. In my eyes, it’s pretty obvious that anet is kicking Mesmer out of the game.

Mesmer has a very narrow to no middle ground between high and low level skilled players. There are few good mesmer players and the rest are either trapped in this limbo of being “mediocre” or “barely making it.”

Unfortunately, with the intro of the chronomancer the skill level of mesmer dropped off to the point where anyone could pick it up. The nerfs and amulet removals will invalidate the bunker chrono. With this revelation, pvp mesmer will fall into an even worser state than pre HoT, simply cause revs and daredevils are here in addition to base thief.
Not that base thief will be really used but still….

Shhhh
No tears lad
Just let it happen

Its not okay that mesmer can spam alacrity to basically have an infinite (slight exaggeration) amount of potential damage mitigation. The nerfs they are receiving sound legit. How are you even supposed to get good on a class just basically has a lot of buttons with literally almost no punishment for being spammed?

Mesmer used to be a class which took real skill to use well, now its just a class you can play with your bum.

Ithilwen.1529:

In my opinion, this is a big middle finger in the face of every Mesmer player. It says “you will be dominated by thieves and anyone else in the arena. You will NOT be successful in pvp.”

Thieves were already capable of killing me very quickly if I wasn’t alert. Now they have unblockable god mode damage, condi and immobilize all in one package. Potentially, so do any of the thief’s teammates nearby. And if that wasn’t enough, they are getting a major increase in spam attack damage … and as if that wasn’t enough, they’re getting more sustain too. In my eyes, it’s pretty obvious that anet is kicking Mesmer out of the game.

Couldnt agree more! They are nerfing the crap out of the mesmer, and buffing thieves!!! The trade of we get is 5% faster scepter attack… And I was thinking they would do something like increase attack on skill 1, and maybe make it like a beam, increase duration of torment to 8 sec, while also adding some bleeds, confusion, weakness etc. to it… But NO…

Then skill 2 is completly worthless (I hate it) aswell, and skill 3 could need a reduction in the cast time and a reduced cd by 2-4 sec… Also they could change so the clone was created at first attack and not on the third on skill 1…

There are alot of other things they can fix for the core mesmer aswell, like not make us so dependant on illusion to go condi build, but well…

Iam not pleased with this… especially while druid, scrapper and necros stay the same, while rev, ele, mesm etc gets nerfed hard!

Necros, druids, scrapper and thieves will rofl in this patch!

Anet are even worse then ncsoft and trion at balance games, and that isnt a title that I would have wanted!