Guild Wars 2

How powerful do you feel the 3 ‘on clone death’ traits are when all taken at once and coupled with Deceptive Evasion as it currently functions, and why?

This thread is to get some feedback from the community in response to the recent balance discussion on Twitch, specifically regarding the strength of the ‘on clone death’ traits. The link is below and the relevant section is about 42 minutes in.

Developer Live Stream: Ready Up

The Change: The Mesmer trait Deceptive Evasion will no longer create clones on dodge if there is more than two illusions out.

The Reasoning: The ‘on clone death’ Mesmer traits are too strong when all taken together with Deceptive Evasion.

This is not to discuss the pro’s & con’s and possible ramifications of the proposed change (many threads on that already) but to discuss if you feel the reasons given justifies it or not and explain why.

The ‘on clone death’ Traits:
(all traits activate if illusions are killed or overwritten and are AoE (240 radius)

• Crippling Dissipation – Cripple (3 sec)
• Confusing Combatants -1 stack of Confusion (3 sec)
• Debilitating Dissipation – Apply one random condition
  3 stacks of Bleed (5 sec) or
  3 stacks of Vulnerability (5 sec) or
  Weakeness (3 sec)

For clarity sake I’m re-posting the argument the developers gave when explaining the reasoning behind this change, as best I could. Italics are mine.

• It proc’ed ‘on clone death’ traits
• It disrupted the flow of your clones (no idea what that means)
• It forced you to either ‘cheese it’ (again, no clue what this means) or
• It interrupts your game-play (still no idea what specific type of ‘game-play’ this inhibited, especially since on-clone death & shatter builds make this an integral part of their game-play)
• It feels broken (very subjective, but ok)
• You have your clone, you’re attacking and you’re there and it’s changing all your positioning (???)
• It can replace Phantasms. No it can’t. (Yes it can.)

So the only intelligible argument made to support this change is they feel the ‘on clone death’ traits are too powerful when coupled with Deceptive Evasion. This is why I feel this needs to be a focus of discussion to explore this assertion.

Please try to be as objective as possible and post any specific relevant data (amount of conditions applied to a test golem using only Deceptive Evasion dodges and the traits above, a duel with a friend using just the above mechanics to gauge their relative strengths and ability to be countered, etc.)

No, I don’t think clone death builds are over-powered. It’s the fact that when coupled with Prismatic Understanding, they become extremely cheese and nigh impossible to take down in a 1v1. Either way, nerfing Deceptive Evasion is simply an extremely lazy way to resolve the “issue”, as it’s a blanket nerf to all of our builds, not just this specific one.

I hope they reconsider. The Critical Infusion hit is bad enough.

On clone death conditions are fine. However, overwriting clones and counting as them dying is not.

Okay, here’s a work up in theoryland about how much condi pressure the On Death traits and DE can produce. Honestly, it’s not very impressive at all.

Every assumption and simplification will be in favour of the On Death traits, so I am overestimating their damage potential here.

Assumptions:
perma-vigour, 20% CD on illusion summoning, 20% CD on GS skills, all clone skills and dodges are used on CD without interfering with each other.

GS is used as the weapon which produces clones with a single skill most quickly (other than scepter…but scepter has its own problems and is a Condi based weapon). Sword/Sword might, just possibly get more if the block always procced but again, that’s pretty unrealistic. So GS.

Clone Creation
With Vigour, may dodge every 5s for 1 clone.

GS puts out one clone every 4.75s

Mirror Images produces 2 clones every 36s

Decoy Produces 1 every 32s

Over 1 minute:
Dodging gives 12 clones.
GS gives 12.63 clones.
Mirror Images gives 3.333 clones.
Decoy gives 1.875 clones.

For a total of:
29.89 clones – call this 30 clones /minute.

Let’s be generous and say all 30 of these actually “die” on the target. We know realistically this won’t happen since some will wander off, some will die away from the target and you actually need to produce 3 more to “kill” the final batch.

With all clone death traits selected, over 1 minute that gives:
30 AOE cripples for 3.5s.

30 AOE confusions for 3.5s

30 instances of a randomly selected AOE
3x Bleed for 6s
3x Vuln for 6s
Weakness for 3.5s

At most, saving up for a “Burst” of this will hit a target 6 times if you have 3 clones out already.

Looking at those numbers, I seriously cannot see how this Clone Death thing is so very dangerous and in need of a nerf.

Keep in mind to get to the numbers above, that is 20 points in Domination, 25 in Dueling, 10 in Chaos and 15 in Illusions. All 70 trait points are spoken for to even make this happen! Dropping any of those points will lessen the effectiveness of the On Death procs or slow down clone generation.

In PvP, I can see the AOE cripples perhaps being a bit much, but is anyone actually dying horribly to the “Clone Death” wave? There are so many other builds and combos out there across the classes which are far, far more dangerous and require a lot less trait points to pull off.

With only a random chance to bleed and 1 stack of confusion per clone and only 30 per minute as a theoretical maximum, I cannot see clone death as a significant source of Condi damage compared to other classes in the game, with builds which can stack 25 bleeds or a mix of condis in a matter of seconds. Instead, I have always seen Clone Death as a “debuff” strategy, using the production of Cripple, Weakness and Vulnerability to gain at advantage and let your weapons win through. To me, that is hardly a “chessy” play style and something which is totally valid.

And that is why I use the on death traits in a direct damage build. Call me crazy, but the “debuff” effect buys me the time I need to use my Swords to grind out the win.

Quite honestly, if this is cheesy, there are many other far cheesier things that need to be addressed first but I am not going to go into that here.

Wasbunny.6531:

The Change: The Mesmer trait Deceptive Evasion will no longer create clones on dodge if there is more than two clones out.

Um, you made a mistake here.
The change is that you won’t make any more clones on dodge after you have THREE clones out, not two.
It’s so that you can’t spam aoe conditions while dodging. And since you can greatly increase your endurance regen via sigils and vigor, I can see why this became a problem.

You are dodging after all, why should you be able to throw out damage like that while being almost completely invulnerable while doing so?

I think this is a very mild, sensible change. It would be nice if there was a little give and take, such as increasing the range of these aoes a tad.
And we don’t know what other changes are coming along side it that might balance it out a little.

-
I think people are massively over reacting to this change, as bloody usual. Like it’s the end times or something.
All it does is curtails a kinda cheesy way to play. I don’t think it will have any noticeable effect otherwise.

I’m just happy I can use two sigils on my staff now.

Yoh.8469:

Wasbunny.6531:

The Change: The Mesmer trait Deceptive Evasion will no longer create clones on dodge if there is more than two clones out.

Um, you made a mistake here.
The change is that you won’t make any more clones on dodge after you have THREE clones out, not two.
It’s so that you can’t spam aoe conditions while dodging. And since you can greatly increase your endurance regen via sigils and vigor, I can see why this became a problem.

You are dodging after all, why should you be able to throw out damage like that while being almost completely invulnerable while doing so?

I think this is a very mild, sensible change. It would be nice if there was a little give and take, such as increasing the range of these aoes a tad.
And we don’t know what other changes are coming along side it that might balance it out a little.

-
I think people are massively over reacting to this change, as bloody usual. Like it’s the end times or something.
All it does is curtails a kinda cheesy way to play. I don’t think it will have any noticeable effect otherwise.

I’m just happy I can use two sigils on my staff now.

The biggest problem with this nerf is how the devs presented it in the livestream. Had they been more detailed and explained what you had, it might not have caused the uproar that it had.

And here here to the two sigils thing! GS sniping in pvp ought to be more interesting now.

No I do not think Clone death builds are over-powered.

I play mostly PvE keep this in mind while reading.

As a reult of this nerf the clones will not cause conditions any more on replacing, or triggering any other usefull way unless dropped in (PB)AOE, kittentering them doesn’t process the traits.

This change will be destroying nearly ALL viable (ahem..) mesmer condition builds left in PvE which were left after the previous nerf round(s), not only the PU condition or PU power build people seemingly did complain over, of whom I doubt they were playing PvE at the time they found they had problems with this mesmer build…

You will take away the possibility of getting a CHANCE to get 3 stacks of bleeding for a condition build. It happens on a 33% chance as it could also give weakness or vunerability, but these conditions do not do damage if they are not triggered. It will remove a source of cripple and AGAIN confusion, leaving the whole condition memser on his back just to be nerfinated (contamination of assasinated and nerfed) again and again into forgetfulness…. even though I must spend 45 of 70 trait points to get this combo up. I hope if this goes through as planned the developers will merge all these then useless traits and put them in the adept trait in chaos, else it is complete and utter dolyak-kitten.

1) When you combine them with PU’s 50-70% stealth uptime and buffs per tick on stealth, yes then they are easily abusable. But not the clones are responsible for this: Prismatic understanding is, due to the buffs while in stealth and the stealth uptime, making it so much harder to hit the real now extremely buffed mesmer.

2) The Developers talk about shatter builds: you will not change these shatter builds by making 3 clones available and then no longer creating them as the max illusions is reached anyways for ANY shatter. It will slow down the spam ONLY for the time it takes the FIRST clone to reach target on shatter, which is negligable often less then a second. Making this change for those reasons useless and a waist of your and our time.

3) This change will be an easy cap for phantasm players, now they can keep 3 phantasms up a lot easier, while having the ability to keep dodging even though they equipped decepetive evasion (i wouldn’t understand why they would be using deceptive evasion in the first place if they run a ful phantasm build…) promoting lazy gameplay.

The best solution:
Nerfing or removing (perma-)vigor or moving vigor to the signet of inspiration would be a nice way of handling a nerf forthe most extreme forms of clone spam… Nerfing PU would create a lot of room… I do not mind me visible as long as I can make clones.

In general I honestly believe:

- Buffing conditions so they can compete with DPS would be a gift to the community,
- Nerfing anything is viewed as a punishment, generally turning people off.
- Buffing bosses with more toughness would open up other builds and would give people a new challenge instead of leaving them with just another dissapontment.

The present developers do not seem to have a clue how bad memser conditions have been nerfed in PvE before, up to a point where mesmers who were able to stack 12-18 stacks of confusion for a usable period, which did NO DAMAGE untill procced through enemy actions happening once every 3-10 seconds in PvE were nerfed into a flimsy pink illusion of a fighter doing a fraction of the amount of stacks with such a nerfed duration it sometimes doesn’t proc at all just because your enemy doesn’t attack in time…

Thank you for your time anyways… and sorry for this CRY OF FRUSTRATION!

A condition mesmer, last of a dying breed in PvE…

I honestly doubt that DE was a huge source of damage due to the fact that clones have very little health and I imagine that they are being killed fairly often in pvp to make DE clone overriding to proc Death traits sort of minuscule. I mean how often does a Mesmer manage to get 3 clones up on a point for example, and then manage to successfully DE and override the clone as such that it actually manages to successfully proc the traits?

With the Sigils of Energy, I can see the chance for that increasing, but due to clones’ low health, and the nature of pvp, it isn’t a huge nerf since the clones only get overridden by DE when you have 3 clones up. I could be wrong though.

The only problem I have with clone death traits is that, from what I have seen, they are undodgable. Eg. when using whirwind/pistolwhip/blurred frenzy you will still get the condi’s applied to you.

I could be wrong though. I probably am.

So I went out to the Heart of the Mists and beat up some golems to test this out and see how much damage & conditions are dished out in an unrealistically ideal situation by the clone death traits and DE alone.

My test setup: 2 identical scepter/torch weapon sets each with 2 sigils of energy, auto-attack off. Got 3 clones out and dodged everytime it was possible on the unmoving, undodging golem. This is what I found:

• From 0-4 stacks of bleeds are maintained (keep in mind the scepter clones are making a small amount of bleeds too, so maybe 1-2 need to be deducted). Never lasting more than 5 seconds.

• Never more than 1 stack of confusion for 3 seconds for about half the time.

• Vulnerability was about the same as the bleeds 0-4 stacks, even slightly lower at times I think accounting for the extra bleeds the clones are applying on crit.

• Weakness about the same as confusion, up at most half the time.

Keep in mind, this is the most that would be inflicted upon the genius player standing motionless in PvP with no dodges, blocks or condi clears while a mesmer dodge rolls off of them exploding clones in their face. Almost any passive heal in the game will out-heal any of this.

So there you have it. I guess because choosing to be a condition Mesmer I need to scrape the barrel for every last stack of confusion or bleed I can get this meager loss seemed like a pretty huge thing. I suppose percentage wise it actually is compared to any other class’s condition builds.

I thought about doing a side by side comparison of other profession’s ‘on dodge’ traits but as I watched my ineffectual scepter clones wailing pathetically on that unfazed test golem it occurred to me…What am I doing? Am I really spending my time doing this? Am I really spending my time in a game theorizing, testing and debating game balance and mechanics, doing for free what others are paid to do by the game itself? <<<MINDWRACK>>>

Honestly, clone death would be fine if it didn’t apply conditions while dodging. I hate dodging when I see a mesmer dodge, or using the evade on Pistol Whip only to have the conditions applied beside the fact that I reacted the the situation, letting me know that my counter play meant nothing.

DuranArgith.1354:

On clone death conditions are fine. However, overwriting clones and counting as them dying is not.

Exactly this. Anyone who says the on-death traits are problematic, really, try a non-NE spec with them (I had 20/0/30/0/20 for fun for a while). They’re actually really really weak. Probably need a buff.

The issue comes when you can dodge to proc them.

Wasbunny.6531:

So I went out to the Heart of the Mists and beat up some golems to test this out and see how much damage & conditions are dished out in an unrealistically ideal situation by the clone death traits and DE alone.

My test setup: 2 identical scepter/torch weapon sets each with 2 sigils of energy, auto-attack off. Got 3 clones out and dodged everytime it was possible on the unmoving, undodging golem. This is what I found:

• From 0-4 stacks of bleeds are maintained (keep in mind the scepter clones are making a small amount of bleeds too, so maybe 1-2 need to be deducted). Never lasting more than 5 seconds.

• Never more than 1 stack of confusion for 3 seconds for about half the time.

• Vulnerability was about the same as the bleeds 0-4 stacks, even slightly lower at times I think accounting for the extra bleeds the clones are applying on crit.

• Weakness about the same as confusion, up at most half the time.

Keep in mind, this is the most that would be inflicted upon the genius player standing motionless in PvP with no dodges, blocks or condi clears while a mesmer dodge rolls off of them exploding clones in their face. Almost any passive heal in the game will out-heal any of this.

So there you have it. I guess because choosing to be a condition Mesmer I need to scrape the barrel for every last stack of confusion or bleed I can get this meager loss seemed like a pretty huge thing. I suppose percentage wise it actually is compared to any other class’s condition builds.

I thought about doing a side by side comparison of other profession’s ‘on dodge’ traits but as I watched my ineffectual scepter clones wailing pathetically on that unfazed test golem it occurred to me…What am I doing? Am I really spending my time doing this? Am I really spending my time in a game theorizing, testing and debating game balance and mechanics, doing for free what others are paid to do by the game itself? <<<MINDWRACK>>>

The problem with your test is that in pvp, clones have very little health, and they trigger the on death traits when they are killed by say, Engi Nades, Warrior’s Arcing Shot, Guardian’s Whirling Wrath, Necro Marks, Ele fields, Thief shortbow etc etc. So testing the Clone Death traits on a stationary golem will not yield the same results in pvp where active clone death is possible, and common.

Other than that interesting results with using Scepter auto.

Viking Jorun.5413:

Honestly, clone death would be fine if it didn’t apply conditions while dodging. I hate dodging when I see a mesmer dodge, or using the evade on Pistol Whip only to have the conditions applied beside the fact that I reacted the the situation, letting me know that my counter play meant nothing.

Of course, thief dodges are useless… They‘ll give you swiftness,might,bleeds,cripple guranteed at dodge for 20 trait points, with a bonus of 40% endurance regain

MESMER will get a clone, it will cause conditions if it`s the 4th one, replacing number 1, and if you placed it well, close to you target it will cause cripple,confusion,and a random 3rd condition,weakness,bleeds,vulnerability….. for a modest cost of 45 trait points

edit: I seem to have read wrong, you are talking about the death being undodgeable…. we yes it is , as is the thief caltrops thing. or warrior on dodge dmg.

Eh, I don’t consider that spec cheese at all. Mainly due to the fact that, even with Vigor/Deceptive Evasion helping out:

• The stacks applied via clone-death are small numbers, compared to the more
  “focused” condi application from sources such as Scepter and Staff autoattacks.
• One of the three condis applied via Debilitating Dissipation is always random
  and many times will proc Vulnerability, which doesn’t crank Condition DPS for
  squat. (Although, yes, you can use it to cover your damage condis)
• Hell, isn’t the entire point of the Mesmer profession to screw with their
  opponent’s head? There’s a Trait line called “Chaos” for a reason, one would
  logically assume that psychological warfare is part. of. the. JOB.

If they [the Devs] honestly felt there was a problem, would not modifying the proc
logic of the clone-death Traits be a more logical step than a blanket-slashdown of
Deceptive Evasion? It seems to myself, and others, that they truly attacked the wrong
part of the “problem” that they perceived.

Advent.6193:

If they [the Devs] honestly felt there was a problem, would not modifying the proc
logic of the clone-death Traits be a more logical step than a blanket-slashdown of
Deceptive Evasion? It seems to myself, and others, that they truly attacked the wrong
part of the “problem” that they perceived.

^ it does indeed seem like they are doing it wrong.

My $0.02. I swap through builds a lot with my Mesmer because I like the diversity. I never PU. The problem IS NOT DECEPTIVE EVASION!….. the problem is STEALTH SPAMMING WITH PRISMATIC UNDERSTANDING. I didn’t get to see the stream, but you guys are saying that one of the changes, an extreme nerf imo, is DE now does not proc when all 3 clone/phantasms are procced. Ok, that does not help on-death traits. If you wanted to nerf on-death clones, then you should have reprogrammed the on-death to be only on death like shattering- shattering does not apply cripple,condi,confus only sshatter (edit is here, abbreviating shatter to its first 4 letters gets it replaced) effect. Nerfing DE makes PU, Phantasm (yes, phantasm), pure condition, full support, hybrid condi/support and other builds (which I am testing out and don’t want to report yet) get a punch in the face. I main this class. I win with this class. In spvp and wvw I never get killed or run from a fight unless the opposing side severely outnumbers my side, and pve/dungeons I use support which requires DE to proc clone replacement. So this is seriously wrong =(. Again, I could be off because I did not watch the stream but you know.

Develper response on another thread:

Thanks for the feedback guys, there were some good points brought up here. This is why we wanted to discuss these future changes so that we had time to adjust to your feedback.

We’ll be discussing this change more internally. Most likely we will make some adjustments or look at other options such as replacing clones not triggering Debilitating Dissipation so it does not impact mesmer play as much which wasn’t our intent.

Saw this coming down the road.
We need to get ahead of this one or we risk just another pointless nerf to an already struggling trait, build and playstyle. Please, before making assumptions like ‘the clone death traits are OP, so just adjust them’ take a few minutes to do a simple test to isolate how much damage the Dissipation traits account for when coupled with DE.

I’m a little surprised I even need to bring this up but when considering any adjustment:

One needs to determine how much something is before stating it’s too much.

You’ll find I did one such test above and the extremely meager results might surprise some that are thinking these traits, combined with DE are causing any balancing issues whatsoever.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

~snip~
We’ll be discussing this change more internally. Most likely we will make some adjustments or look at other options such as replacing clones not triggering Debilitating Dissipation so it does not impact mesmer play as much which wasn’t our intent.

This sentence should terrify any remaining Condition Mesmers.

Just to see how devastating this would be on only one of our few semi-direct Condition applying abilities (scepter auto-attack coupled with ‘on clone death’ traits) I did some tests in the Heart of the Mists. This is apparently what the developers are worried is unbalancing the game. I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves.

Stationary Target Test (PvE):
Single stationary target golem (to represent PvE stationary target) auto-attacking with scepter skill 1 and all three clone death traits (45 point investment) taken.

Results:

• Weakness 50% up-time
• 1 stack of confusion 100% up-time
• Cripple 100% up-time
• 3 stacks of Vulnerability 50% up-time
• 3-6 stacks of Bleed 100% up-time

Moving Target Test (PvP):
Single moving target golem (to represent slow moving PvP target) auto-attacking with scepter skill 1 and all three clone death traits (45 point investment) taken.

Results:

• 0-3 stacks of Bleed 100% up-time
• Occasional spikes similar to the stationary results when the target gets crippled, but the duration/stacks of the conditions were reduced. This spike would trigger roughly once every 20 seconds only when the target was snared by cripple and only if near the clone being destroyed.

Debilitating Dissipation Test:
Debilitating Dissipation trait removed, other two ‘clone death’ traits still active.

Stationary Results (PvE):

• 1 stack of confusion 100% up-time
• Cripple 100% up-time
• 0-4 stacks of Bleed 100% up-time

Moving Results (PvP):

• 0-3 stacks of Bleed
• Occasional spikes similar to the stationary results when the target gets crippled, but the duration/stacks of the conditions were reduced. This spike would trigger roughly once every 20 seconds only when the target was snared by cripple and only if near the clone being destroyed.

Wasbunny.6531:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

~snip~
We’ll be discussing this change more internally. Most likely we will make some adjustments or look at other options such as replacing clones not triggering Debilitating Dissipation so it does not impact mesmer play as much which wasn’t our intent.

This sentence should terrify any remaining Condition Mesmers.

Just to see how devastating this would be on only one of our few semi-direct Condition applying abilities (scepter auto-attack coupled with ‘on clone death’ traits) I did some tests in the Heart of the Mists. This is apparently what the developers are worried is unbalancing the game. I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves.

Stationary Target Test (PvE):
Single stationary target golem (to represent PvE stationary target) auto-attacking with scepter skill 1 and all three clone death traits (45 point investment) taken.

Results:

• Weakness 50% up-time
• 1 stack of confusion 100% up-time
• Cripple 100% up-time
• 3 stacks of Vulnerability 50% up-time
• 3-6 stacks of Bleed 100% up-time

Moving Target Test (PvP):
Single moving target golem (to represent slow moving PvP target) auto-attacking with scepter skill 1 and all three clone death traits (45 point investment) taken.

Results:

• 0-3 stacks of Bleed 100% up-time
• Occasional spikes similar to the stationary results when the target gets crippled, but the duration/stacks of the conditions were reduced. This spike would trigger roughly once every 20 seconds only when the target was snared by cripple and only if near the clone being destroyed.

Debilitating Dissipation Test:
Debilitating Dissipation trait removed, other two ‘clone death’ traits still active.

Stationary Results (PvE):

• 1 stack of confusion 100% up-time
• Cripple 100% up-time
• 0-4 stacks of Bleed 100% up-time

Moving Results (PvP):

• 0-3 stacks of Bleed
• Occasional spikes similar to the stationary results when the target gets crippled, but the duration/stacks of the conditions were reduced. This spike would trigger roughly once every 20 seconds only when the target was snared by cripple and only if near the clone being destroyed.

It’s a shame these things should change in PvE… It thins out the options quite a bit.

Bye PvE condi builds. it is nice for all those non-mesmer PvP-ers, and in PvE i got NOTHING

Wasbunny.6531:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

~snip~
We’ll be discussing this change more internally. Most likely we will make some adjustments or look at other options such as replacing clones not triggering Debilitating Dissipation so it does not impact mesmer play as much which wasn’t our intent.

This sentence should terrify any remaining Condition Mesmers.

If the intent was to nerf the on death traits (specifically debilitating dissipation it appears) via the originally proposed DE nerf announced on the live stream, the fact they have backed off on that in favor of this solution is much better.

I interpreted Roy’s response to mean “replacing clones (via DE) not triggering …”, not necessarily any other skill which creates a clone. If in fact he meant any skill that creates a clone, we’re in trouble. So, clarification on this would be appreciated.

Also I think everyone’s question revolves around why the devs feel the need to nerf clone on death in the first place. I would really appreciate a response to why they think it is so apparently overpowered. Given your analysis there it seems pretty clear it’s only mildly OP when fighting afk’ers.

Let’s play Devil’s advocate, how about punishment for overwriting clones. interrupt and dazed when you cast clones while you have 3 up?

Before we all start asking for a nerf to any of the Mesmer ‘on-dodge’ traits (DE + clone death) by making them uniquely blockable or whatever we must find out if they are really overpowered in the first place.

You need to find out how much something is before stating it’s too much.
Sorry to sound like a broken record, I’m really more reminding the devs than anyone else.

So I did a simple side by side comparison between Mesmer & Thief using only ‘on-dodge’ traits (Deceptive Evasion & Caltrops) and only dodging to kill a moving target golem.

Mesmer: About 3-5 stacks of bleed 100% up-time (90% from auto-attacking clones). Very rarely a few seconds of Cripple,Vulnerability or Weakness.

Thief : 4 stacks of bleed 100% up-time. 45+ seconds of cripple.
also 2-4 stacks of might gained as well as swiftness and endurance regeneration

If anyone can seriously look at those two examples and arrive at the conclusion that the Mesmer is in need of having their ‘on-dodge’ traits nerfed in any way for the sake of balance…then I just don’t know what else to say.

Personally I think DE’s greatest strength is Staff clones.
Staff clones can deal a considerable amount of damage if left to their own devices, thou I would not go so far at to call them OP, but closer to be on par with condition builds from other professions. Not quite thou.
The addition of on clone death conditions help, but even still.

Mesmers have a wide swath of condition that they can apply, but it’s the short duration that kills it. Maybe if the base condition duration for a lot of the auto attacks were improved slightly, people wouldn’t have such a problem with it being so weak by comparison.

If a bulk of your condition damage is coming via your clones, then the counter play to that is to destroy the clones. So it could afford to be quite a bit stronger since it is much more tentative then conditions from other professions.

The On-Death traits for clones are not over powered and should not be changed.

That is all.

Natsu Dragneel.1625:

The On-Death traits for clones are not over powered and should not be changed.

That is all.

Exactly. The problem stems from how DE works. Or rather, how DE as a whole is problematic, whether you consider it overpowered or not.