Guild Wars 2

I rarely frequent the forums to make a post because of the general negativity and the misinterpretation of what I write…but if you look at my forum history I try my best to present a case or a thought worth examining for the better of our game…

So let’s be honest IC, (Illusionist Celerity) has been a crutch for far too long… It has been an all or nothing trait. Mesmer’s on every level new or vet have made this a staple to their build because it was placed at 5 Illusions not at our behest but at the direction of the development team. Most Mesmer’s since beta/head start also knew that one day it would be changed.

…Well today it has…

Every last cool down attributed to clone/phantasm generation has been impacted… from direct 1-5 skills all the way into our utilities…and after seeing this so called “change” I asked myself… So isn’t about time we rethink how Illusions work in regards to the Cool Downs? If these are truly “Hex’s” shouldn’t the react based on the situation the Mesmer is in? X+ unique conditions spawn Ill. Disenchanter, X% amount damage spawn Ill. Defender… Phantasms should react based on the conditions of the battle field but… I digress…and I’m sure many won’t like the idea but it’s the creativity of the Dev team that I am after…

So what is my point?

First… reading carefully the all the patch notes from all professions there is a push to slow the pvp meta down on 2 fronts mobility and normalizing/standardizing how damage is dealt.

There is an unknown “delta” between professions on mobility and how damage is dealt that you are seeking to balance without sacrificing the essence of what makes the professions unique.

This is all fine and acceptable to me as a player who enjoys my profession and have enjoyed creating, adopting builds from other players and reinventing my beloved Mesmer through testing and dying over and over again :-) that was and is My FUN…and through whatever changes you have made to our Mesmer… I stuck to it and got to a skill level that I can be proud of… but I and maybe many others feel that we are being manipulated.

Manipulated into a “meta” that will pan itself out as we continue playing… but ask yourself will we continue just playing and that will be the inspiration that will drive continued innovation and diversity of our profession because it will “pan-out”?

Mesmer’s have been fortunate to have the most versatile profession in game hands down. Look at all the creativity the Mesmer community has created since release in turn you have taken the time to sticky them at the top of our forum as a testament to that versatility…

As developers doesn’t that inspire you?

Then, please why….why? Did you carry this change the way you did? So this was the optimal method you all chose that will continue to inspire our community? Why would you jeopardize that vision of Versatility? It would have been far easier to completely remove IC (Illusionist Celerity) and re-balanced all clone/phantasm CD’s (Cool Downs) across the board and create a new trait.

That would have given us far more incentive to initiate intense debate and discussion that would further promote TRUE build DIVERSITY.

Lastly…also TL;DR… A challenge.To the developers that work on our beloved Mesmer and and hopefully encouragement to fellow Mesmer players…. A-NET stay true to yourselves and make this right… we expected a lot more… not this…not this at all.

great post.

fifteen characters/

You may be pontificating and self-pitying in this post, but we all feel that way today.

also they should change back vengeful images. making a limit of 5(s) on it completely destroyed my favorite build…. Retaliation was my greatest damage dealer and now I cant kill anything – I recently spent ALL of my gold to spec for this build THIS WEEK!! And now its all useless…. Uuuugh so frustrating. Can we like, take a poll or something?? To see who wants things changed back? Or we could go on strike!

Pontificating! Yes of course it’s a habit I can’t break! Self pitying, I respectfully disagree. This post has nothing to do with trodding the Mesmer profession in the mud because I believe it’s in an unplayable sorry state.

I have already theorycrafted my way out of this but unfortunately it still includes (IC). Meaning if there intent is to change the “meta” our ability to still access (IC) is beyond reasoning and also why I think there needs to be a better solution than what they have given us…

I think it’s a bit dramatic to say that Mesmers are in an unplayable sorry state (which I’m not sure if you were actually saying that or affirming this post was not about that). But, both of the builds I run in PVP and PVE were not affected by anything they changed. One in fact, was made stronger with the change to Prismatic Understanding. The other can now perhaps even make use of the buff to interruptions and benefits from the izerker fix.

I get your point, but I don’t think ANET is trying to force you into anything. Honestly, IC was in a relatively low slot for the power it gave. Isn’t this just another chance to diversify the builds and express more versatility by creating new ones with the other traits they changed? I guess I don’t see how they “jeopardized that vision of versatility” when they simply are allowing us to create new builds with these new changes.

Not trying to rant, just saying there are a lot of things you can still do with a Mesmer, even if you have to change up your play-style slightly!

Please don’t read out of context… I was making a point that I NEVER stated that Mesmer is in a “unplayable sorry state” Nikked, implied that I was, based on an incorrect interpretation of what I wrote…Similar to what you just did… Mesmer is still very playable in so many scenarios and game modes I just want ANET to do right but making a change that continues to build on our Versatility…

This change does not solve Illusion CD’s or an effective way to balance them if at all. Also what ever consideration that went into this implementation was not well thought out. I just made this post to call that out…

kyro.3487:

I think it’s a bit dramatic to say that Mesmers are in an unplayable sorry state (which I’m not sure if you were actually saying that or affirming this post was not about that). But, both of the builds I run in PVP and PVE were not affected by anything they changed. One in fact, was made stronger with the change to Prismatic Understanding. The other can now perhaps even make use of the buff to interruptions and benefits from the izerker fix.

I get your point, but I don’t think ANET is trying to force you into anything. Honestly, IC was in a relatively low slot for the power it gave. Isn’t this just another chance to diversify the builds and express more versatility by creating new ones with the other traits they changed? I guess I don’t see how they “jeopardized that vision of versatility” when they simply are allowing us to create new builds with these new changes.

That’s stupid. If you actually think prismatic understanding is buffered a lot it just goes to show that you didn’t test different builds before the patch. Making random boon (out of 3) proc twice as often doesn’t change the core play style of PU build much. It’s a slightly better troll build than before, but your dps output is still abysmal compared to phantasm build or shatter build.

I get your point, but I don’t think ANET is trying to force you into anything. Honestly, IC was in a relatively low slot for the power it gave. Isn’t this just another chance to diversify the builds and express more versatility by creating new ones with the other traits they changed? I guess I don’t see how they “jeopardized that vision of versatility” when they simply are allowing us to create new builds with these new changes.

Sounds to me like you’ve never actually tried to test the different builds before the patch. All the patch did was to make some of the old builds less viable by giving a lot skills a higher cooldown time.

Sorry, revelations, I didn’t mean to misinterpret which is why I put what I did in the parenthesis. I understand your frustrations, I was just trying to look for some positives in it.

Squallas, well one, obviously a build with PU is not a DPS build and it does, in fact, increase the uptime of protection. I have tested it out before and after, as have the other posters on this forum in other topics such as this one.

And yes, I have played shatter, phantasm, mantra, bunker, and condition builds for Mesmer. I mean I have played tonight with both of the builds that I normally use for PVP and PVE and they work better than they did before, that’s just how it is. It can sound to you however you want it to but the fact is I have played Mesmer since last year and this honestly, for my play style, doesn’t feel much different (better if anything with some of the things I mentioned before). My point was there are viable builds still and not all is lost…

No problem, I think all true Mesmer fans have had the wind knocked out of them today but at the same time highly optimistic we’ll continue to feeding our enemies “Stakes” all day everyday :p

Novamatrix.2569:

also they should change back vengeful images. making a limit of 5(s) on it completely destroyed my favorite build…. Retaliation was my greatest damage dealer and now I cant kill anything – I recently spent ALL of my gold to spec for this build THIS WEEK!! And now its all useless…. Uuuugh so frustrating. Can we like, take a poll or something?? To see who wants things changed back? Or we could go on strike!

the golden question: why on earth did you spend all your gold for one build if you know a big balance patch is coming. let me guess: new to mmos? if not, then…

blutstein.2468:

the golden question: why on earth did you spend all your gold for one build if you know a big balance patch is coming. let me guess: new to mmos? if not, then…

maybe because they trusted anet words?
*read my sig 1st line….(you can find an extended version somewhere that tells how anets says they believe in SMALL tweaks and not nerfs…yeah….they dared to say that)

seems nowaday even electronic arts is more trustworthy.

Revelations.3154:

There is an unknown “delta” between professions on mobility and how damage is dealt that you are seeking to balance without sacrificing the essence of what makes the professions unique.

With statements such as these, please keep the following in mind:

In a RPG-based combat system, assuming you want the classes to be unique in more than a graphical fashion, it is impossible to balance small-scale encounters with less players than the # of classes available. And even that is assuming you force a 1-of-each-class.

In other words, the smallest really balanceable tPvP format would be 8v8, with an enforced class-setup.

And yes, not joking.
It’s trying to do the impossible. You can improve the balance, yes. But the very fact that classes are not carbon-copies of each other prevents small-scale balance from being achievable unless the sides are exactly mirrored, and all classes are present.

In other words, while they are certainly trying to balance damage potential and mobility, it is a good thing they are trying to keep the uniqueness of classes (most of the time) because in the end, it’s not possible to achieve the former, without giving up the latter entirely.

This was the crux of WoW arena, too. And it had a rather disturbing effect on WoW’s class design if you look at the entire TBC → Now timeline. Even the devs at some point commented that the small size is inherently problematic and especially 2v2 was a bad idea (originally it was supposed to be 3v3 + 4v4 + 5v5).
I really really hope that ANet doesn’t overly focus on tPvP as far as long-term class design goes. Since it cannot be properly balanced, it’s not “worth” ruining the classes over it.

kyro.3487:

But, both of the builds I run in PVP and PVE were not affected by anything they changed.
…

I get your point, but I don’t think ANET is trying to force you into anything.

This is exactly it. Virtually all builds were nerfed except a few that stayed the same – and those few were pretty strong to begin with.

Now do you see why it feels like we’re all being forced into the same pigeonhole?

@ Carighan, Another great point more so for other professions that are not so lucky. Even with all the buffs and “Love” the Warrior forums are still burning with rage because some of them feel that they are being pushed into burst when they have wanted sustained it seems they do not want to be pushed into the same category as thieves. The same way were are trying to maintain all of our Versatility instead of being crammed into a smaller build set other profession want to expand their versatility :-/

True. Although I think much of the Warrior rage is because they think the new dungeon is terribly difficult for them (it’s elements seem specifically designed to be extra difficult with zerker warrior groups, an indirect “fix” I am liking a lot!). :P