Guild Wars 2

Here’s the latest hit:

Chaos Chaotic Dampening: Reduced the recharge reduction percent of staff skills per pulse of chaos armor from 5% to 2%.

Domination Power Block: Reduced the damage on interrupt by 17%.

Soon enough we’ll be back to irrelavance. I could just puke on my keyboard.

I don’t know how no one saw this coming. It’s almost too easy having around 5-10s of chaos armor if you combo properly. You’ve got the 5seconds from Staff 4 and the ethereal field from Chaos Storm or the 2 Glamour skills which you can always blast or leap to get another 5 or 3 seconds of chaos armor. Pretty reasonable to me. Thats around 40-50% of recharge reduction right there. Personally, I would have preferred just raising the interval instead of reducing %

I’m glad I didn’t preorder the expansion yet.

I think the conditional recharge traits are a no-go in the long run. They’re cool conceptually but the line between OP and irrelevant is very, very thin.

It’s much easier to balance a static -20% modifier.

NetKrris.7180:

I don’t know how no one saw this coming. It’s almost too easy having around 5-10s of chaos armor if you combo properly. You’ve got the 5seconds from Staff 4 and the ethereal field from Chaos Storm or the 2 Glamour skills which you can always blast or leap to get another 5 or 3 seconds of chaos armor. Pretty reasonable to me. Thats around 40-50% of recharge reduction right there.

Because it’s Risk versus Reward? Given time, the Mesmer’s behavior of leaping through their Ethereal Fields, using their Phase Retreat/Sword Leap/Whatever would have been a known potential tactic of a Mesmer, and good players would have developed a counter for it.

Guardian: "Okay, this mesmer is going to Phase Retreat in his Chaos Storm to get Chaos Armor second time, He’s already used the Staff 4, One of his escapes will be on cooldown. " Ring of Warding after Phase Retreat, Potentially trapped Mesmer, or forced to use Blink.

thetarot.8246:

Guardian: "Okay, this mesmer is going to Phase Retreat in his Chaos Storm to get Chaos Armor second time, He’s already used the Staff 4, One of his escapes will be on cooldown. " Ring of Warding after Phase Retreat, Potentially trapped Mesmer, or forced to use Blink.

Or more realistically:

“Guardian… CHOP!!!!”

This needed to happen. 8 second cd chaos storms and 8k power blocks are broken lol. We are still op so stop complaining. There are still many more things that need to be nerfed atm.

I made an observation after patch that, yes, a lot of our trait synergies can make us over powered, but the damage I was taking was downing me.
Please, ANet. If you plan to nerf traits and skills that allow us to properly deliver damage, give us some more survivability to offset it so we can be a viable again.

Sankofa Jimiyu.1567:

I made an observation after patch that, yes, a lot of our trait synergies can make us over powered, but the damage I was taking was downing me.
Please, ANet. If you plan to nerf traits and skills that allow us to properly deliver damage, give us some more survivability to offset it so we can be a viable again.

We have plenty of survival. Have you tried PU yet? It makes mesmers godmode along with being able to 100-0 almost anything in 1 second

Just give us back our flat +20% recharge for staff instead, please.

Velimere.7685:

Just give us back our flat +20% recharge for staff instead, please.

I would say this or make it 3% every second.

Velimere.7685:

Just give us back our flat +20% recharge for staff instead, please.

+1

I am not sure it was necessary. Sure had this been put in a week ago then it would have been OP, but we live in a different world now. I dont think reducing the % to the point they have done was the way to go here. Imo it was fun keeping the uptime of the CA going as much as poss and meant i was using my staff more than I had been – if the staff had been the mesmers main source of damage then yes it should have been reduced – but that isnt the case. I think they need to re adjust it – to maybe 4%. The 17% on power block was fair enough, thats always been a great skill and needed to be fine tuned when different builds tested with it.

thetarot.8246:

Because it’s Risk versus Reward?

The risk being that you had to sit in Chaos Armor while also having Protection up, I guess? Sounds rather risky to me, I mean, you didn’t have Stability or Resistance, so open! :o
I mean I think 2% is too low, but OTOH Torch is 1,5%. Not sure I see those two being different as working out well. Should probably both be 2,5% or something.

Ithilwen.1529:

I wish you’d keep it down, it doesn’t make you “Cool” to advocate against your class. It makes you elitist and something else it’d prob be against the TOS to say.

Funny how people only take an issue with biased balance discussions when it’s their class to get nerfed. It’s a-ok if we all yell how overpowered those lame Warriors are with their autowin mode, but hell if someone wants to say that Mesmers might need a nerf.

To be fair, I tried running power block with a zerker amulet and traveler runes, and I was getting AoE 4K halting strike/powerblock procs in the middle of a team fight with mantra of distraction. To powerful, but at least you need to interrupt to make it happen. There are many things about the mesmer buff that need to be shaved. I’m fine with the core ways in which the mesmer was buffed in terms of the funcitonality of traits/skills, but the numbers on them are a bit too strong at the moment.

The staff trait nerf seemed a little odd to me though, I guess too many chaos storms?

tl;dr The ideas and fucntion of the mesmer traits/skills right now are balanced, but the numbers need to be shaved down for them to be truly balanced.

I thought the point of staff cooldown proccing only with chaos armor was the tradeoff for having a potentially larger % cooldown (>20%) with staff. Making it 2%/s cooldown for 10 seconds of chaos armor (staff 4 and staff 5 combo leap) is no different from having a flat 20% cooldown on staff like it was before specializations, except having to spam chaos armor after using chaos storm to take advantage of the cooldown. 5% per pulse was a little too good sure, why not 2.5%?

Josh Davis.6015:

Wanted to clear something up:

Power Block had its damage unintentionally increased with the 6/23 release. The reduction wasn’t a “nerf” – it was a bug fix. It still does the same damage it did before the 6/23 release.

As for Maimed, we wanted to address it before the build went out but we ran out of time. I agree that it would have been better to have adjusted it before you guys got your hands on the new build, but there just wasn’t time. Sorry about this.

For staff cd trait – conditional recharge is something new we’re trying out. The high cd reduction uptime that we were seeing right out of the gate wasn’t something we felt comfortable with. If it feels really weak after this we’ll come back to it and look at it again.

Anyways, as Peters said, we’re keeping a really close eye on everything right now and things will definitely continue to shift as we discover and evaluate how things take shape across the game.

Hope that addresses a few of your questions.

Night!

How bout Confusing Combatants?

Josh Davis.6015:

As for Maimed, we wanted to address it before the build went out but we ran out of time. I agree that it would have been better to have adjusted it before you guys got your hands on the new build, but there just wasn’t time. Sorry about this.

We’re not irritated about it coming after the build, we’re irritated about it happening at all. It was uncalled for nerf, and absolutely should be reverted. Maim post-nerf with IP is weaker than Maim prior to this trait revamp, and that’s absurd.

Josh Davis.6015:

For staff cd trait – conditional recharge is something new we’re trying out. The high cd reduction uptime that we were seeing right out of the gate wasn’t something we felt comfortable with. If it feels really weak after this we’ll come back to it and look at it again.

I’ll just copy and paste a quick bit of math and reasoning I did in another thread:

The main problem, as I’ve already stated, with the current 2% is that the normal rotation of chaos storm -> phase retreat -> chaos armor will provide a total of 20% cooldown reduction on chaos storm, and 10% on chaos armor.

This is objectively worse than the flat 20% trait. Additionally, it locks you into a predictable rotation if you want to gain that bonus.

Yes, you could jump through hoops and take other ethereal fields, swap to sword for more leap finishers to sustain chaos armor longer, or have a friend blast the fields for you…but that’s an absurd amount of effort to just match what the old trait gave you.

A more balanced point would probably 3%. The normal rotation would give 30% cdr to chaos storm, 15% to chaos armor, and allow you to potentially boost it further by jumping through those hoops. That 10% bonus on chaos storm is compensatory for the predictable rotation you’re forced to do in order to obtain it.

Nerfs were warranted.

Josh Davis.6015:

Wanted to clear something up:

Power Block had its damage unintentionally increased with the 6/23 release. The reduction wasn’t a “nerf” – it was a bug fix. It still does the same damage it did before the 6/23 release.

As for Maimed, we wanted to address it before the build went out but we ran out of time. I agree that it would have been better to have adjusted it before you guys got your hands on the new build, but there just wasn’t time. Sorry about this.

For staff cd trait – conditional recharge is something new we’re trying out. The high cd reduction uptime that we were seeing right out of the gate wasn’t something we felt comfortable with. If it feels really weak after this we’ll come back to it and look at it again.

Anyways, as Peters said, we’re keeping a really close eye on everything right now and things will definitely continue to shift as we discover and evaluate how things take shape across the game.

Hope that addresses a few of your questions.

Night!

Anet, any idea why you give Mesmer Perma Stealth in the first place?

100% stealth duration increase + pulsing boons every second is way too much. It is even worse than thief because they can set up a 15k burst right beside you and you can’t see it coming.

Honestly, instead of kittening people up later with all the nerf, how about do some real testing before you release something. Yknow these guys are greedy folks that don’t care about balance a single bit. If you take away something from them after you given them something first, they’d refuse to buy your expansion! Totally bad move!

They’ll probably never mention Confusing Combatants again.

Mind you, yes, the combination of “You and Illusions proc bleed on crit” and “You and illusions proc confusion on crit” felt really strong. But also really awesome. And honestly, I’d rather proc confusion than bleed, bleed is such a… a pleb condition! :P

As for the CD reduction traits, if you’re looking for input, I’d add this:
Part of the problem is that Protection on Chaos Armor is really strong. Maybe reduce the protection gained in duration, and in return increase CD reduction to 3%-4%? If that’s still not enough, restore 5% reduction but make it only weight Chaos Armor towards applying more useful boons (read: Protection, say, give it twice the chance) instead of giving protection flat out.

Josh Davis.6015:

Wanted to clear something up:
…
As for Maimed, we wanted to address it before the build went out but we ran out of time. I agree that it would have been better to have adjusted it before you guys got your hands on the new build, but there just wasn’t time. Sorry about this.
…
Hope that addresses a few of your questions.

Night!

Except you didn’t address anything in reference to Maim and you still haven’t addressed anything in reference to Maim after your post. I disagree with you that it needs to be adjusted at all and would absolutely love some reasoning as to why it was necessary on both a micro and macro balancing level from a dev stand point.

And just to be clear: by macro, I mean, how is this balance justified in reference to other classes.

Josh Davis.6015:

Wanted to clear something up:

Power Block had its damage unintentionally increased with the 6/23 release. The reduction wasn’t a “nerf” – it was a bug fix. It still does the same damage it did before the 6/23 release.

As for Maimed, we wanted to address it before the build went out but we ran out of time. I agree that it would have been better to have adjusted it before you guys got your hands on the new build, but there just wasn’t time. Sorry about this.

For staff cd trait – conditional recharge is something new we’re trying out. The high cd reduction uptime that we were seeing right out of the gate wasn’t something we felt comfortable with. If it feels really weak after this we’ll come back to it and look at it again.

Anyways, as Peters said, we’re keeping a really close eye on everything right now and things will definitely continue to shift as we discover and evaluate how things take shape across the game.

Hope that addresses a few of your questions.

Night!

The real question here is where do you get those knee jerk reactions to nerf mesmer? Traits or skills that have never been tested, you change or nerf or fix immediately. But with other classes stuff that are currently in game?
I never see you guys see that with Consume Plasma (which is undoubtedly OP, ask anyone)

For the bug fixes too, You guys fix Backstab bug ASAP when a lot of the thieves were crying, but how about our bugs that take ages to fix?

Dude no offense, it is just frustrating.

Glad and weird to see a red post in this thread, feels like forever, but basically what Fay said. MtD was never meta pre-patch and was now buffed to the major leagues by lowering its tier to offer more to condi only to be shot down again to mediocre level while many other condition builds have higher spikes of ticks into the five-digit range… well, doesn’t feel like it was necessary.

If you weren’t amazing with Halting Strike pre changes, +17% damage wasn’t going to do anything for you now. Now that it’s back to normal it’ll be just like wrecking face before, which was easy enough to do.

Though we got a ton of ways to boost our damage now to further trick it out :D

Nothing to QQ about here. Move along. (The staff thing aside, QQ away if you use a staff).

Carighan.6758:

They’ll probably never mention Confusing Combatants again.

Mind you, yes, the combination of “You and Illusions proc bleed on crit” and “You and illusions proc confusion on crit” felt really strong. But also really awesome. And honestly, I’d rather proc confusion than bleed, bleed is such a… a pleb condition! :P

Just to be clear, there was a 33% chancing of causing confusion only IF you got lucky enough to crit in the first place. That’s two hoops to jump through before you get the confusion proc.

Josh Davis.6015:

Wanted to clear something up:

Power Block had its damage unintentionally increased with the 6/23 release. The reduction wasn’t a “nerf” – it was a bug fix. It still does the same damage it did before the 6/23 release.

As for Maimed, we wanted to address it before the build went out but we ran out of time. I agree that it would have been better to have adjusted it before you guys got your hands on the new build, but there just wasn’t time. Sorry about this.

For staff cd trait – conditional recharge is something new we’re trying out. The high cd reduction uptime that we were seeing right out of the gate wasn’t something we felt comfortable with. If it feels really weak after this we’ll come back to it and look at it again.

Anyways, as Peters said, we’re keeping a really close eye on everything right now and things will definitely continue to shift as we discover and evaluate how things take shape across the game.

Hope that addresses a few of your questions.

Night!

thanks for the reply Josh, clears some concerns up. Any chance you can give us a sneak towards bugfixes on traits not working as intended which would benefit us, instead of lower our damage down? (Duelist’s Discipline, Malicious Sorcery come to mind)

Josh Davis.6015:

Hope that addresses a few of your questions.

Night!

Thanks for the update – I actually think you’re focusing on particularly troublesome traits and skills which is great! I hope you get a chance to review them and make sure they’re still useful… I haven’t had a chance to test much yet.

I’d also suggest when it comes to stealth bits, changing the torch trait so it isn’t a positive feedback loop (stealth = even more stealth etc.) Might be worth trying before taking an axe to PU… Not sure if that’s your plan, but just in case!

Toxsa.2701:

Anet, any idea why you give Mesmer Perma Stealth in the first place?

100% stealth duration increase + pulsing boons every second is way too much. It is even worse than thief because they can set up a 15k burst right beside you and you can’t see it coming.

Honestly, instead of kittening people up later with all the nerf, how about do some real testing before you release something. Yknow these guys are greedy folks that don’t care about balance a single bit. If you take away something from them after you given them something first, they’d refuse to buy your expansion! Totally bad move!

I don’t know if this post is supporting us or calling for more nerfs. Please go back to the Ranger forums and stop posting all these nerf this/nerf that posts on the mesmer forums. I can’t speak for other classes but mesmers as a whole police ourselves and know when something is out of whack and deservedly need to be adjusted.

And just for the record, I don’t see anything majorly bad about the Power Block nerf. I also didn’t see anything too bad with the Staff nerf except you over-nerfed it when 3% would have been more balanced (basic math proves this). The biggest issue is the maim nerf, because it simply reinforces the trend that has happened with Mesmers since the game came out.

Rinse wash repeat with the devs:

• Quick to “fix bugs” that lessen Mesmer effectiveness.
• Quick to fix bugs on other classes that boost their effectiveness.
• Slow to fix our bugs.
• Quick to nerf our traits/skills.
• Slow to nerf traits/skills of other classes. See Healing Signet & Turrets.

Leodon.1564:

Toxsa.2701:

Anet, any idea why you give Mesmer Perma Stealth in the first place?

100% stealth duration increase + pulsing boons every second is way too much. It is even worse than thief because they can set up a 15k burst right beside you and you can’t see it coming.

Honestly, instead of kittening people up later with all the nerf, how about do some real testing before you release something. Yknow these guys are greedy folks that don’t care about balance a single bit. If you take away something from them after you given them something first, they’d refuse to buy your expansion! Totally bad move!

I don’t know if this post is supporting us or calling for more nerfs. Please go back to the Ranger forums and stop posting all these nerf this/nerf that posts on the mesmer forums. I can’t speak for other classes but mesmers as a whole police ourselves and know when something is out of whack and deservedly need to be adjusted.

Hey! I play all classes and have them lv80, and pvp 150 games a long time ago!
I have the right to care about Mesmer! I post in all threads cuz I play all of them.

Anyway, any sane person can tell 40 secs of stealth is abit out of control.

StickerHappy.8052:

The real question here is where do you get those knee jerk reactions to nerf mesmer? Traits or skills that have never been tested, you change or nerf or fix immediately. But with other classes stuff that are currently in game?
I never see you guys see that with Consume Plasma (which is undoubtedly OP, ask anyone)

For the bug fixes too, You guys fix Backstab bug ASAP when a lot of the thieves were crying, but how about our bugs that take ages to fix?

Dude no offense, it is just frustrating.

i feel the same way throughout the YEARS. is that one guy w/ the pony tail and bangs to be blamed for (in the gw2 video where he takes care ofthe mesmers and necros)? who is doing this to us!?!? arrrrrrgh makes me angry hulk smash. I seriously am bothered.

This is beyond ridiculous imo. PU is the single one trait the majority (or so it feels) believes being too strong. Power Shatter with PU is simply insane. The devs keep touching stuff on the wrong place. Okay, Power Block was a bug, I get that. But nerfing MtD and Chaotic Dampening (mind you the cool down reduction was nerfed by 60% [reduced the cool down reduction bonus of Chaos Storm from 1.75s/s to 0.7s/s]) was absurd, the way it happened.

As Fay pointed out: The staff trait is now worse than before the patch regarding the cool down reduction and in the current state there is no real reason for me to use that trait any more for some rare protection. Back to GS then.

Also, no mentioning on why Confusing Combatants was touched.

Please look at the broken PU trait and leave the actual fun and active stuff as it was.

Josh Davis.6015:

For staff cd trait – conditional recharge is something new we’re trying out. The high cd reduction uptime that we were seeing right out of the gate wasn’t something we felt comfortable with. If it feels really weak after this we’ll come back to it and look at it again.

How about you wait more than a day before before making knee-jerk decisions? Would it really hurt to wait 1 week and see if other classes come up with counters?

Josh Davis.6015:

For staff cd trait – conditional recharge is something new we’re trying out. The high cd reduction uptime that we were seeing right out of the gate wasn’t something we felt comfortable with. If it feels really weak after this we’ll come back to it and look at it again.

The change to 2% was absurd.
The trait is literally worse then a flat 20% now.

I really don’t understand why it shipped at 5% anyhow, people on the forums had done the maths weeks ago, we all knew it would be silly.

my thought on the matter is preety clear as yours

anet saw the mesmer community is happy with all the new chages while others not so much, thus they felt they gave us unintentiaonl buffs while ignoring 2 years of complaining
when they checked how many mesmer log in probably they saw too many in wvw and pvp so they though to them self ohhh probably there is some OP builds out there so they checked it and so that before the patch only 10 ppl played mtd in pvp and now 200 which cause a scream by all bew players to nerf conditions
thus they nerf mtd back to squere one.
after seeing what they have done they will give other class more time to settle down and try to handle the condi rush even if engi and ele burning 15 stacks is surely OP atm .

is this what you want josh to tell you – he cant as it puts them on stupid/ mistake action which they cant revert

Josh Davis.6015:

Anyways, as Peters said, we’re keeping a really close eye on everything right now and things will definitely continue to shift

Yet the patch notes in the last 2 days have been:

Other classes:

• Bug fixed

Mesmer:

• nerf
• nerf
• nerf
• nerf

I hope you see the pattern there.

Mesmer should get nerfed. Its the most OP class at the moment.
The last thing you want is your class to be played effectively by braindead players. Or even afk (bearbow style).

I qm seriously amazed how some players didn’t see this coming.

There are so many changes to the basic mechanics, that things just need shaving and balancing.

I would just really like to see Anet treat mesmer (and other classes) as well as they treat Engie. Oh, but engie is Grouch’s favorite, so of course it will always get the coolest stuff…

This was to be expected at least with the staff trait. The recharge was ridiculous. Expect pu next, as it is even more over the top.

I main a mesmer and obviously, these traits are very strong and desirable. However, most professions now have rather stupidly strong staff. If there is not to be complete chaos, various things everywhere need to be adjusted.

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Mesmer should get nerfed. Its the most OP class at the moment.
The last thing you want is your class to be played effectively by braindead players. Or even afk (bearbow style).

I qm seriously amazed how some players didn’t see this coming.

There are so many changes to the basic mechanics, that things just need shaving and balancing.

This is exactly what we warned before the patch went life. Mesmer players on average had to deal with a lot of issues before and were probably one of the classes, where you actually need to adept to your opponents behavior. And now we got similar and even stronger traits (looking at you PU and 5% Staff Trait [but nerfing it 60% was way way way way way way way way way overkill]) than many others. And we can use our new tools to the fullest, where others could often ignore us so far. Now people need to learn how Mesmer actually works.

And what do the devs do? They jump on the nerf train (and nerf the wrong traits). I tell you what the result will be: After things have settled and Mesmer have been nerfed back into place, people will actually understand how Mesmers work now and we will be back to square one.

Why not let it play out for a while? So that people can actually come to the forums with informed opinions and not with first impressions and emotional responses.

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Mesmer should get nerfed. Its the most OP class at the moment.
The last thing you want is your class to be played effectively by braindead players. Or even afk (bearbow style).

I qm seriously amazed how some players didn’t see this coming.

There are so many changes to the basic mechanics, that things just need shaving and balancing.

Mesmer is only OP in pvp right now because of a single trait… And they didn’t even touch that trait. Again, why the knee-jerk balance behavior? They could give it at least a week to see what other classes come up with to deal with mesmers. A day later shows that all they care about is how much QQ they hear from bad players how the “big bad mesmer hurt me.”

TyPin.9860:

Why not let it play out for a while? So that people can actually come to the forums with informed opinions and not with first impressions and emotional responses.

+11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

these traits need to be powerful since now we only get 3 choices per line.
Keep watering them down and the whole system will feel weak and insipid.
Unless you carry glamour utilities, the changes feel pretty harsh.

Pvp is complete chaos right now because of the way they are approaching things: come up with some ideas for each profession, then balance from live.

Expect the next months to only bring nerfs to all professions.

Hello grouch, I do hope your looking at other classes as closely as Mesmer.
I also think a few things have been over the top (from all classes, not just Mesmer).
Take a little look at Prismatic Understanding and Confounding Suggestions. Please hit the problems where it exists, rather then nerfing everything around it while missing the core problems.

Told ya. They buffed us to make us happy and go preorder HoT. Give them 1-2 weeks and we’ll be back to … well yeah.

serialkicker.5274:

Told ya. They buffed us to make us happy and go preorder HoT. Give them 1-2 weeks and we’ll be back to … well yeah.

Like someone else said, lucky for me, I didn’t pre-order HoT.

I can do without Chronomancer if this is the balancing experience I have to look forward to.

MailMail.6534:

serialkicker.5274:

Told ya. They buffed us to make us happy and go preorder HoT. Give them 1-2 weeks and we’ll be back to … well yeah.

Like someone else said, lucky for me, I didn’t pre-order HoT.

I can do without Chronomancer if this is the balancing experience I have to look forward to.

I told you so Anet. You should have tested your stuffs before you give-out candies to greedy folks. They would have pre-order HoT if you do the balance right at launch, not giving too much, so no need to nerf any of them either, and they’d be as happy as when you released the OP version of it.

Human are born greedy, so if you let them expose to wealth, there’s no turning back anymore. They would not be able to endure poverty anymore after they taste the wealth first. You shouldn’t have spoiled them in the first place. Bad move Anet!