Guild Wars 2

For once, the title is pretty much the question. It says nowhere that clones deal confusion on hit, but underwater it’s all they do. It applies to any clone, either made by utility (mirror images in my case) or weapon (trident in my case).

I’m confused!

It’s true. I believe back in Beta, the confusion was part of the auto-attack. It was then swapped away, but for some reasons the clones still use it.

We haven’t heard if it’s intended or not, and it hasn’t been addressed by ANet even though it’s widely acknowledged on the forums.

For now, it makes trident mesmers a hoot underwater!

Indeed, and for a change it’s actually making underwater combat fun on the mesmer, rather than the chore best avoided if at all possible that it is on all my other characters.

I hope that if they “fix” it, the fix will just involve updating the tooltip.

Yes it is a left over from the beta. Just like Chaos armour from a combo doesn’t grant protection… that is just another left over from the beta.

And yes, it is fun to see the confusion condition last longer than 4 seconds on my target…. especially in PvE where 4 seconds of confusion might not even proc it’s damage once.

Or Staff clones use the old, contour-scanning, version.

I wish they’d make our scepter clones apply confusion

Yes they do and if this is removed one day, what will be our damage under water? Trident has no damage (your phantasm has a pathetic damage lol a clone is more useful) and spear is melee range under water lolz no thanks.

Nuka Cola.8520:

Yes they do and if this is removed one day, what will be our damage under water? Trident has no damage (your phantasm has a pathetic damage lol a clone is more useful) and spear is melee range under water lolz no thanks.

Without confusion, there is still the option to stack bleedings for damage. Works fine if you are condition-spec and use Sharper Images. The trident phantasm alone creates about 5 or 6 bleeds in my build, all ticking for 100+ damage (trident phantasm has a rapid-firing multi attack, thus it’s much better than staff phantasm iWarlock which is useless in a pure condition build).

But I admit, the trident autoattack is a bit lousy. It should be more like the staff autoattack, creating both conditions and boons, not just the latter.

The trident clone autoattack on the other hand is overpowered, no doubt.

We need some middle way here. If ANet ever touches the Trident, I hope they rework both the normal attack AND the clone attack.

Spear is the weapon for power builds, and in my opinion you shouldn’t be actually fighting in melee range but use your #2 skill to ram your enemy every 5 seconds. You can stay out of their melee range and create some clones for shatter. It takes some practice to master your spear underwater combat skills, but I think it’s a pretty cool way to fight. Skills #2, #4 and #5 allow you to play a hit-and-run game. Unfortunately this requires a lot of room to maneuver and you’ll add a lot of mobs. Too bad there are so many angry fish monsters in the WvW lakes.

Spear is hugely underrated, IMO, mostly because people try to use #1 for damage, yes.

The Spear’s damage is largely it’s #2 ability, especially escaping enemies are often hit 3-5 times with it (larger PvE monsters in front of walls take absurd amounts of damage, this makes the underwater bosses in HotW crazy fast to kill with Mesmers :P ). The other part of the damage is the Phantasm, dealing quite high damage while not being attackable during it’s attack animation.

A few other perks:

• Good utility (AE pull and AE barrier + speedbarrier) without giving up damage (due to how hard #2 and #3 hit).
• Good personal defence between #4/#5 and the invulnerability during ~40% of #1’s attack cycle.
• Innate cleave of the autoattack, always handy in add-based underwater fights.
• Very fast – as a Mesmer you can often catch up to enemies underwater who thought themselves out of range, then bind the straggler via #5 while his army runs away.

Spear isn’t perfect, ofc – no boons/conditions at all, and still a melee weapon – but it’s quite powerful in a Power-based build.

They also heal you. The 1 skill for Trident originally inflicted confusion on enemies and healed allies it bounced to.

Just another example of how little polish the Mesmer has received. They are all too quick to nerf us, but incredibly reluctant to give us the polish the profession deserves. I don’t mind the nerfs so much because they are usually warranted, but it is incredibly disheartening to only ever see nerfs when so many unpolished or buggy aspects of the profession go untouched.

You just need to use Mirror Images while holding a trident and you’re asking to get nerfed. If you’re running a condition based build with all the good confusion/clone traits you’re going to hurt a lot of people out there.

Not really, because except Mesmers no one ever wants to fight underwater. Apparently their weapons are all smelleh or so. Well granted, we still do damage and control as if you needed to swim to the surface to heal up at all.