Guild Wars 2

I’m about to make a suggestion spreadsheet thread for mesmer to deal with balance inconsistencies (see links in signature for examples)

Before I do so, I’d like to collect information from other players:

What are the current balance problems of mesmer/chronomancer?
What is too strong and overbearing in build diversity?
What is too weak and overshadowed by stronger options?
How is your experience in PvE / PvP / and WvW?

I look forward to reading everyone’s response.

OP:
Gravity Well —-- the most broken CC in WvW besides Hunter’s Ward , even more broken with Power Block or Mistrust trait
Chaotic Dampening —- protection on chaos armor wasn’t impressive, until every well became ethereal + Chaos Storm + Tides of Time + Feedback + Null Field , this ought to be hit with a higher ICD

Slightly OP:
(Inspiration trait) Restorative Illusions – this really should not heal with 0 illusions , I feel

UP:
Rending Shatter – it’s 1 vulnerability per illusion , so about 3 stacks every time you have a full shatter
Duelist’s Discipline : interrupting with a Pistol offhand is like playing russian roulette , so you’re looking at 25% recharge reduced with one interrupt
Shattered Strength: 1 stack of might is underwhelming unless you have scepter’s illusion spam
Ineptitude : not enough ways to blind without Blinding Dissipation for it to be useful
Phantasmal Swordsman: it makes a swordsman. wow.
All’s Well That Ends Well : nerf to alacrity, but this was never adjusted by 50-100%
Lost Time : it slows but you need to wail on someone and crit 5 times ; Chronophantasma and Seize the Moment are far superior almost all the time
Chaos armor (the skill): the recharge should be dropped by 5-10s after a Chaotic Dampening Adjustment
Mirror Images: Decoy is far better in almost every situation
Well of Action : 3 ticks of slow and mediocre damage , should have a recharge adjustment or some damage added
Well of Precognition: nerfed to the ground basically, Mantra of Concentration tends to be better due to mobility , recharge, more stability, and large radius
Mantra of Pain: is if for some odd reason you’re running power build and running a staff and need mediocre auto attack damage

Usability:
Evasive Mirror – breaks stealth
Fencer’s Finesse – duration of the ferocity stacks should be more than 6s
Master of Fragmentation – the cry of frustration shatter could use a tweak
Staff 1 / Winds of Chaos – improve speed of projectile
Phantasmal Disenchanter – needs to remove the boons/conditions once it casts and not take its sweet time doing it

I agree with the list above.

Just to want to add a few more here:
1. The offhand shield is OP compared to other weapon sets. Tides of time may need some shaving.

2. GS damage is not enough in current meta. GS autoattack aftercast should be eliminated, similar to the treatment to elementalist lightening whip. GS3 remove maybe 2 boons.

3. Sword trait is underwhelming . The ferocity stack needs to last longer and maybe gets easier to stack

4. All phantasms cast time normalized to 3/4 sec. Many phantasms are too weak to justify the long cast time(disenchanter e.g.)

5. Precog well. Completely useless now after the over nerf. It should at least gives continuous block rather than pulsing aegis. I would highly suggest change it back to evade/distortion with slightly increased CD.

6. Improved alacrity. The effect should be increased from 50% to 66%. The hard nerf of alacrity needs some compensation. This change won’t affect PvE at all but can increase QoL of power mesmer in PvP.

7. Lost time. Underwhelming at the moment. I would suggest adding ‘slow application time increased by 33%’ for this trait. This can lead to some new way to play chronomancer.

I was going to post a reply but it got too long and elaborate and as such i will post in in a separate thread. It’s about Shatter mesmer by the way.

Quadox.7834:

I was going to post a reply but it got too long and elaborate and as such i will post in in a separate thread. It’s about Shatter mesmer by the way.

You can put a link in this thread to your new topic as well. Maybe it can catch some attention from Anet.

Okay, this only concerns balance issues of power Shatter mesmer.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Classic-Shatter-suggestions-list-PvP/first#post6029586

Signet of Humility is also rather over the top. Due to being locked out of a heal for 10s, no utility, etc. This wasn’t an issue back when not every single class did huge damage spikes and condis took time to ramp up. Not to mention this skill is basically on a 90s cd (at absolute most) since chrono came out.

So maybe signet isn’t the issue and continuum is, dunno, dont care, something just needs to give. Maybe just have continuum not affect elites? That would alleviate a huge amount of ‘mesmer elite x is too op’ I see plenty of.

On the flip side of mesmer being too strong I also know mesmer lost lots of burst in the power department… GS lost burst and didn’t gain any sustain or even have more damage over time, which is of course bad design and some devs need to lose their job over consistently doing this to multiple professions (just worse for power mesmer since the damage over time was always trash).

As for a few of the things in the list above:
“Mirror Images: Decoy is far better in almost every situation”
It is used by most condition builds for even more condi spam, using it with continuum shift is 4x clones with no cast time on a 30s ish cd, it’s plenty effective for what it does.

I agree with most everything else in the list.

Allison The Strange.4519:

Signet of Humility is also rather over the top. Due to being locked out of a heal for 10s, no utility, etc. This wasn’t an issue back when not every single class did huge damage spikes and condis took time to ramp up. Not to mention this skill is basically on a 90s cd (at absolute most) since chrono came out.

So maybe signet isn’t the issue and continuum is, dunno, dont care, something just needs to give. Maybe just have continuum not affect elites? That would alleviate a huge amount of ‘mesmer elite x is too op’ I see plenty of.

On the flip side of mesmer being too strong I also know mesmer lost lots of burst in the power department… GS lost burst and didn’t gain any sustain or even have more damage over time, which is of course bad design and some devs need to lose their job over consistently doing this to multiple professions (just worse for power mesmer since the damage over time was always trash).

As for a few of the things in the list above:
“Mirror Images: Decoy is far better in almost every situation”
It is used by most condition builds for even more condi spam, using it with continuum shift is 4x clones with no cast time on a 30s ish cd, it’s plenty effective for what it does.

I agree with most everything else in the list.

It is not used for condition builds in PvP outside of maybe hotjoin. It’s much worse than decoy and Signet of Illusions is for condi mesmer. What are you talking about here?

One more thing I would suggest to change
Inspiration line:
warden’s feedback should be moved to adept tier.
First focus is only an off-hand weapon. Moving to adept is in-line with other off-hand weapon traits.
Second it is unfair that iwarden cannot benefit from protected phantasms.

Persisting image can be moved to master tier with some kind of buff. Perhaps change it to an health increase of 50% and apply to all illusions.

I know this is mainly from a PvP stand point OP because I saw your post in the PvP sub forum however Mesmer has one massive design fault that cripples it in every single game mode.

Phantasms.

Whoever thought having a pet class with pets that die when your target dies, moves out of range and do diddly squat when invisible was high as a kite. If Mesmer was rebalanced so that they were just clone generating skills but the attacks were redone and came from the Mesmer then mesmers could have sustained damage builds in all game modes. In WvW they would be able to do AoE damage without having it tied to a suicidal paper thin clone.

Fix that that one issue and Mesmer can start being balanced properly.

Oh and chrono needs to lose F5, you cannot balance the ability to double up on skills like it is. Buff alacrity to compensate (1s per clone, 100% for improved alacrity) and look at shaving down time warps cool down by 30-60s, maybe reduce its duration by 2s if a 60s shave.

I have this idea that would help Mesmer’s, but it will never happen.

Its something that IF it was implemented at release(early on) would probably not be an issue, but changing it now would cause too much out-rage.

So clones are supposed to confuse the enemy. Make it hard to choose the “tree from the forest”, “stealth in plain site” – kind of thing. But in reality, it really doesn’t take much to pick out the real Mesmer. In fact, once you have the Mesmer targeted, unless the Mesmer gets stealth, the real Mesmer will remain targeted no matter how many clones are generated.

My idea is this: Any weapon skill that generates a clone will also “drop target”.

This would be pretty simple to implement by adding a .5-1 second of stealth to those skills. The Mesmer would blink in and out of stealth when the clone is generated. (Dropping target, and making the enemy to re-target/re-select the real Mesmer. Really add that “find the tree from the forest” type of gameplay to the Mesmer.

For the professions with all the AOE, it probably wouldn’t change much for them. They just spam the ground and not really target the Mesmer. But for those other professions like Warrior, Thief, Rangers, Rev’s and OTHER Mesmer’s, this will make the Mesmer a bit more “slippery”. Of course, it will also make the Mesmer more of a pain in the kitten to fight. And players will complain and complain and complain.

I came up with this idea as a way to help fight thieves and rev’s. It’s really frustrating that as a player you can kite like crazy, only to have a thief or rev instantly shadowstep thru rocks and walls and stone at the press of a button. Because all they need is a target.

This probably “should of been” since the beginning, but now it will never happen. Just wanted to pitch “something out of the box”.

SlimChance.6593:

I have this idea that would help Mesmer’s, but it will never happen.

Its something that IF it was implemented at release(early on) would probably not be an issue, but changing it now would cause too much out-rage.

So clones are supposed to confuse the enemy. Make it hard to choose the “tree from the forest”, “stealth in plain site” – kind of thing. But in reality, it really doesn’t take much to pick out the real Mesmer. In fact, once you have the Mesmer targeted, unless the Mesmer gets stealth, the real Mesmer will remain targeted no matter how many clones are generated.

My idea is this: Any weapon skill that generates a clone will also “drop target”.

This would be pretty simple to implement by adding a .5-1 second of stealth to those skills. The Mesmer would blink in and out of stealth when the clone is generated. (Dropping target, and making the enemy to re-target/re-select the real Mesmer. Really add that “find the tree from the forest” type of gameplay to the Mesmer.

For the professions with all the AOE, it probably wouldn’t change much for them. They just spam the ground and not really target the Mesmer. But for those other professions like Warrior, Thief, Rangers, Rev’s and OTHER Mesmer’s, this will make the Mesmer a bit more “slippery”. Of course, it will also make the Mesmer more of a pain in the kitten to fight. And players will complain and complain and complain.

[…]

This probably “should of been” since the beginning, but now it will never happen. Just wanted to pitch “something out of the box”.

Your name is oddly applicable to your post :P

I disagree about CS/F5 not being able to be balanced. I said from the start that it should not affect Elites. I couldn’t believe they ever let it go live with affecting Elites. It makes very little sense.

Look at Moa, the whine parade has started over a skill that has been the same for a very long time. Hardly anyone cared about this Elite before! Yeah some newbs whined but the long CD on a high failure rate seemed to keep most of the QQing to a minimum. Now with F5, Moa is bound to get nerfed, then people will whine about TW and/or GW, both of which area nearly as strong as Moa overall. (Far more reliable, and very impactful in team fights.) So what then, these get nerfed too before Anet finally gets it right and nerfs CS, and then leaves the now neutered Elites as they are?

That’s how it usually goes with Anet. Very sad to watch this happen over and over again.

Without Elites in the picture, F5 should also get a longer base duration, and longer added duration from illusions. It should not only be something to double-up a few skills on, but a means of juking, causing confusion, misdirection, etc. This is how it was initially intended and sold to us, before it got gutted down to a “double up on Elites and some change” kinda skill.

Without Elites in the picture, you can work on it in other ways to promote skillful play, and not “Shatter n’ Spam!” The Rift needs to be strong enough to withstand some pressure though, especially incidental/splash damage in group fights.

It could be a really cool Mesmerish skill, if they just got back to the roots of it.

And to top it off, now that they’ve nerfed Alacrity into irrelevance in PvP, killed off the Power Shatter Mesmer (not to mention Bunker), they need to probably think of ways to make Chrono competitive to other Elites in the damage creep department. ( Or preferably nerf the others down, but that’s a lotta nerfs, QQing, etc. Might be easier to bring the 2-3 lacking Elites up to par.)

Windwalker.7421:

( Or preferably nerf the others down, but that’s a lotta nerfs, QQing, etc. Might be easier to bring the 2-3 lacking Elites up to par.)

This is the biggest obstacle I’m facing here when I make these spreadsheets. There’s always a person with that perspective and refuses to accept that power creep has happened and some things need to be brought down. Each profession subforum here has their own agenda- nerf other professions and buff the profession we use. This contradicts balance and every suggestion made through this perspective further misleads arenanet what needs changes. (perhaps, we shouldn’t be looking at the weak skills/traits, and perhaps we should instead divert our attention to the strong and overpowered)

Oh I agree with you on that. Fundamentally, it is always considered better practice to avoid power creep as much as possible in an MMO, and thus it’s better to make a dozen needed nerfs to stuff that obviously has experienced massive power creep, then to bring up the stuff that didn’t get the creep.

However, there comes the ugly truth of a for-profit business. Peeing off a bunch of customers with a bunch of nerfs is politically harder to pull off without major losses, then making even more people happy by boosting stuff to bring it up. (Creating more power creep)

Windwalker.7421:

Now with F5, Moa is bound to get nerfed, then people will whine about TW and/or GW, both of which area nearly as strong as Moa overall. (Far more reliable, and very impactful in team fights.) So what then, these get nerfed too before Anet finally gets it right and nerfs CS, and then leaves the now neutered Elites as they are?

I found this quote quite telling as it sums up alot of the plights that plague the class at the moment.

First burst damage was nerfed in several takes and then the game changed around it (shatterlock, anguish, mirror, powerblock/mantras – the figures are just very milky, especially compared to new specs) with tankier builds, healers and more passives.

Then stealth was first (corespec) modelled on other classses and nerfed before the game changed around it (elite spec), ie., nerfed in a very temporary summer environment and then more stealth was given to other classes and more reveals added without review.

Rip-play, the game has changed around it through mechanics (the class had among the best rips in the game and it worked in tandem with having a decent access to interrupts – ripping boons to land interrupts, now it can’t keep up with the spam).

Lock-play, the game has changed around it through boon overflow and mechanics (there’s just so much stun and stability spam now that the old specialized lock-setups are fairly pointless to play between access, counters and accuracy).

Counter-play, the game has changed around it through overflow and mechanics (so much unblockable stuff being stacked in now and Mesmers always had a unique relation to evadable unblockables and counter-attacks before).

The HoT stuff, nerfed before it even had time to settle because of sPvP bunkering (alacrity, wells [blur] and slows could have added so many new ways to play the game but are just poorly pieced together and prenerfed as it stands).

There are just so few unique things left to build the class (or its builds) around now – luckily the portal is still here to crutch the class in some situations.

What the class needs the most is surely some unique things to build around that isn’t the portal. Something to use the class for. It’s like the class was balanced for corespecs during corespecs and now trail an expansion and a few patches behind, waiting for some temporary fixes to be reviewed that have lingered for six months when new ways to play the class began to be explored (ie., replacements to shatter-rip, shatter-lock and condi-clone mechanics and norms that are over a year- and multiple balance passes old).

I mean, condi shatter has been here since june ‘15 and the only larger change we’ve seen from chrono is giving up DE for the ability to slot perplex. It got old, quickly.

The warrior elite is pretty dull and largely unused too but at least it improved upon existing builds and didn’t sell worse versions of the old builds back to them (gunflame being an evolution of killshot rather than a degeneration of it, which alacrity-shatter (to rip and lock) and condi-shatter arguably are. While active condi-shatter certainly is more fun to play – for everyone involved – than condi-clone, it is not necessarily better.

I still see alot of potential in the class with slow+chill and haste+alacrity being able to create interesting new “time” effects with wells and balance passes could revive unique aspects like rips, blurs and lock/counter bursts, but they have to be allowed some effect.

i’d rather see continuum split re-worked to something more versatile..

+higher duration, removal of skill resets on end, and instead do something like knock 1 second off all cooldowns, and give half a second of alacricity for every second the split was active.

It has incredible burst..but as it is, it only feels worth using to initiate combat, and very restrictive when trying to manage using it during combat when you actually have skills off cooldown

Mesmer’s highest damage potentials come from resources set to half our attack bar revolving around either punishable long casted skills, or lengthy cooldowns that are affected by LoS, blinds, CC, AoE and cleaving. Require an in range target. All with little secondary utility to their existence, and what utility there is, is often situational.

Low Coefficients.

No damage modifiers.

Easy to avoid burst.

No real heal sustain comparable to old valk/cele ele and scrapper.

Nerfed back to harsh cooldown dependency.

On par neutral cleanse restricted by one sometimes gimping line.

When compared to everything else in the game that has 3-4 on demand high value skills that either apply pressure, set up without risk, or have clear utility use across each weapon set, with less mandatory utilities for the sake of viability. Along with the historic existence of over abundant heals/sustain from bruisers. Then lets not forget builds that don’t require your entire bar to achieve less with no resources and few cooldowns, and there is a major imbalance here.

Oh I’m sorry I forgot, Moa and Portal OP plus we have a little more HP than thief so everything above is invalid :/

Personally I’d just like to see the auto attacks get buffed a bit. Though I’m mostly from a PVE perspective.