Guild Wars 2

Been thinking about methods to balance match ups, and one I’ve wondered is how broken would it be to have Phantasms not get cancelled by blinds? I’m pretty sure there was a point when this was the case and I don’t recall it being too OP for people to cry out for it.

The way I see it this forces players to have to actively blind the phantasms if they don’t want to take the hit, as opposed to countering the entire cast, which imo is a bit to much. The idea as to why is that if you think of each phant as a condi, if you blind a target before they apply it, it does nothing. The problem I see with that is… Phants don’t scale the same way as condis, and regardless of build they are a significant part of ones damage to be shut down by one condition.

Now I get this is also in consistency with the ability to LoS Phant casts, But for the sake of balance especially against thieves would this revert make the match up more even? Perhaps even make the medi guard match up closer?

Granted this makes the S/F Ele tip in our favor more, as well as allow us to pressure necro as a response to certain setups. But I feel such a change would be almost negligible in those matchups.

What are your thoughts?

Problem is this is only a 1v1 fix, in team fights phantasms still get cleaved down immediately.

Reason mesmer is hardcountered by thief is not only because the meta spvp build is not a 1v1 build (not phantasm, not PU, not CI, all of the builds that can’t be bullied by a thief).

The issue is spvp is a team fight mode, and in a team fight the only “useful” build is shatter, and you gotta bring your portal. Both of those things only make you more vulnerable to a thief.

It’s not even a mesmer exclusive issue, though people keep acting as if thieves only hardcounter mesmers.

Thieves hardcounter any berserker class that isn’t a medi guard. It’s that simple. Thieves can land their burst too easily, too frequently, and their amounts of ports and stealth make it so there’s little other berk specs can do to retaliate.

Backstab damage is just dumb even a proper backstab combo on something like a power necromancer brings him down from 18-19k hp down to 13k, it only takes an autoattack chain, which still hits hard and automatically applies poison, to put someone in heartseeker territory.

And heartseeker is another big issue. You really can’t kite a thief who’s got steal, shadowstep, shadowshot, and heartseeker in his kitten nal. And this isn’t even s/d thief which is even worse.

Zerker thief and warrior builds simply are far more survivable than other classes’ zerker builds. Zerker mediguard is pretty good against burst too.

But zerker engi, ranger, necromancer, and mesmer are just asking to die. And now you see why most ele’s run celestial, because an 11k hp ele is extremely easy to down from a thief combo when you’ve got teammates on the other side spamming collateral damage like grenades/poison/combustive shot.

Black Powder is also horrendously OP against melee zerkers.

Daishi.6027:

Been thinking about methods to balance match ups, and one I’ve wondered is how broken would it be to have Phantasms not get cancelled by blinds? I’m pretty sure there was a point when this was the case and I don’t recall it being too OP for people to cry out for it.

It didn’t always used to be the case, you’re right. It wasn’t OP by any stretch of the imagination. No LoS requirement was a bit much I’ll admit (particularly iZerkering any seige within 1200 range), but casting through blind was just fine. It got hit with a heavyhanded nerf like so many other things, and now it makes fighting thieves (and to a lesser extent guardians) an absolute nightmare on a phantasm build.

Yeah that combined with the blind rework in summer 2013 that prevented it from being cleansed just by attacking air. It was a good change, but still a massive buff for thieves (one thieves often forget about when complaining about a history of nerfs).