Guild Wars 2

Blurred Frenzy: This is now evasion instead of immunity. This means it will be affected by retaliation. Increased the cooldown to 12 seconds.

I do not think I really understand the difference between evasion and invulnerability. Since using blurred frenzy should still dodge attacks, what will now affect a mesmer while using blurred frenzy that previously did not?

It’s right in the description. We’ll be effected by retaliation.

In other words, if you’re attacking someone with blurred frenzy, you’ll now take retal damage for every hit you land.

you can also ge thit by un evadable attacks… like necro wells i guess?

Alissah.9281:

you can also ge thit by un evadable attacks… like necro wells i guess?

I don’t think there’s such a thing as an unevadable attack (though static field might be one), only unblockables. Blurred frenzy should still prevent all froms of direct damage, though conditions may tick.

Its basically like a dodge, but you can get hit by unblockable attacks and retaliation which will hit like a kitten

And environmental traps seem unavoidable too. The new story dungeon has a part that would have made the old blurred frenzy shine like a diamond.

it seems it’s a bit less than an real evade currently. the mk2 golem lays down these electrical fields which cripple and damage players. before the change using blurred frenzy meant neither damage nor cripple came through. same went for dodgeing throug them.

using blurred frenzy now you get both the damage and the cripple – yay, another big change which hasn’t been tested at all it seems.

In simple terms: Blurred Frenzy will now no longer work against the Fractal JadeMaw’s laser beam attack…sadness.

curtegg.5216:

In simple terms: Blurred Frenzy will now no longer work against the Fractal JadeMaw’s laser beam attack…sadness.

Given that evading due to a dodge works just fine in Jade Maw, why wouldn’t evading due to a skill?

Palu.3405:

curtegg.5216:

In simple terms: Blurred Frenzy will now no longer work against the Fractal JadeMaw’s laser beam attack…sadness.

Given that evading due to a dodge works just fine in Jade Maw, why wouldn’t evading due to a skill?

Good question, ask ANet

Can no longer block treb shots with Blurred Frenzy :/

in the end, is there any bloody thing that can be avoided by using blurred pansy? I mean frenzy~

Ahh. I see. I primarily PvE so knowing about things like ‘not working on environmental traps’ is great to know. Thanks!

curtegg.5216:

In simple terms: Blurred Frenzy will now no longer work against the Fractal JadeMaw’s laser beam attack…sadness.

I’d like to see confirmation on this one.

Does the skill also being affected with Shocking Aura from Eles?

kylia.4813:

Can no longer block treb shots with Blurred Frenzy :/

darn and it was sooo much fun laying baseball. :-)

Oranisagu.3706:

it seems it’s a bit less than an real evade currently. the mk2 golem lays down these electrical fields which cripple and damage players. before the change using blurred frenzy meant neither damage nor cripple came through. same went for dodgeing throug them.

using blurred frenzy now you get both the damage and the cripple – yay, another big change which hasn’t been tested at all it seems.

Are you sure Blurred Frenzy actually evaded the electrical field before?

I just fought that boss yesterday with my Mesmer and I could swear I was taking damage from the electrical field even during Blurred Frenzy, because I remember being surprised that I was given that BF made you invulnerable. That thing seems to be 100% unavoidable period, except by getting out of the attack altogether.

I agree with this change, in any case. Being immune to any of the “offensive” defensive measures kind of defeats the purpose of those offensive defenses. Was probably a little too good to have that sort of defense on BF. The cooldown increase on top of it seems overboard, though.

It’s another obvious PVP balance that also severely hinders PVE. Good game anet, good game…..

I believe blurred frenzy also used to protect from condi damag (i.e. no ticks of bleeding while blurring). that is also gone.

bobross.5034:

I believe blurred frenzy also used to protect from condi damag (i.e. no ticks of bleeding while blurring). that is also gone.

That is incorrect. If you had conditions on you, they would still tick.

Lol Anet is absolutely the worst company I’ve ever seen. Brb making blurred frenzy a suicide button vs engies and guardians now.

Pyroatheist.9031:

bobross.5034:

I believe blurred frenzy also used to protect from condi damag (i.e. no ticks of bleeding while blurring). that is also gone.

That is incorrect. If you had conditions on you, they would still tick.

I don’t think anything in the game can prevent condition damage from ticking once its already there, other than cleansing them outright.

Meh, how unfortunate. Well, I only use my mesmer for pve and duels anymore anyway, and was also getting bored of the offensive shatter spec in duels as well. It was so weak against good thieves. Quess the minor scepter buff makes my old confusion shatter a little more viable.

Archer.1658:

Lol Anet is absolutely the worst company I’ve ever seen. Brb making blurred frenzy a suicide button vs engies and guardians now.

It was OP as all hell before considering it was up 20% (25% traited) of the time in every fight.

Pyroatheist.9031:

curtegg.5216:

In simple terms: Blurred Frenzy will now no longer work against the Fractal JadeMaw’s laser beam attack…sadness.

I’d like to see confirmation on this one.

Still works on laser beam – works as if you had normally dodged.

Huh… I was just in WvW and it “evades” siege attacks (treb and cata). What I don’t really like is getting eight Retaliation ticks whenever you hit a pack of guards, for example.

Kravick.4906:

Archer.1658:

Lol Anet is absolutely the worst company I’ve ever seen. Brb making blurred frenzy a suicide button vs engies and guardians now.

It was OP as all hell before considering it was up 20% (25% traited) of the time in every fight.

Lmao “OP”, it roots down a cloth class. Regardless, sword is now a death trap vs these professions. In fact, lets assume a guardian’s retal ticks for 300, blurred frenzy hits 8×. That is 2,400 damage. Now lets assume you attack a party that has a guardian and they all have retal from the guard, assuming 300 ticks as well, that is 12,000 damage. This is just assuming blurred frenzy, the most common combo is to go ileap-frenzy-shatter, in which case u’ll be taking another 1,200 damage from 4 shatters. You will instagib yourself on a group of 5 people that have retal. So it goes from “OP” to death trap, yeah great fix.

Oh and btw, most retal ticks are above 350.

Very weird sitting there longer waiting for cooldown plus retal works against you? geeze… I don’t know if my builds viable anymore :P Thank god I’m not working on the Bolt.

Archer.1658:

Kravick.4906:

Archer.1658:

Lol Anet is absolutely the worst company I’ve ever seen. Brb making blurred frenzy a suicide button vs engies and guardians now.

It was OP as all hell before considering it was up 20% (25% traited) of the time in every fight.

Lmao “OP”, it roots down a cloth class. Regardless, sword is now a death trap vs these professions. In fact, lets assume a guardian’s retal ticks for 300, blurred frenzy hits 8×. That is 2,400 damage. Now lets assume you attack a party that has a guardian and they all have retal from the guard, assuming 300 ticks as well, that is 12,000 damage. This is just assuming blurred frenzy, the most common combo is to go ileap-frenzy-shatter, in which case u’ll be taking another 1,200 damage from 4 shatters. You will instagib yourself on a group of 5 people that have retal. So it goes from “OP” to death trap, yeah great fix.

Oh and btw, most retal ticks are above 350.

Ok, first of all, I agree that the nerf to Blurred Frenzy was a bit unneeded. However, it’s not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. Yes, Blurred Frenzy hitting eight times will generate 2400 damage for the mesmer in your scenario. At most it will generate 7200 damage because it can only hit up to three targets.

Really though, other than in large ZergVsZerg combat, where are you going to have the opportunity to have 24 unblocked, undodged hits against people who have retaliation up? Most decent players will do SOMETHING to mitigate damage because they know that a shatter is on the way, so in actuality a large chunk of of the hits won’t even make contact in most situations.

Also, there’s no real excuse for “instagibbing” oneself on retaliation. The mesmer has plenty of boon stripping abilities, FOUR of which are either common utilities or on common weapons. God forbid we actually look at our opponents’ boons before we rapidly unload every single one of our attacks. I run sword and played WvW for several hours today and, because I pay attention, not once did I find that Blurred Frenzy was causing me to take excess amounts of damage. I certainly didn’t take anything in the 3-7k range that you are advocating as common.

Like I said, nobody likes nerfs, but at least this will encourage players to think a little bit more.

Palu.3405:

Archer.1658:

Kravick.4906:

Archer.1658:

Lol Anet is absolutely the worst company I’ve ever seen. Brb making blurred frenzy a suicide button vs engies and guardians now.

It was OP as all hell before considering it was up 20% (25% traited) of the time in every fight.

Lmao “OP”, it roots down a cloth class. Regardless, sword is now a death trap vs these professions. In fact, lets assume a guardian’s retal ticks for 300, blurred frenzy hits 8×. That is 2,400 damage. Now lets assume you attack a party that has a guardian and they all have retal from the guard, assuming 300 ticks as well, that is 12,000 damage. This is just assuming blurred frenzy, the most common combo is to go ileap-frenzy-shatter, in which case u’ll be taking another 1,200 damage from 4 shatters. You will instagib yourself on a group of 5 people that have retal. So it goes from “OP” to death trap, yeah great fix.

Oh and btw, most retal ticks are above 350.

Ok, first of all, I agree that the nerf to Blurred Frenzy was a bit unneeded. However, it’s not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. Yes, Blurred Frenzy hitting eight times will generate 2400 damage for the mesmer in your scenario. At most it will generate 7200 damage because it can only hit up to three targets.

Really though, other than in large ZergVsZerg combat, where are you going to have the opportunity to have 24 unblocked, undodged hits against people who have retaliation up? Most decent players will do SOMETHING to mitigate damage because they know that a shatter is on the way, so in actuality a large chunk of of the hits won’t even make contact in most situations.

Also, there’s no real excuse for “instagibbing” oneself on retaliation. The mesmer has plenty of boon stripping abilities, FOUR of which are either common utilities or on common weapons. God forbid we actually look at our opponents’ boons before we rapidly unload every single one of our attacks. I run sword and played WvW for several hours today and, because I pay attention, not once did I find that Blurred Frenzy was causing me to take excess amounts of damage. I certainly didn’t take anything in the 3-7k range that you are advocating as common.

Like I said, nobody likes nerfs, but at least this will encourage players to think a little bit more.

Ok I’ll make this brief. It isn’t instagib, but it certainly does a lot. Blurred frenzy was a means to get into that zergvzerg, and now it is completely useless in that regard. While the scenario of retal being up isn’t going to happen every time, any decent group runs at least 1 guardian. Boon stripping? Arcane thievery is hit and miss and is no way a guarantee that you’ll even get retal, null field is based on whether they stand in the field which is also hit and miss, sword auto isn’t even going to be considered because you would be taking way too much damage for an attempt to rip the boon, Phantasm dis enchanter isn’t going to be up long enough to work considering 90% of mesmers will now be shatter. In conclusion, there is a lot more pressure on a cloth class being in meele range to the point where sword is not a viable option anymore. I took a solid 2.6k retal damage to myself today using blurred frenzy once vs a guard.

MakersMark.8420:

It’s another obvious PVP balance that also severely hinders PVE. Good game anet, good game…..

It’s also really bad in WvW, where AEs fly galore.
I wonder, why was this not done as a sPvP-only modification? It’s only the sPvP people who have an issue with the skill, so…

This blurred frenzy nerf is just awful. Anet never ceases to disappoint. The only solace I can take is that this will confuse the hell out of foes. Normally if a foe hits us with direct melee during BF they would receive the invulnerable tag. Now it’ll just say “miss”. I can only imagine all the other classes who haven’t read our patch notes thinking their attacks are bugged. Other then that, this is an absurd nerf.

Well to be fair, the patch as a whole is quite good. Both my Mesmer and my Engineer are really interesting to play now, weird as that may sound.

The specific change to BF is also understandable, just the problem that it only makes sense in sPvP!

this change is a huge nerf mechanic of skill+cd… why touch both on this skill… Last patch dev killed confusion, yesterday they hit kitten blurred frenzy… patch day is bad day for me… As WvWvW mesmer i can t understand why dev put spvp and WvWvW on the same way, in one hand u fight 5v5,10v10 and the other hand fights are usually 40+v40+…

Please split spvp and WvWvW :p

Kwaz ( Vizunah Square)

I actually think the change in blurred frenzy is acceptable in terms of balancing. But the increased cooldown wasn’t necessary. Especially since increased increased our illusion skills’ CDs by 25%, too -.-

Acceptable? Maybe. BUT…
Before update (vs thief with my build): Illusionary Wave out of Shadow refuge > Into the Void > Swap > Blurred Frenzy.
After update: useless > change build.

The nerf to BF was massive yet probably called for considering how powerful the ability was before the change. The cooldown increase is a bit of a kick in the teeth however.

Retaliation duration does need to be reduced for some abilities/traits.

The ironic complaints concerning the OP’ness of retaliation now that it actually affects mesmers are rather amusing, coming from some of the same posters who in the past were laying scorn on engineers/thieves for spamming multi-hit/channelled abilities without first checking for buffs on the target. ..

Well retaliation builds are pretty strong as it is, mesmer was a nice counter to that.
I agree that BF was maybe a bit too strong but as you said, either/or should have been done, either cd increase or the effect change, by no means both >_>

XRay.1920:

Well retaliation builds are pretty strong as it is, mesmer was a nice counter to that.
I agree that BF was maybe a bit too strong but as you said, either/or should have been done, either cd increase or the effect change, by no means both >_>

Well, BF still feels strong, and with any luck we’ll see less “Sword is the default weapon” setups.
But the thing is, you’re right, there’s an issue with Retaliation. That needs to be fixed game-wide though.

considering the scepter still being the trash that it is I highly doubt that we’ll stop seeing sword as the ‘obligatory’ mh.

Scepter is way underrated, tbh. I think too many people never give it a serious chance, or think of it as “the condition weapon” (it’s kitten powerful with power stats, though sadly slightly less so after this patch ).

Scepter’s sole – and sadly rather big issue – is how slow the auto-attack chain is. This is made worse by being the only projectile-based advancing chain, and having this weird bug where the chain doesn’t advance until the projectile impacts, making your damage range-dependent.
If the projectile were removed (this would both make the chain faster and remove the range bug), I’d have no issues with Scepter #1.

And, outside of that, the Scepter is plenty good on it’s own. It generates extra clones, it’s auto-attack even hits quite ok (it’s just so slow that it’s easy to dodge or avoid each individual shot), and #2 and #3 are very good abilities which easily keep up with BF and iLeap in most situations.

The thing is weaker. But by a very small margin, especially after this patch. People tend toe exaggerate that margin until it sounds like this huge chasm. :P

the scepter AA should be redesigned yea, making it more like greatsword AA in terms of concept. 3 laser beams instead of 3 floating eggs sounds way cooler and would have a better/faster effect. it would also help if it had any condition on it, be it bleed, short torment, burn, just to make it more appealing~

to be fair when the game first came out the big plan was to be scepter/torch staff condition mesmer but anet just doesn’t want to let me >_>

Nah my favourite would be to remove the projectile entirely. And all other information as to where I am.

I wave the Scepter (still with the purple glowie on the scepter), enemy is hit (instantly) by an attack which makes purple glass shards fly off from their head.

In essence, it’d be a hitscan weapon. :P

make that butterflies instead of shards and we’ll reach a consensus xD

Carighan.6758:

Nah my favourite would be to remove the projectile entirely. And all other information as to where I am.

I wave the Scepter (still with the purple glowie on the scepter), enemy is hit (instantly) by an attack which makes purple glass shards fly off from their head.

In essence, it’d be a hitscan weapon. :P

Like Necros Scepter … which got buffed that patch.
Just replace the bleeding (hits #1-1 and #1-2) with 0.75s confusion. And leave third one as it is.

shimmerless.4560:

I’m really sick of the whole “it was up 20% of the time” thing. Yes if you did absolutely nothing that sat in MH Sword and rooted themselves every time it was off cooldown that would be the case. Have these people ever actually played GW2? Who are they facing, Orr bots?

sPvP/tPvP

Blurred frenzy can now be interrupted by Shocking Aura (lightning bubble shield). just got mine cancelled when I blurred frenzy those Aetherblade mobs, I would imagine this happens on eles too. Is this intended?

In theory, evasion should mean that BF works like a dodge, which outside of retaliation, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to affect anything. The real nerf is the cooldown.

DiogoSilva.7089:

In theory, evasion should mean that BF works like a dodge, which outside of retaliation, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to affect anything. The real nerf is the cooldown.

So I have been testing it in various places (PvE), and have found it to work the same (save for the increased cooldown). So this is really just a PvP/WvW nerf.

Static field + blurred frenzy:
http://i.imgur.com/vMFZP0F.jpg
Shocking aura + blurred frenzy:
http://i.imgur.com/L1STb0C.jpg
Need I say more?
On the good side, “unblockable”(necro marks and wells) and targeted knockdowns\knockbacks from ele = evade.