Guild Wars 2

This topic isn’t meant to be a nitpicking topic, but I just found it, idk, odd? On the specialization livestream, it was mentioned: “Alot of the retaliation traits in Mesmer got removed as we didn’t feel like you want people to hit you as a mesmer.” Yet the main usefulness of Chaos Armor comes from getting hit...Do keep in mind that I’m not considering the upcoming protection/cd trait for Chaos Armor.

Don’t know about others, but even when I do have chaos armor up, I don’t want to get hit. It just makes hits a bit less painful.

Staff skills don’t require getting hot with chaos armor to recharge faster either, just to have it active. Honestly, in gw2 you’re going to take “ambient” damage from doing any game mode, but some things are designed to benefit being hit a lot, and I think they’ve decided mesmers probably won’t want this.

When I’m wearing full Rabid Chaos armor is amazing. When I’m in Berzerker Chaos Armor feels worthless.

My observation. I do actually like to be hit to some degree in my condi spec.

Chaos armor is strong in zerk builds. Prot and such is always good. Also things like cripple on enemy is important when for example running away from projectile user

Yeah with that retaliation logic, they should revisit chaos armour. Although the guaranteed protection with the new staff trait is a good change, if it applied to chaos armour from ethereal blasts/leaps a build could be made with sword/sword and glamours to maximise uptime of protection but the way the new trait is phrased it looks like the protection is acquired from the staff skill only.

A trait that gave the boons (shorter durations) of chaos armour even if not getting hit, in addition to the boon on hit. Would prefer that in place of PU and make a build that is centered around applying chaos armour to self and allies. So PU would become a support trait than a selfish one.

Another possible change, what if chaos armour converted a condition on the mesmer into a boon every sec, and convert an enemies boon into a condition whenever an enemy hits the mesmer, possibly making it more of a deterrent and giving mesmers another condi removal option.

Would like to see chaos armour being more central to a mesmer build in some way.

I like all those ideas. Something more passive, especially since mesmer devs implied themselves that being hit shouldn’t be a core feature for us.

So, Devil’s Advocate on why Chaos Armour and Retaliation are not the same thing, from a design perspective:

Retaliation is purely an offensive boon. It offers no protection to the Mesmer, it just punishes attackers. Because it’s an offensive boon and because its effect scales on the Mesmer’s Power, the “optimal” (read: highest DPS) way to use Retaliation is to wear glass cannon gear while jumping in front of enemy attacks. This is a pretty obvious contradiction just in itself.

Chaos Armour is a defensive/utility boon. The only way it applies damage is if your opponent procs the Confusion debuff. Otherwise, it either reduces the damage you take (Protection, Blind), enables you to escape from your opponent (Swiftness, Cripple), or heals you (Regen).

So, the reason why ANet want to prune back our sources of Retaliation is that it doesn’t make sense for a squishy class to be glass cannons who dive in front of bullets. Chaos Armour doesn’t encourage us to dive in front of bullets, it just helps us survive longer when dodging isn’t an option.

Hm, I suppose that makes sense.