Guild Wars 2

There are a few cooldowns on mesmer that don’t seem to make a lot of sense. It seems like these are easy places to target in balance tuning – they are small changes, and if you get them wrong, you can change them back easily.

It feels like just reducing the cooldown on some of these things would give people more incentive to try them and maybe get more variety in builds. Here’s the list of things that feel like they could be shaved.

Phantasmal mage (30 seconds) – only shield is 30 and it has a mechanic to get 2 uses (all others are 18 – 25 seconds base cooldown)
Chaos armor (staff 4 – 35 seconds) – as a personal-use only skill without a huge impact, it feels long
Arcane thievery (45 seconds) – it’s a long time for a chance at swapping that can fail
Mirror images (45 seconds) – it could be fun as an offensive/defensive choice, but the cooldown is so long I think it’s hard to justify taking a utility slot

I don’t know if the next balance change is already done, but it feels like a little trim on some of these times could be good and easy to do.

I don’t know if mirror images should have its cooldown reduced considering how easy it already is for chronomancers to generate clones like candy, but I agree with the other skills being looked at

To give suggestions for that list:

iMage could be 25s (along with a functionality buff)
Staff 4 could be 20s (along with functionality buff)
Arcane Thievery should be 20s
Mirror Images could be 40s (matching with Decoy)

You could reduce the cool down of iMage and arcane thievery to 10s but it wouldn’t mean anything as they don’t hit 90% of the time.

I do agree that chaos armour should be 20s though and mirror images 40s to put it on par with decoy as an offensive stun break.

If Arcane Thievery were AoE around its target, would people use it then?

William Bradley Knight.2609:

If Arcane Thievery were AoE around its target, would people use it then?

While hitting 90% of the time when it should? Sure.

William Bradley Knight.2609:

If Arcane Thievery were AoE around its target, would people use it then?

On same cooldown? It would be so OP. Imagine mesmer using it on aproaching melee and posibly striping stability/protection/resistance, along with applying itself up to 15 boons and than even sharing all of that. I’m talking about WvW ofc.