Decent powerDPS build, but still.....
When does a dps ele ever switch to water or earth? That’s half their class mechanic ignored too. Or druids not swapping pets if their group brings enough cc. Every build opts against using some specific components of its given kit.
Oh and technically minstrel chrono uses shatters to gain some extra boons for what little it’s worth.
Minstrel chrono is not a dps build.
As for ele, switching to water or earth is just switching to more defensive/supporty skills. Its not as if eles aren’t using attunement swapping or overloads at all. Don’t play enough druid to know what to say about its pet swapping, or lack thereof. But again, a druid a support class, so we should be comparing cRanger to the power mesmer build.
And none of that changes the fact that we have a self defeating mechanic. It literally destroys itself when we use our F skills.
Would it be op if we something like this?:
You summon a phantasm or 3, let them do their thing, let’s say they do 50k damage in total from few of their attacks, then you shatter them (mindwrack) and each phantasm or clone now deals 25% of the total damage they have done in the time they were summoned?
Let’s say for every 10 seconds they were summoned, daze from diversion would last 1/4 longer?
That would give mesmer a reason to let them attack, but also a reason to shatter.
Minstrel chrono is not a dps build.
Not every build needs to use every aspect of the class mechanic, I said it’s not much but we have one endgame-viable build that does use shatters. I personally also use F3 on pretty much any raid breakbar and F4 to block things like sloth shake but my static isn’t good enough to fullclear every week so maybe that’s just for casual scrubs.
As for ele, switching to water or earth is just switching to more defensive/supporty skills. Its not as if eles aren’t using attunement swapping or overloads at all. Don’t play enough druid to know what to say about its pet swapping, or lack thereof. But again, a druid a support class, so we should be comparing cRanger to the power mesmer build.
Condi ele exclusively camps fire, some guardian and warrior specs might only press F1 for a damage modifier trait, necro rarely used more than (RS5+)RS4. A burn guardian built around VoJ passive procs is somewhat decent and technically never “uses” the class mechanic. The vast majority of ranger pets see no use in PvE. All of these could and should be criticised but given the general state of the game mesmer not using shatters in one dps build is not a major concern.
And none of that changes the fact that we have a self defeating mechanic. It literally destroys itself when we use our F skills.
Until the next round of PvP nerfs roll in I prefer to think of it as an optional choice: you shouldn’t shatter and blow up your dps, but you can if the situation calls for it. Like an ele who can switch to water, lay a field, switch to earth and blast it where a low-health thief would just keel over and die.
I would much prefer to have CoF replaced with an illusion retarget skill (illusions last 1s after a target dies so you can retarget them) and the condis be shifted to MW/traits, that way the dps build would at lest use 1-2 “shatters”. I quite like the current phantasm concept though since it focuses more on planning and resource management than mechanically grinding rotations which the “single-use phantasms” I’ve seen suggested would inevitably devolve into.
Edit:
Would it be op if we something like this?:
You summon a phantasm or 3, let them do their thing, let’s say they do 50k damage in total from few of their attacks, then you shatter them (mindwrack) and each phantasm or clone now deals 25% of the total damage they have done in the time they were summoned?
Let’s say for every 10 seconds they were summoned, daze from diversion would last 1/4 longer?
That would give mesmer a reason to let them attack, but also a reason to shatter.
Hard to track/display, incredibly confusing if anyone ever got hit with it in PvP, nothing new over what we could already do with Chronophantasma if chrono had a viable dps spec.
(edited by Photoloss.4817)
Minstrel chrono is not a dps build.
Not every build needs to use every aspect of the class mechanic, I said it’s not much but we have one endgame-viable build that does use shatters. I personally also use F3 on pretty much any raid breakbar and F4 to block things like sloth shake but my static isn’t good enough to fullclear every week so maybe that’s just for casual scrubs.
As for ele, switching to water or earth is just switching to more defensive/supporty skills. Its not as if eles aren’t using attunement swapping or overloads at all. Don’t play enough druid to know what to say about its pet swapping, or lack thereof. But again, a druid a support class, so we should be comparing cRanger to the power mesmer build.
Condi ele exclusively camps fire, some guardian and warrior specs might only press F1 for a damage modifier trait, necro rarely used more than (RS5+)RS4. A burn guardian built around VoJ passive procs is somewhat decent and technically never “uses” the class mechanic. The vast majority of ranger pets see no use in PvE. All of these could and should be criticised but given the general state of the game mesmer not using shatters in one dps build is not a major concern.
And none of that changes the fact that we have a self defeating mechanic. It literally destroys itself when we use our F skills.
Until the next round of PvP nerfs roll in I prefer to think of it as an optional choice: you shouldn’t shatter and blow up your dps, but you can if the situation calls for it. Like an ele who can switch to water, lay a field, switch to earth and blast it where a low-health thief would just keel over and die.
I would much prefer to have CoF replaced with an illusion retarget skill (illusions last 1s after a target dies so you can retarget them) and the condis be shifted to MW/traits, that way the dps build would at lest use 1-2 “shatters”. I quite like the current phantasm concept though since it focuses more on planning and resource management than mechanically grinding rotations which the “single-use phantasms” I’ve seen suggested would inevitably devolve into.
Edit:
Would it be op if we something like this?:
You summon a phantasm or 3, let them do their thing, let’s say they do 50k damage in total from few of their attacks, then you shatter them (mindwrack) and each phantasm or clone now deals 25% of the total damage they have done in the time they were summoned?
Let’s say for every 10 seconds they were summoned, daze from diversion would last 1/4 longer?
That would give mesmer a reason to let them attack, but also a reason to shatter.Hard to track/display, incredibly confusing if anyone ever got hit with it in PvP, nothing new over what we could already do with Chronophantasma if chrono had a viable dps spec.
You’re missing the point, very few of the classes are actually punished for using their class mechanic, the only one you can possibly say that does is core necro though as you say reaper does still use it for 5+4 and possibly 3 for CC.
Sure if a guard uses F1 they mess up but they are encouraged to use F2-3 when needed without penalty. Indeed I don’t know a single dps build for any other class that doesn’t use their class mechanic except rangers.
You push one button and trade all your DPS for an ineffectual burst by comparison. I don’t know why people try to defend this this.
This sucks even more when you have to summon each phantasm over again, sometimes popping your kitten healing skill to make it go faster. No other class has to put up with this crap.
I was hoping their was gonna be more might stacking shatter builds when I saw Persistence of memory and how offhand sword changed, but lol.
Cool build tho, to bad Chrono can’t have nice (power based) things, and this has to sacrifice insp too.
“I control time and space; you can’t break free.~”
“Maybe I was the illusion all along!”
“Maybe I was the illusion all along!”
Yea, apharma gets it. We are actually punished for using our F skills. Other classes might have slightly less DPS for a few seconds if they use theirs, but they aren’t punished like mesmer is. So seeing yet more phantasm buffs in this patch is pretty disheartening. Yes, its nice to finally have a decent DPS build, but it still suffers all the problems that phantasm builds suffer, mainly that it is a single target build and still has a noticeable ramp up time. And to get that we actually have to ignore our f skills, or all of our setup is undone for a tiny (for PvE at any rate) tiny little “burst”. Having an effect to recharge our phantasm skills by 2 sec for each illusion shattered go baseline (and then balancing IR and chronophantasma around that) would help out a lot, but even then it wouldn’t change the fact that our mechanic is literally self defeating. Imagine the outcry if rangers’ pets died on pet swap, yet that is roughly what we have to deal with when we use our shatters.
Illusions are half our class mechanic and we use those all the time. Why are you so fixated to have one specific skill used in one specific build type? I agree we could use many small improvements and already mentioned a few, but why are you desperate to spam F1 off cooldown?
Rangers by the way rarely cared when their pet died outside of top tier speedruns, and gladly sacrificed it by pulling all the group’s condis onto the poor thing. Warriors don’t have much of a class mechanic to begin with, thieves don’t get much for raids either, engineer is a mess, eles use half of theirs and necros arguably less than half (1 skill, 2 more for situational utility, the damage absorption rarely ever matters)
Mesmer still suffers from a mechanic that is self defeating. Looking here, we can hit close to 30k DPS if optimized with a power build https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/6siame/power_mes_post_patch_285k/
But notice that to do that we can never use our shatters. Why is it that 1/2 of our mechanic is ignored? Its because its a self defeating mechanic Anet. Using our shatters should never hurt our DPS by so much and for such a long period of time compared to other classes, it just shouldn’t. Why is it that this is never addressed by you? Why do we just have to ignore our F skills to have any chance at a decent DPS build?
Actually, mesmers’ mechanics are built with an intrinsic contradiction : illusions (mostly phantasms) are desired for their effect yet you need to shatter them too. You can have both sides of the coin shine at the same time unless you go : summon phantasm, let it attack once, then shatter it.
Currently, with the chrono bomber trend, I don’t think lots of mesmers care the slightest about what they summon, given the core of the strategy is to shatter them. Now, that kind of build (and I think mirage will also have this flavour) focuses more on fighting alongside the phantasms, which prevents from shattering them.
While I do agree I hate having to resist the urge to hit my shatters while on boss fights or when going against particularly strong enemies; I can also say that shatters are not a full waste of damage. When looking at trash mobs, especially large groups of trash mobs, where we are mostly single targeted with our weapons; a well used shatter can decimate the grouping of enemies before you.
I run Condi Shatter for the majority of content and can honestly say under estimating/under valuing shatters is a mistake. Yes, it takes away from overall dps in the long run, but when it comes to trying to burst down trash mobs, or even enemies in PvP/WvW, shatters are very useful.
Do not take this as me defending the shatter system, though. I still wish Mesmer of GW2 were more like Mesmer of GW1: Massive health and energy degeneration (energy in form of endurance, I suppose, or cool downs) with a very counter based play style. We went from very deadly Hexers in GW1 to falling closer to the performer aspect, in that we are entertaining with our pretty butterfly illusions, in GW2.
(edited by Vyriis.6258)
Do not take this as me defending the shatter system, though. I still wish Mesmer of GW2 were more like Mesmer of GW1: Massive health and energy degeneration (energy in form of endurance, I suppose, or cool downs) with a very counter based play style. We went from very deadly Hexers in GW1 to falling closer to the performer aspect, in that we are entertaining with our pretty butterfly illusions, in GW2.
And be absolutely worthless in PvE? No thanks? (never played GW1 but we’re talking about a mesmer rework not a full game redesign, what little we have in interrupt builds is patently useless against breakbars)
Mind you MW is great for finishing off open world mobs and a decent filler for tagging, it’s really only in sustained dps situations where a burst damage skill with a cost is not desirable.
Do not take this as me defending the shatter system, though. I still wish Mesmer of GW2 were more like Mesmer of GW1: Massive health and energy degeneration (energy in form of endurance, I suppose, or cool downs) with a very counter based play style. We went from very deadly Hexers in GW1 to falling closer to the performer aspect, in that we are entertaining with our pretty butterfly illusions, in GW2.
And be absolutely worthless in PvE? No thanks? (never played GW1 but we’re talking about a mesmer rework not a full game redesign, what little we have in interrupt builds is patently useless against breakbars)
Mind you MW is great for finishing off open world mobs and a decent filler for tagging, it’s really only in sustained dps situations where a burst damage skill with a cost is not desirable.
Mesmers were godly in PVE during Gw1 and that’s because the game was mroe difficult it was akin to something like BNS today in that the mobs mainly used our own skills against us. There were tons of skills added in gw1 and the mobs got them too so when an elementalist undead in Orr fir instance begins to nuke your party the mesmer could interrupt and increase the cd of that skill. Strength in PVP easily converted to strength in PVE because of this and the pvp was better to a degree not because of mechanics but because people knew the basics from their time in pve.
Yeah in GW2 I’d say that would be worthless but then again the new Warr elite is more of a traditional Mesmer than our entire class. So I’d say it would still be viable based on Spellbreaker merely existing.
Yeah in GW2 I’d say that would be worthless but then again the new Warr elite is more of a traditional Mesmer than our entire class. So I’d say it would still be viable based on Spellbreaker merely existing.
You seem to have missed the “Spellbreaker is a useless PvP-only spec” doomsaying, and the fact it’s an optional elite spec added to a class which (prior to this patch anyway) already had better dps and better group buffs than mesmer, and an actual viable dps build on top of that. Sure give the mesmer a hexlord elite spec in the next expansion but don’t make it the core design of the entire class!
Mesmers were godly in PVE during Gw1
This is objectively not true. Mesmers were for long time pretty weak in PvE, with Rangers being better interrupters. Tons of their skills were pretty useless in PvE, where you had tons of enemies at the same time (hard to interrupt all of them), enemies had higher Energy regen (so no energy denial to stop skills) etc.
Then came in PvE (and human player at the same time) only skills, which changed Mesmers into very good defence ignoring AoE nukers. There is a reason why Cry of Pain was on every human Mesmer bar. This however wasn’t the favourite role most Mesmers wanted.
Mesmers got really good in PvE only in the final years of GW1, after BIG patches and rebalances – however, some people still argue that it was better to run Heroes (AI Companions) as Mesmers than to be one yourself, as you could have extremely powerful passive human player only defensive skills on melee classes, while AI had no big lag problems and inhuman reflexes for interrupts/denial.
My point wasn’t saying that all of GW1 Mes would work in GW2. Enemy denial just would not function the same way because it was focused around using your enemies energy and skills against them, which they neither have energy nor a large pool of skills to matter. However, what I am looking at is how hexes worked with other Mesmer skills and how they worked against the enemy.
For example: If our shatters applied hexes on enemies. Mind Wreck could, not only have the burst damage but also, apply a hex that caused the enemy, and surrounding enemies, to take damage when they are hit by an illusions. Or Cry of Frustration could apply Confusion on shatter and a hex that would apply more confusion to target and surrounding foes when struck by illusions This would allow shattering to work for both burst and sustain in that shattering would kill our illusions, but any illusion attack after that (for a set duration) would do extra damage. Balancing of damage per illusion shattered, of course, to make this not broken; but you see what I’m going for here, I hope.
Maybe I’m a noob but, you shatter your phantasms if :
1. You need/desire the effect of the shatter (invuln, boon strip, stun, ect)
2. If they’re about to die anyway
3. The foe is about to die
4. You need to change targets
I’d hardly say any of that are rare occurrences therefore punishes the mesmer or invalidates shatters.