Hello my pink butterfly-ey friends,
I don’t have a lot of time to articulate this thought, as I am at work but I was considering an idea on the state of mesmers in gw2 as compared to gw1. I see a lot of complaints from veteran gw1 players about how the gw2 mesmer doesn’t feel like the same class we all knew and loved. While I completely agree with the sentiment, gw2 is a very very different beast, and the odds of the mesmer resembling its earlier incarnation are slim to none. However, I think there are ways to keep the flavor of the current gw2 mesmer, with a dash of the old reactionary based fighting style.
It dawned on me at work today, what if we had conditional phantasms? Bear with me on this. Phantasms in the current form are incredibly boring (in my opinion) and really take a lot of the thinking out of the fight. Sure you have to position them correctly, but asides from that they pew pew and things die. But what if there were conditions to be met in order for the pew pewing to being? Let’s use the Gw1 skill Backfire as an example. In gw1 backfire was a hex that caused the enemy to take damage whenever casting a spell. What if we had a phantasm (such as iduelest) caused more damage than currently, but only if/when opponents were casting a spell? Another example could be the gw1 hex: clumsiness, which caused the enemy to fall over and take damage whenever using an auto-attack. Something like iswordsman would make sense here as it could leap in on an auto-attack and cause a knockdown.
Granted, I know this is all a pipe-dream, but I much prefer the mesmer as a reactionary class as opposed the proactive class it is now. Mesmers our supposed to make enemies consider their actions carefully, and with the current state of confusion we just don’t have the capability to do so. This will likely never happen, but I wonder what you guys think?
[edit] I should make clear that i don’t actually think or mean to suggest that something like this will/should be implemented. I just think it’s an interesting thought.