Guild Wars 2

This is one of the upcomming discussions about utilities. We all know them and we (almost) never use them: signets. Let’s discuss!

The current signets we have:

1. Signet of the Ether: Passive: Gain Health every few seconds, based on the number of active illusions you control.Active: Heal yourself and refresh all phantasm skill recharges.
2. Signet of Domination: Passive: Improved condition damage. Active: Stun your foe.
3. Signet of Illusions: Passive: Grants more health to your illusions.Active: Recharge your shatter skills.
4. Signet of Inspiration: Passive: Grants a random boon every ten seconds. Active: Copy all of your boons to nearby allies.
5. Signet of Midnight Passive: Improves boon duration. Active: Blind nearby foes.

Now the signet of the ether is sure worth getting and besides a small cd reduction it’s probably in a pretty fine state, so I’m gonna leave that alone.
The same goes for Signet of Domination. While I’m no fan of ‘’all or nothing’’ skills, I guess some ppl really make advantage of the long stun. Imo it could need some rework on a cooldown reduction to 35 seconds and apply 2 seconds of stun instead of 3 so you can use it more frequently.

The skills we’re mostly gonna look at are the last 3:

1. Signet of Illusions: Passive: Grants more health to your illusions.Active: Recharge your shatter skills.
2. Signet of Inspiration: Passive: Grants a random boon every ten seconds. Active: Copy all of your boons to nearby allies.
3. Signet of Midnight Passive: Improves boon duration. Active: Blind nearby foes.

1. Signet of Illusions: Passive: Grants more health to your illusions.Active: Recharge your shatter skills.
Passive: Grants more health to your illusions. (50%)
Active: Recharge your shatter skills.
Casting time 1.25 seconds
Cooldown: 90 seconds

Now as some of you might know, this skill was totally overpowered in the old days due it’s passive effect being 200%. This got nerfed to 50% and pretty much became…. useless. While I’m already not a big fan of the passive effect, I totally don’t understand the active effect.
Let’s start off with the cooldown: 90… wait.. really? 90 seconds? For what exactly? Recharging shatter skills. Okay well here’s my problem: We got a passive effect trait that occurs on 50% hp (Illusionary Invigoration) with a 60 seconds cooldown.
Now, you can look up any passive ‘’on % health’’ effect, cuz I’ve checked quite a lot of them, and from what I’ve seen all of them have the same cooldown as the utilites. So why don’t we? Yes we get a passive effect since it’s a signet, but asuming we’re almost constantly using the signet, we don’t notice anything from that passive effect. Hell, even if we would use it both ways, 90 seconds is a really long cooldown for the effect it does. 60 seconds would probably come close to being usefull. So here’s my rework:

Passive: Grants more health to your illusions. (50%)
Active: Recharge your shatter skills.
Casting time 1.25 seconds
Cooldown: 60 seconds

It’s not a massive rework, but certain arguments are needed to do so.

Let’s go on to the next one:
2. Signet of Inspiration: Passive: Grants a random boon every ten seconds. Active: Copy all of your boons to nearby allies.
Passive: Grants a random boon every ten seconds.
Active: Copy all of your boons to nearby allies.
Aegis: 10 s
Fury: 5 s
Might: 20 s
Protection: 3 s
Regeneration: 5 s
Retaliation: 5 s
Swiftness: 10 s
Vigor: 5 s
Range: 600
Casting time: 0.75 seconds
Cooldown: 45 seconds
Amount of targets: 5

Great skill, totally matches mesmer! Too bad it’s not really worth getting. 45 seconds? Let’s asume we go with the trait, 36 seconds. Ok decent, decent, but like.. you would need to somehow stack boons massively and then share with your team. This could be done with lyssa runes, but since they got nerfed, so did this signet (sort of.. it’s like removing a combo). Now we got some good forms of stacking boons quite fast such as mirror blade, double leap in a light field with #3 sword, #2 staff into a light field, F2 combined with a trait to gain retaliation, regeneration on 75% hp, protection-aegis-regeneration on stealth from PU, but none of these come out as super high duration stacking boons. The moment you start sharing these with your allies, they will be mostly already on 90% of their duration which will be like 10-15 seconds tops.
Also, even if you share the boons your party gave, then unless they are really bad at stacking might, I don’t really see the effectiveness of it since you can usually gain the cap on stacking boons with 5 guys easily.
Another thing would be; the passive effect is really… slow. 1 boon every 10 seconds would mean you have like… 1 boon up constantly? Woho? 6-8 seconds would come out much more viable. So to sum up:
Reduce the cooldown to 35 seconds, reduce the passive effect to ‘’Grands a random boon every 6/8 seconds.’’

3. Signet of Midnight Passive: Improves boon duration. Active: Blind nearby foes.
Passive: Improves boon duration.
Active: Blind nearby foes.

Boon Duration Increase: 10%
Blind: 3 s
Radius: 360
Breaks stun
Range: 360
Cooldown: 30 seconds

Honestly, who uses this?
1. Boon duration increase, passive effect: 10% increase is just way too less.
Besides, I don’t think we need a lot boon duration anyway. We got 30 points to
spend in chaos to gain 30%, we can gain 15% from traveler runes and to waste a
utility for this would be kinda meh since ‘’boon stacking’’ builds aren’t
really viable as we don’t have things like ‘’Do x% more damage for every boon
you have’’ like elementalists have (new idea for a 25 points trait?).
2. Blind nearby enemies for 3 seconds, 360 radius.
Hah okay. 3 seconds blind on using? On a 30 seconds cooldown? Let’s be honest,
no one is gonna be using this signet for this reason. It could aswell just be
left away and the signet would be as go… eh.. bad as it is now.
3. Breaks stun
Do we need more stunbreakers? Like really? We got sword that can break stun,
we got blink and decoy that both break stun and with staff you can just keep
portaling away if you’re stunned. I don’t really think the stun makes much
sense on this signet. Sure for a class that lacks stun breakers it can be
good, but for mesmer? Nope.
4. 30 seconds cooldown
Well I’m not gonna go too deep on this, but 30 seconds for the effects is
kinda… sad. Especially if you look what the traits for signets do and on
what they’re based. Not really to have long cooldowns on it.
Okay so I pretty much dislike everything about this signet, ‘’But doiid what
would you do with it?!’‘, well here’s my rework:

Signet of Ice (Don’t really have much creativity on names…)
Passive: Grants a 25% increase in movement speed.
Active: Blasts the area around you, applying chill to nearby enemies.

Chill: 2 s
Radius: 360
Combo Finisher: Blast
Cooldown: 20 seconds
Casting Time: 0.5 seconds

Discuss!

Agree that illusions could use a buff. Don’t see the need to change the other two.. ether if anything needs a redo imo.

Ps I love Sig of midnight when I run a staff anything with phantasmal regeneration. And I know it’s not a popular view but I don’t think our class needs a passive speed boost trait skill or utility..

Signet of the Ether:
Perfect.

Signet of Domination:
Pretty ok, maybe lower the cd.

Signet of Illusions:
Good in PvE with defender, can’t say anthing about wvw / pvp about it. Never used it.

Signet of Inspiration:
35 sec CD instead of 45. Still good signet.

Signet of Midnight Passive:
Needs a blast finisher and 20% boon dura.

Swish.2463:

Agree that illusions could use a buff. Don’t see the need to change the other two.. ether if anything needs a redo imo.

Ps I love Sig of midnight when I run a staff anything with phantasmal regeneration. And I know it’s not a popular view but I don’t think our class needs a passive speed boost trait skill or utility..

Then we’re still pretty stuck to travelers, cause obviously people do think its needed as 90% of the mesmer roamers use it.
Also for pve I can imagine a lot people will like it a lot more if they can move a bit faster. At the moment a mesmer on low level is like the slowest you can get after a necromancer.

Played signet for a long time, still like the game style because it’s unusual, but it’s still UP.

Signet of the Ether: It’s well balanced. Can remove 3 conditions with all traits.

Signet of Domination: Long cooldown, but also one of the longest stun of the game.

Signet of Illusions: The most useless one. Long charging and cooldown. Yes you can chain distortion : F4 -> SoL -> F4. That’s it.

Signet of Inspiration: 25 % Speed boost should be on this signet and on passive. Active is ok, despite maybe a long cooldown.

Signet of Midnight : The only signet to get a real buff from signet traits. It’s the distortion on demand signet. Beside that, it’s a pretty boring signet without traits. Buff the boon duration and shorter cooldown.

When you trait Blurred Inscription, it’s because you want to play your defense actively. The trait only works when you completed your casting time. Only Signet of Midnight needs no casting time. You don’t want Distortion after your casting time, you need it immediately. If they could change to make Distortion works while casting a Signet, it would helps.

@BlackDevil: First of all, in PvE a Necromancer can outrun a Mesmer. Warhorn, 25% Signet, Spectral Walk, done.

Now to discuss the signets, they need to be reworked.
Signet of Domination: In my eyes lacks a synergy in itself. Is the passiv any good if you’re interested in the active use?
Signet of Illusions: The active is just bad, on this cd certainly and on a lower one perhaps still. A shatter mesmer will most likely take the traited reset and the cds aren’t that long if you’re into illusions anyway .. Even if the activ wasn’t that bad the passiv doesn’t synergize with it (again). Yeah my Illusions have a slightly longer life on the way to their death..
Signet of Inspiration: Has a strong active especially in combination with the steal. The passiv is RNG and I hate that. Please change something with this RNG and add a all time buff. Signets give 180 to attributes and this one doesn’t, it gives a boon with its pros and cons..
Signet of Midnight: No synergy (third time, BINGO!). My idea for a little change would be to make it a counter stealth skill. Add a revealed effect to everyone affected by the blind.

Even if these get buffed, there doesn’t seem to be a concept behind them. Traited they give distortion and condition cleanse? Why? That’s like taking ketchup only because that’s the way to get more french fries.

Decent suggestions, though I think Signet of Midnight would be better flopped over.

Passive: 25% chance to blind an when hit(5 second CD)
Active: Double time on all active boons(30 second CD)

@LunarNacht; Well if we take blink and staff I wouldnt be too sure about that combined with focus/runes but yeah, you would have to sacrifice some kitten for that.

Anyway, Signet of domination is often used in condition builds for those who try to escape. It also gives a nice boost in condition damage during the fight, though as stated above I do agree it should get a lower cd and a shorter stun. However, they do remain signets, so should be used as passive aswell as active effects.

Signet of Illusions, well… yeah pretty much look at OP. Maybe it should also be instant cast like signet of midnight? Like that you keep it a bit hidden (besides that theres a signet just gone off you) to do a burst, right after you bursted. Like if someone dodges your mindwrack you be like; oh no man, I got a 2nd burst for you!

Signet of inspiration; the passive and active matches eachother sort of… but I can see a change in it. I prefer to get the passive effect of signet of midnight, buff it to 20% boon duration, keep the active effect and have signet of midnight as stated above. Would solve the RNG, a bit of the lack of blast finishers and the uselessness of the signets itself.

The traits of signets should be changed I agree, maybe something to discuss in this thread? At the moment I have little to no time so can do later on today.

The thing bothering me about Signets is that they apparently lack focus. Signet traits encourage using all-Signet builds because – let’s be honest – they do not provide enough when used with only one or two Signets. The issue I see is that Signets are difficult to run within one build because some of them support only specific builds. Aside from that, some Signets plainly need a buff to be relevant.

Utility skills

Signet of Ether
I personally don’t like it but it appears to be somewhat balanced. Any increase in health per second could lead to a Healing Signet situation. However, considering that a permanent uptime of 3 Illusions is a bit unrealistic, I think the devs could consider moving a slight portion of the healing power per Illusion to a default regen. For example, make it heal 100 health per second per default but keep the current maximum.

Signet of Midnight
Most boons available to Mesmers got a very short duration. Increasing the boon duration up to 15% or even 20% should not be a big deal. I also like the idea of a boon duration aura mentioned earlier as alternative, but this might be too guardian-elementalist-ish.

The active is a rather underhwelming stunbreaker when compared to Blink or Decoy. I enjoyed the suggestion of also applying a pbae chill for 2-3s on activation (on top of the blind). Trading mobility/stealth for some soft CC might be more appealing than its current state.

Signet of Inspiration
Give us that 25% movement speed already. Seriously.

I love the active effect since it opens up unique strategies but it can only be used in niche builds. If at least the passive provided something universally useful this Signet would be used a lot more.

Signet of Illusions
Personally, I feel that the recharge is way too high, especially when compared to Illsionary Invigoration. Besides that, I guess the skill is fine although it only benefits Illusion (Shatter/Phantasm) centered builds.

Signet of Domination
The most difficult one for me. The stun is pretty awesome although on a very long cooldown. But I’m extremly bothered by the passive stat bonus it provides. I would love seeing the condition damage being changed to condition duration so it can be used in either power, condition or hybrid builds more efficiently.

Associated traits

Blurred Inscriptions
I agree with Krispera here. Although, it would mean that Signets would become uninterruptable, gaining Distortion after the cast ended results in a very weird and unintuitive gameplay.

Empowered Mantras
Yey! Many people hated the change but I loved it being moved to Domination. For me, the next step is turning it into Empowered Signets and making it affect Signets instead of Mantras.