Guild Wars 2

It is time to go into detail why this was the most Ill thought grandmaster trait Anet has ever made.

For those who don’t know what Disruptors Sustainment does it grants you 1000 HP for 5 seconds when you interrupt a foe.

Wow! That seems really good right? Well it’s not. First thing I am going to cover is the lack of skills to utilize healing power for mesmers. (Restorative Illusions will be ignored since it is a grandmaster trait competing with Disruptor) We have:

Restorative Mantras
Regeneration
MoR
Ether Feast
Mirror
Signet of the Ether

Now to list how badly all these scale with healing power. Also notice that 4 of these skills are purely selfish?

-Restorative Mantras: Heals 2600. With 1300 HP (healing power) it heals for 260 more
-Regen: Heals 130. With 1300 HP it heals for 162 more

These 2 are our only means of support healing. Pretty pitiful for a grandmaster trait isnt it? Now let’s look at our selfish healing.

-MoR: Heals 540 more per charge
-Ether Feast: Heals 1300 more main portion. 130 more per illusion.
-Mirror: Heals 780 more
-Signet of the Ether: On activate heal, heals 1105 more. The passive extra healing is just so horrible I am not even going to bother list it (it is that bad)

Now these seem like a much improvement right? Wrong. The key is their CDs. Ether feast takes the most advantage from this by having a 1:1 ratio with healing power. However if timed right you would only get 1,690 extra healing every 20 seconds not only is this an actual low amount added the the abyssal high amount Ether feast heals already but the trade off is a Grandmaster trait in the inspiration line – our worst trait line.

Now do I need to even cover restorative mantras and regeneration scaling with healing power? It is awful. Garbage. Terrible. Ignoring the fact that nobody takes restorative mantras the activation down time is horrible. Let’s face it nobody uses pain so the shortest CD would be recovery but you need to be taking damage in order to recharge this, next to that is cleansing on a 20 sec CD. So realistically you are only activating restorative mantra every 20 seconds if you spam cleansing on CD for some reason. Stability and Daze mantra are way too situational to be reliable. Worst of all you would be taking restorative mantras over the focus reflect trait which is the only redeeming factor of this trait line.

Next regeneration. Since phantasms will be giving perma regeneration this actually seems pretty good. Not. The buff only last 5 seconds. So if you could time the 1000 HP right for the regeneration it will give a total of 625 healing. Combined with how often you won’t be interrupting foes – this is pretty awful.

Now lets cover activation. PvE you will never ever activate this. Why? Because of defiant. Not only does it make interrupts useless but if defiant falls off and someone else interrupts the mob. No healing power for you. PvP is equally useless – no skills to make use of the HP, stability countering this, not a lot of interrupts we have, and horrible scaling and lets face it. Between this and restorative illusions, restorative illusions is better.

Now. This Vs Restorative Illusions. Taking into consideration pure self healing of ether feast. Restorative illusions will heal for 902 with 1 illusion shattered. That is almost as much as 1000 HP would give you for ether feast. With 3 illusions that is only 20 less healing then 1000 HP gives ether feast. Not only that but restorative does not have a CD, so between 4 shatters that is about 4k more then 1000HP can give you for just ether feast and only ether feast since it is the only healing skill we have that scales 1:1 with healing power. Shatters are also on a shorter CD then ether feast, with nothing in the illusions line mind wrack has a 15 sec CD. You would be healing for the same amount AND being doing damage! Let’s add shatter CD reduction traits and shatter reset traits and you got tons better healing then 1000HP can give you.

Now this has gotten long so lets just summarize:

-Mesmers have horrible scaling with healing power.
-Mesmers don’t have any healing skills to make use of this
-Almost zero activation time in PvE
-Inspiration trait line is our worst trait line and generally is a waste of points (except for reflect focus trait). Going full 30 is just awful
-Timing 5 seconds of extra healing power with our healing CDs is almost impossible (because it last so short, what if our healing skill is on CD already?)
-Restorative Illusions outclasses this BY A LOT

Sorry Anet but you kittened up. There was zero consideration when you guys decided to make this “grandmaster trait”.

Welcome Disruptors Sustainment to the trait graveyard.

While I agree with the general statement here, I feel the need to make a few corrections.

Ether feast has 2 components: Main heal and per illusion. The main heal scales 1:1 and each illusion scales .1, so with 3 illusions the entire heal maxes out at a 1.3 scaling, so with 1000 healing power you add 1300 to the heal.

Both regeneration and signet of the ether are ticking skills. This means you can’t just look at the scaling for a full view.

Signet of the ether (with 3 clones, as this is best case scenario) ticks at .125 per tick, one tick every 3 seconds, for a total over 20 seconds (to match ether feast) of .833, or an increase of 833. However, since the buff only lasts 5 seconds, you’d only get 1 tick of this….so yeah, it’s actually pretty horrific.

Regeneration is actually the one healing effect in the entire game that scales amazingly with healing power. Regeneration ticks once per second, not once every 3 seconds, at .125 per tick, so over 20 seconds it rounds out to at 2.5 modifier, or an increase of 2500 hp over 20 seconds. Again though, since the buff only lasts 5 seconds, you’d only get the increase for 5 ticks, a total of 625.

yeah this one of those leftover traits they just randomly threw at us mesmers, because they didnt know what to give us. it will not be utilized at all…no mesmer build would ever put 30 point into a traitline for such a useless trait that we cant even properly utilize…

id rather have ip moved down a notch so wvw mesmers could actually shatter in zergs without having to go 30 into illusions. there was sooo many ideas out there for new traits and soo many things they could have added just to help our lack of aoe skills, but we get these horrendous gm traits….

oh well ill try the interrupt one eventhough it will be quiet useless as all my interrupts are pretty much single target skills.

anet, we need multi target non ai based skills/traits. u took that away with the massive nerf of glamours and the se new gm traits are not well thought through, please go the the mesmer forum and check all the ideas and discussions so u know what we actually would need.

Ah sorry I was reading Phantasmal healing wrong. Read it as five sec of regen ticks every 3 seconds. I’ll fix that.

For ether feast I already showed the bonus healing for the extra illusions. I left it off my comparison at the bottom just for ease since the scaling isn’t 1:1 for that portion and the bonus healing is pretty awful.

zexion.5842:

Ah sorry I was reading Phantasmal healing wrong. Read it as five sec of regen ticks every 3 seconds. I’ll fix that.

For ether feast I already showed the bonus healing for the extra illusions. I left it off my comparison at the bottom just for ease since the scaling isn’t 1:1 for that portion and the bonus healing is pretty awful.

You mathed wrong on ether feast. You have it as 1300 for the main heal and 130 more per illusion, when it’s 1000 for the main heal and 100 more per illusion for a total of 1300 with 3 illusions.

Pyroathiest.4168:

zexion.5842:

Ah sorry I was reading Phantasmal healing wrong. Read it as five sec of regen ticks every 3 seconds. I’ll fix that.

For ether feast I already showed the bonus healing for the extra illusions. I left it off my comparison at the bottom just for ease since the scaling isn’t 1:1 for that portion and the bonus healing is pretty awful.

You mathed wrong on ether feast. You have it as 1300 for the main heal and 130 more per illusion, when it’s 1000 for the main heal and 100 more per illusion for a total of 1300 with 3 illusions.

Nope. You get 300 healing power for going 30 in inspiration so it would have a base of 300.

zexion.5842:

Pyroathiest.4168:

zexion.5842:

Ah sorry I was reading Phantasmal healing wrong. Read it as five sec of regen ticks every 3 seconds. I’ll fix that.

For ether feast I already showed the bonus healing for the extra illusions. I left it off my comparison at the bottom just for ease since the scaling isn’t 1:1 for that portion and the bonus healing is pretty awful.

You mathed wrong on ether feast. You have it as 1300 for the main heal and 130 more per illusion, when it’s 1000 for the main heal and 100 more per illusion for a total of 1300 with 3 illusions.

Nope. You get 300 healing power for going 30 in inspiration so it would have a base of 300.

Ah, if you’re counting the 30 points in inspiration, then ok. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense though, since any good PvE build will be a minimum of 20 points in, if not 25.

What Pyro said, this is only really powerful in combination with Regeneration, and it is actually really strong there. Only I doubt it’s enough.

But honestly, +1000 Healing Power seems ok. This is more an issue with healing power scaling as a whole, game-wide.

Agree with the OP, this looks utterly useless. Creating new GM traits that are this utterly useless is a waste of ANets valuable time/resources, and only serves to anger/alienate players.

It’s obvious this is just “filler” in order to claim we created new GM traits for every line for every profession. If you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all.

I still think it is a very interesting trait for a Mantra build. I guess we have to actually try it to figure out if a combination of Restorative Mantras and Regeneration will be enhanced enough to make this trait worthit.

However, maybe the devs should consider a different bonus on interrupt because of the bad scaling on most heals. For example, make all healing mechanics heal 25-50% more as they did it with Aquatic Benevolence but also affecting the Mesmer. That certainly would make it appealing. It would still require skillful play because of the trigger on interrupt.

Some questions:

If the trait is so obviously bad, why haven’t the devs responded here?
How could a trait so terrible have gotten past the Q/E teams?
What could the use case for this trait be given how bad it is?

Given the above, this trait seems like a “filler” or “make work” item, where the game architect was trying to balance new content “count” across the classes without regard for usability. What does it say when they release content no one will ever use, or at best people will try and then quickly never use again due to it being so bad.

The mechanics of heal power are known, the analysis in this thread is irrefutable.

Just let restorative mantra’s scale better with healing power (I.e. 0,8 instead of 0.2) and this trait will be worth looking at.
Though we really should get some more aoe interrupts to make interrupt builds viable. Chaos storm is pretty unreliable and the I-wave + focus pull got a too long cooldown to make up for aoe interrupts.

Pyroathiest.4168:

zexion.5842:

Pyroathiest.4168:

zexion.5842:

Ah sorry I was reading Phantasmal healing wrong. Read it as five sec of regen ticks every 3 seconds. I’ll fix that.

For ether feast I already showed the bonus healing for the extra illusions. I left it off my comparison at the bottom just for ease since the scaling isn’t 1:1 for that portion and the bonus healing is pretty awful.

You mathed wrong on ether feast. You have it as 1300 for the main heal and 130 more per illusion, when it’s 1000 for the main heal and 100 more per illusion for a total of 1300 with 3 illusions.

Nope. You get 300 healing power for going 30 in inspiration so it would have a base of 300.

Ah, if you’re counting the 30 points in inspiration, then ok. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense though, since any good PvE build will be a minimum of 20 points in, if not 25.

This is a grandmaster trait. So in order to even take it you need 30 points in inspiration which would give you a base of 300 HP. So if you take this trait you will have a minimum of 300 HP at all times – 1300 if you proc.

Diego Vargas.3058:

Some questions:

If the trait is so obviously bad, why haven’t the devs responded here?
How could a trait so terrible have gotten past the Q/E teams?

You do know other traits are just as equally useless for not only mesmer but other professions as well. Retalitory demise for example.

BlackDevil.9268:

Just let restorative mantra’s scale better with healing power (I.e. 0,8 instead of 0.2) and this trait will be worth looking at.

This is a general HP scaling issue. Every skill in the whole game scales like KITTEN …

I’ll paste my comments from another thread:

I read this trait as stacking in duration (not intensity). Meaning every interrupt gets you 5s, behaving much like the old furious interruption gave you fury for 4s. If it stacks like this, we have some interesting potential in support builds. If it doesn’t stack duration, it sux bad and needs to be ignored.

Obviously the net gain isn’t from restorative mantras, it’s from our phantasm’s regeneration and ether feast. Ether feast immediately gets 1,300 increased healing at max effect with 3 illusions. That’s not alarmingly huge, but it’s sure decent. And we get another 125 healing per second with regen, giving a berserker mesmer 300 healing/sec from regen. Yeah you gotta go 30 in inspiration but assuming the duration stacks, this just isn’t something to ignore IMO.

The concern of not reliably proc’ing the trait is valid, but for those who have played AoE rupt builds for a long time, you all know how often they proc, enough to make something like this deserve a look.

I’ll add to that, on the surface even if it does stack in duration, the trait seems a bit weak for a grandmaster and might be better placed in master.

Also only the high level changes were announced. There are other weapon/skill updates yet unknown which may (or not) make this trait more appealing, source here. Maybe there is a change to RM healing power scaling coming (doubtful, but we won’t know until we know).

Xyonon.3987:

BlackDevil.9268:

Just let restorative mantra’s scale better with healing power (I.e. 0,8 instead of 0.2) and this trait will be worth looking at.

This is a general HP scaling issue. Every skill in the whole game scales like KITTEN …

Well I somewhat agree mantra healing shouldnt scale good with healing power as it got a trait that should scale well with healing power. If those both would scale good you would have massive healings every 12 seconds.
But yeah, I agree on your point, though Imo restorative mantra’s would be one of the main priority’s to look at since it can easily give more variety in the builds mesmers can use atm. (Especially with the new GM traits inc.)

It’s not the mantras in general. Ofc Healing power mustn’t have the basic 916 points wich result into the now known healing stats. It would mean that 916 additional healing power would result into a heal with double effectivness. That’d be op ofc.

However, It should scale better. With 0 HP, you should have the heals as we know it now. If you have 3664 HP (theory) you should have a double heal. So lets say, HP scales 0.25% with each point in HP.

How is it now? Each skill scales differently, wich is NOT the system of the game! It doesn’t really fit to the % damage reduction by armor or the % damage increase by precision. For a mesmer there is almost 0 reason to go for HP wheras the guard scales pretty well with it.

I really want to see a viable interrupt skill in Inspiration. This doesn’t seem good enough, but something has to be. With Warden’s feedback in the tree, it’d be really nice to see something that rewards focus pull interrupts.

Some inspiration-thematic Ideas:
When you interrupt…

• Healing power + your next heal skill heals allies too
• Transfers all conditions on you to the target, steals all of the target’s boons
• Phantasm alpha strike: all phantasms gain might and immediately execute their attack skill
• All healing done by target affects you too
• When the interrupted skill finishes the 5s cooldown, your healing skill cools down instantly
• Target is surrounded by a “temporal circle” that functions like temporal curtain
• A null field spawns at target’s feet
• A portal spawns at target’s feet and your own
• All your charged mantras gain a charge

I don’t think the trait its self is bad. I just think it points out the glaring flaws of our healing capabilities.

pvt rupt bunker, now if only they’d undo those retal nerfs

The OP is correct. Overall this grandmaster trait has great potential, but it is hindered by the other mechanics in the game. I think there are many ways to make this work, but it won’t work in its current form.

I think the question we need an answer to is: What is the intent of this new Grandmaster trait?

Is the real intent to improve group healing, self-healing, or both?