Guild Wars 2

I seriously question whether the two people they have working on “balance” understand how our phantasms and illusions function.

To be clear, most phantasms work for groups like engineer turrets, but producing skills more akin to what guardians produce (boons, reflects, wards) in addition to their damage. Neither guardian defensive and support spells nor engineers’ summoning of turrets are subject to block, blind, dodge, LOS, etc (even though, like phantasms, the turrets’ attacks are). Additionally, ALL illusions double as a resource for our shatters, which are assumed to comprise a large amount of our DPS and survival kit.

All of these functions can now be negated by blind, which is spammed my multiple professions.
The injustice of this is palpable and patent, and if this happened to guardians, engineers, or warriors, they would be dustbinned in droves. If they made blind and block stop initiative generation on thieves, there would probably be real-life riots tearing through their corporate headquarters.

Cases and points:
Defender is now subject to the new rules on blind, block, LOS, etc even though it is not an attack at all! It does not attack, it is there to mitigate the damage from a sudden zerg on the player, and now BLIND AND DODGE will prevent you using a NON-ATTACKING DEFENSIVE COOLDOWN! The “anti-zerg” defensive spell is now not usable when being zerged because at least 3 professions out there pretty much SPAM blind!

Warden’s primary purpose in an explorable dungeon is to provide a feedback bubble that provides respite from ranged attacks. Trying to block golem missiles while it’s invulnerable? Good luck with that now!

Every phantasm provides regen when traited. You might need that if things are starting to get sticky for the group.. oops you got blocked.

I’d much rather have the damage component of phantasms removed and have them also divorced from the shatter mechanic than have the change that has been made. It has not just gutted outgoing damage, it has robbed us of defense as well.

On to clones:
Clones do almost no damage at all, but our survivability kit is built around them, both their presence and the capacity to shatter them. Now, someone can spam blind and we can’t generate clones? This is outrageous. No other class is denied their defenses or their ability to gain resources so badly by such a change.

This has turned fights, especially against thiefs and guardians which are already obscenely strong, into one-sided affairs where you may as well get up and get a soda, because there will be nothing for you to do.

Enough here.. I just hope someone who matters in ANet actually reads this.

If their change is to stand without modification, then we need a complete ground-up rebuild of our entire core mechanics to compensate, because no other profession has a condition that is “utter cryptonite” in this way.

Yes I know.
The whole late-beta reworks to Clones, Phantasms, Traits and the general setup should – in hindsight – probably all be rolled back. They weren’t horrible, but thinking about it now they also didn’t help, so go back to where thinks made at least some sense, and start over from there again. :S

On my thief mesmers use to be a tuff fight, not anymore as I have a S/D build based around poping in and out of stealth a mesmer is so screwed by trait Cloaked in Shadow(Grants blind for 5 seconds in a 240 unit radius around you when entering stealth.)

I’m not having any problems. Sure ya gotta be smarter about setting up your clones, etc. but I still got em.

Being able to put up phantasms w/out actually having to hit w/ the spell was so OP’d it wasn’t even funny. I’m happy now that a lot of the FoTM rollers of mesmers are leaving…..so let’s just keep the other OP builds a secret until they completely move on mmmkay?

I sense stun matra, and scepter pistol is making a come back.

Jinks.2057:

I’m not having any problems. Sure ya gotta be smarter about setting up your clones, etc. but I still got em.

Being able to put up phantasms w/out actually having to hit w/ the spell was so OP’d it wasn’t even funny. I’m happy now that a lot of the FoTM rollers of mesmers are leaving…..so let’s just keep the other OP builds a secret until they completely move on mmmkay?

Where is the “intelligence” of “setting up” your clones when the thief is chain blinding you and you need defender but OH.. you can’t use that, even though it has no attack!

The fact you consider the ability to summon what is essentially a turret that may move once in a while and has low hp “overpowered” indicates you don’t really play this class very often.