Guild Wars 2

Just curious, but why does the mesmer not have an elite phantasm?

Because it would suck to shatter your Elite skill.

Every class has skill “categories” they do not have an elite skill of. For Mesmer it’s clones/phantasms and mantras. For a ranger it’d be signet and trap, etc. You get the idea.

tobascodagama.2961:

Because it would suck to shatter your Elite skill.

Eh if it was a skill like phantasmal defender/disenchanter wherein the main effect was gained when casting it it would be alright. Even better if the elite phantasm gave you an additional effect when it wkittentered. It could definitely work if implemented well.

Personally though if we got one I would like to see something like the following:

Phantasm with your stats and all of your weapon skills for whatever weapon you are using (including the ability to generate clones and phantasms of his own), immune to your shatter effects (which does cripple you a bit to help balance it), given the same AI given to higher level HoT enemies, and have it live for ~20 seconds. It won’t have a heal so it could go down pretty quickly, but ideally the point of it would be to actually confuse the other team as to which one is actually you and which one isn’t, the way the mesmer class is described. It could be a lot of fun to play with I imagine

While i like the idea for that phantasm elite, i dont even want to imagine the qq’ing that’d be going on if this skill would be a real thing. xD

Meh people will always QQ about mesmer, might as well give them something to actually QQ about lol

There should be an elit that summon 3 phantasm of the current weapon U’r using with 90s cooldown to it. This would be nice for pve.

Or maybe a special debuff on your enemy that summons one random phantasm like every 3 or 5 seconds for either 9 or 15 seconds (so 3 phantasms in total). With the random summon it’s a bit of a gamble but would also be an interesting gimmick, because you would get phantasms into your gameplay that you normally wouldn’t have. And thanks to the delay between the summons you would have enough time to get your active phantasms shattered before the new one would spawn.

Summoning 3 phantasms of the same type is easy enough thanks to chrono.
CS → Summon → Aether Signet → Summon → CS → Summon.

pico.6402:

There should be an elit that summon 3 phantasm of the current weapon U’r using with 90s cooldown to it. This would be nice for pve.

And broken for PvP. Although I like this general concept.

Summon a phantasm equivalent to your current weapon’s phantasms… but it looks like a clone! 20-30 second CD.

Won’t feel so bad shattering your elite if it’s a short CD. Adds some deception of clone vs phantasms. SotE would also renew this which makes it a bit harder to balance if it was something as strong as 3 phantasms with a 90 second CD but actually a 28 second CD with SotE. Still helps a solo Mesmer if they want to get a few phantasms up and running quickly.

We should be able to summon an Anomaly as our elite skill. The more illusions we shatter, the stronger it gets. As a counterpart to this elite, we loose the ability to shatter if we don’t have any illusion up as long as the anomaly is active on the field. Hey might be an idea for a next elite spec

Elite Illusion.
(Passive)Allow the Mesmer to have one additional illusion, four in total.
Activating the skill: Reset all Illusion skills.

They could do a simple copy of the phantasm of the weapon you wear just to help to summon several phantasm of the same type rapidly, very useful for shatter build or long fights.
The based CD could be standardized to 25 – 30 sec so that it does not become better than the original skill.
I mean on engineer we have an elite kit which follows the same rules as regular kits and is not even stronger.

Phantasmal Double – elite skill
Summons a Phantasm to attack your target using your currently equipped skills and weapons. None of its attacks have any effect, but they do produce all spell effects and attack animations.Furthermore, this Phantasm is indistinguishable from you and will react to damage by dodging and strafing while attacking.
The Phantasm has increased health and toughness, and if destroyed via shattering will resummon a Disenchanter and a Defender with limited duration.
Cooldown: 45 seconds
Duration: Until destroyed
Phantasm’s health: 50% of your own
Phantasm’s armor: 100% of your own
Replacement duration (PvE): 45 seconds
Replacement duration (PvP/WvW): 10 seconds

Here’s a wild idea… Make it something like warband or the theif elite skill… So it will just be a summon, and not applicable to being shatter. Just an idea.

You summon a phantasmal killshot warrior who hits for excessive damage at up to 1500 range. kitten cd.

I approve of this.

Thieves have Thieves guild.. which is more or less an elite phantasm. They ( the two thieves) are pretty hard to kill too.

I don’t see you Mesmer couldn’t have such a thing. Hell, it might be a step toward making phantasm builds actually work.

Would be nice to have an elite spec with some kind of elite transform skill – “phantasm form”, where you turn yourself into some kind of nightmare.

The whole elite spec could then be focused around phantasm play.

Carighan.6758:

Phantasmal Double – elite skill
Summons a Phantasm to attack your target using your currently equipped skills and weapons. None of its attacks have any effect, but they do produce all spell effects and attack animations.Furthermore, this Phantasm is indistinguishable from you and will react to damage by dodging and strafing while attacking.
The Phantasm has increased health and toughness, and if destroyed via shattering will resummon a Disenchanter and a Defender with limited duration.
Cooldown: 45 seconds
Duration: Until destroyed
Phantasm’s health: 50% of your own
Phantasm’s armor: 100% of your own
Replacement duration (PvE): 45 seconds
Replacement duration (PvP/WvW): 10 seconds

I like this idea a lot but would like to offer up some suggestions:

“Doppelganger” would be a cool name for an elite phantasm like this imho. It would even be a bit of a throw back to the original GW.

Instead of none of their attacks doing any damage, how about if if they spawn with whatever weapon set you were wielding at the time you cast it, and then they did the main hand 1 attack chains only. Then there would be some subtle skill to determining which weapon you want your Doppelganger to have. It’s power, condition damage, precision, ferocity, and expertise would all be the same as the casters.

I like the idea of it doing something special when shattered, but don’t forget that the Chronophantasma trait allows phantasms to respawn after the first time they are shattered, and for this reason I think creating two more phantasms would be too much. Maybe once it is shattered it creates two clones instead, a la Mirror Images? This would create a full compliment of illusions after the first shatter.