Guild Wars 2

I have been trying to come up with a way to drastically increase the sustained power dps of the mesmer to a potentially raid competitive level in a future elite spec while at the same time maintaining trait synergy (or at least keeping all traits useful) and decreasing dps build up time. Inspiration for this spec has come from many of the powerful mesmers in gw history, such as Kitah who made her squad appear to double in size and Queen Jennah who created a clone of a large elder dragon.

New Mechanic: A new shatter skill (thats not really a shatter). When you click it, your phantasms and clones duplicate themselves (priority first on phantasms and then based on the order the phantasm was created.) You also get additional illusion spots (either up to 5 or 6). These “additional” illusions do not count towards your vanilla shattering skills. However, they do work with your traits.

Balance: Phantasms are said to make up roughly 40% of a mesmers dps. The Power (not condi) damage of a mesmer can get up to around 15K. By doubling the number of phantasms, your dps should go up by roughly 40% to about 21K. However, this is not taking traits into consideration. To balance this spec, the cool downs of mind wrack and cry of frustration may also need to be increased as soon as you trait in the elite spec, just like how the dragon hunters mechanics changed.

Trait Synergy
Domination and Dueling: All phantasm traits like Empowered illusions and Sharper Images
Chaos: Illusionary Defense: Damage reduction up to 18% with 6 illusions
Illusions: Compounding Power: Damage increased by up to 18% with 6 illusions
Inspiration: Healing Prism: Increased #illusions you control means increased healing power.

skills: Extra illusion slots allow room for typically unused phantasm traits like Phantasmal Defender and Phantasmal Disenchanter.

Elite Skill Summon a giant that periodically stomps the ground, knocking down enemies. Just cause it sounds cool and could go with “large illusion” summoning lore.

The Bad: Screen Clutter, perhaps too much

side notes: Don’t really care about the weapon, although axe or hammer would be pretty cool. However, I would like the weapon to create a phantasm that specializes in a lot of AoE damage. Phantasmal warden does some AoE. However, its more specialized in projectile defense. You could also obviously balance the spec by increasing the damage of the main hand weapons. Therefore it would be nice to see either a two handed weapon or two identical weapons, such as both mainhand and off hand axes together.

Why don’t we just get an elite spec that lets our illusions stay alive when we kill an enemy? They could follow you around like pets.

Imo, cause our dps would still suck. I also believe that is a problem now that could be helped by changing the trait Protected Phantasms to Protected Illusions. Your Illusions gain protection. Your Illusions periodically gain distortion when you summon them.

The problem is that what you suggest does not fix all of our DPS problem. We lack DPS in every aspect of the game, but your suggestion only fixes PvE.

And on top of that, it means you will now go from half of our DPS coming from phantasms to 2/3 of our DPS coming from phantasms. Essentially, we can put our phantasm and then just afk.

Putting more DPS on AI is sadly the wrong way to go.

I have myself been thinking a lot about a way for elite spec to allow us to have more sustained damage. And I never found a satisfactory answer which works with core mesmer traits and skills.

I really think there is absolutely no GOOD way to fix that without fixing it at the core mesmer level (for example removing damage from phantasms altogether). The only ways will be band-aid fix which will at best improve one specific area (PvE in your case).

Well that is . . . . somewhat depressing. However, I of course agree with you. The problem is most of our core traits deal with illusions or shatters. The other problem is that because of phantasms, our main hand weapon can only be buffed so much. On the other hand, you don’t think this would be viable at all in pvp over shatters? phantasmal swordsman, phantasmal axeman, signet of the ether—> axeman (or perhaps the new axe breaks away from tradition and has two different phantasm summoning skills instead on a clone and phantasms one), elite spec mechanic, then boom, you have six high damage phantasms up. Even though they are AI, that has to be pretty hard to avoid if they are attacking at different times. Of course, based on your remarks in mesmer rework, I could see why Anet would avoid doing this. I could only imagine PU problems

I don’t think this would solve the problem of wind up time and the fact that shatters work against phantasms. Chrono could somewhat make shatters and phantasms work together because of CP but the new elite spec won’t have CP. This also wouldn’t help at the high and low end of PvP. Like too OP at the low end and still not worth it at the high end and overall just a lot of bloat on the screen.

A new elite spec with new F1-F4 could have shatters that don’t blow up your illusions. Basically make them like exactly what they did to DH virtues. All active effects that can’t be spammed at the same time because they aren’t instant cast but stronger than before in that they don’t blow up your illusions. So new F1 could be like a leap attack burst. A single telegraphed attack that doesn’t get stronger with more illusions up (traits could still amplify with more illusions but not the base damage).

Random tangent:
I think something that’s similar to what you are trying to do would be to change signet of illusions. The illusion health and shatter recharge never really made sense together. An active that increased phantasm damage by (30 pvp/wvw or 60% Pve split) for 20 seconds and give the signet a much shorter CD (30 seconds). DPS increase for PvE builds and just the idea of trying to keep your phantasms alive for a bit longer before enraging them makes sense thematically. I realize that the current Signet of Illusions is part of the PvP meta but it was crap before Chrono and is only used because chrono has soo much shatter fodder which means it’ll probably be crap for all new elite specs but it controls the balance of heal/condi clear on shatter. If Chrono had new F1-F4 that had shorter CDs and allowed Chronos to use all that fodder without SoI, I think the general balance of Mesmer would be better off with chrono being the shatter spam spec that is a bit tanky and supportive and other elite specs being less shatter spammy.

Xstein.2187:

Well that is . . . . somewhat depressing. However, I of course agree with you. The problem is most of our core traits deal with illusions or shatters. The other problem is that because of phantasms, our main hand weapon can only be buffed so much. On the other hand, you don’t think this would be viable at all in pvp over shatters? phantasmal swordsman, phantasmal axeman, signet of the ether—> axeman (or perhaps the new axe breaks away from tradition and has two different phantasm summoning skills instead on a clone and phantasms one), elite spec mechanic, then boom, you have six high damage phantasms up. Even though they are AI, that has to be pretty hard to avoid if they are attacking at different times. Of course, based on your remarks in mesmer rework, I could see why Anet would avoid doing this. I could only imagine PU problems

Sorry if I sounded harsh, it was not meant to be. In PvP, it would at best become a new burst, but keeping phantasms too long will be difficult, so it does not give sustained damage which is what I would want in PvP.
In large WvW fights/GvG, phantasms are just a no go.

Since they will be up to 5-6 phantasms, we go pass the 5-target limits of most AOE, so in a sense they will probably survive better. But will also generate a lot of complaints of passive gameplay, like old PU as you mentioned.

Currently, the next elite spec I would design would be a “mobile support” with shouts/chants. This would also fix a current weakness of mesmer (we only have local AOE support with wells and glamours, we need more mobility) and the minstrel/bard idea many suggested could be a good theme.

Sorry, I didn’t mean you sounded depressed, I just meant the whole problematic mesmer thing sounded depressing, not you. There is just not an easy solution. Another idea that I had that I forgot about was that the elite spec would give you a damage modifier based on the number of phantasms you have. Basically, you (phantasms not included) would do substantially more damage if you had no phantasms and your personal damage would decrease for each additional phantasm you summon. This would also allow you to do quicker, high damage against mobs initially to help with the wind up time. I have also heard about ideas to change the shatter skills, like DuckDuckBoom mentioned. However, I just don’t understand how it would work with the traits. Would shatter concentration always remove the same amount of boons as it did before, even though the illusions aren’t really shattered/are destroyed? What about maim the disillusioned and all the other shatter traits? How would Bountifully Disillusionment and Master of Fragmentation work? I’m actually guessing those last two would work the same, just under different mechanic names?

p.s. ya I think a skill that increased phantasm damage would probably be better than more phantasms for many reasons. Split pve and pvp one of em.

I’d rather we had a minor trait that increased phantasm damage on the first attack, but then reduced it to 0 on the following attacks.

The intent being to use phantasms as a single attack, then have them effectively just turn into shatter fodder, however, it would still allow you to maintain your utility phantasms like the warden vs projectiles or the disenchanter if you really felt the need to keep them.

If that caused too many burst issues, and the phantasm attacks were too hard to avoid in PvP, then have them instead disappear and spawn the harmless copy X distance away so that by the time it arrives, its next attack will be ready, which would create a ramp up time while the spawned copy has to run to the target for someone to heal or recover before the shatter damage happens.

Or a minor trait that just completely replaces the old phantasm skills with entirely new attacks that have a similar effect and spawn a 0 damage phantasm as an extra.

I’m a bit leery about options that are based around just removing the mesmer reliance on illusions. It is part of their identity, after all.

I do like the idea of an elite specialisation that replaces the current shatter skills with something that doesn’t consume your illusions. You could possibly have it so that the replacements work by buffing or controlling your illusions in some way. So, for instance, the new F4 could, instead of sacrificing your illusions to grant yourself Distortion, instead grant Distortion to all your illusions for a time, so you can use it to protect your illusions against some big telegraphed attack. Other possibilities could be a skill that redirects your illusions against a new target, one that allows your clones to temporarily deal more damage (but without the spike potential of current shatters), one that unbinds illusions so they are no longer directed against a specific target (possibly setting them to defend a specific area instead, or maybe they just follow you and attack whoever you’re attacking) and/or one that allows you to temporarily increase your limit. You could combine some of these – for instance, ‘unbound’ illusions might not count against your limit, at the price of having a limited lifespan instead.

It’d probably still be useful to still have at least one F# skill that allows you to blow your illusions (at some stage your phantasm generation skills are going to recharge, and it will probably feel better to be able to use them rather than having half your bar (including clone-generation skills) unavailable).

That said, if there is no skill that sacrifices your illusions for an effect that ramps based on the number of illusions, they could do something like having separate limits for clones and phantasms, so you can freely use a clone-generating skill even if you have three phantasms up without it displacing a phantasm.

In order to deal with the issue of needing to ramp up, there could be a skill that immediately summons two phantasms, so you can start a fight with three phantasms going.

Ok so how to make these work with other shatter traits:
F1: A big burst that is melee cleave
F2: A leap attack that applies torment
F3: Singlet target CC
F4: As another mentioned: AOE distortion to phantasms.

Bonus for the F2. Make it look like sword 3. Bring back the beta sword skill usage of not knowing if the mesmer or a clone is leaping at you.

Master of Frag: Bonus crit on F1. F2 Cripple on the leap to help chase people down. F3 becomes aoe. F4 becomes distortion+reflect on all illusions.

For the traits that apply more stacks/clear boons per illusion that hits, it becomes an all or nothing situation. If you hit with an F1 while you have 3 illusions, it removes 4 boons etc. So your enemies have a singular attack to dodge but it’s a much more powerful attack. The base skill doesn’t have to scale with how many illusions you have. The sustain would also be lower in that you can’t spike F1-F4 almost all at the same time to prop the inspiration trait. DPS doesn’t suffer in that you don’t need illusions to fuel your shatters which means shatters and phantasms don’t conflict with each other.

I also really like the trait idea that someone mentioned of bonus damage on the phantasm summon. Like 50% bonus damage on the first hit. Could split the % with PvE and PvP to balance it better. It gives a reason to keep re-summoning phantasms as part of a DPS rotation even if you already have 3 out.

OP, I love your original suggestion. A few small tweaks that would make it more functional.

Phantasms gain durations while this spec is active. Using the f5 anti-shatter cuts duration and damage by 1/3rd.

Shatters only ever shatter 3 illusions at a time. Shattering puts a 3 sec global cd on other shatters.

Both the new weapon phantasm… a “3/4 size risen giant with a big cleave” takes up 2 illusion slots.

The “giant dragon with huge aoe cone breath attack” takes up 3 illusion slots.

Both apply additional effects when shattered.

The new weapon does high damage and applies both condis and does direct. (Think… similar to the revnants spear).

As for the poster who mentioned phantasm being a source of too high a precent of our damage…

The original design is to have either a phantasm build where you don’t shatter… or a shatter build where you don’t care about keeping phantasms up. Chronomancer allowed for a ‘phantasm shatter’ build with chronophantasma. There’s no need to rebalance things generally, we just need phantasm to change targets once their target has gone down. When they die our dps gets locked behind cooldowns. Or perhaps, targeted enemy deaths reduce phantasm cooldowns some. I don’t think a total rebalance is in order.