Guild Wars 2

How are you doing with this change? WvW mainly.

I think it should give us protection when it reaches back the Mesmer, as compensation for the reveals or the time that you will not be able to stealth because of it xD

Or even better is to remove the extra effect that they added. I mean it is not April yet, they can keep such effects for next year April ( as someone said retaliation damage is more than the damage it will deal) and it put you in great danger.

The extra effect would be useful if it did more than 300 damage on crit in a full glass build but atm it’s a very weak attack. They also made it take longer to cast which I don’t like either. Overall it’s a change for the worse as it takes longer to cast making mesmer more susceptible to it’s counter, thief, while providing little to no real benefit for the increased cast time or it revealing you in stealth.

The whole thing feels extremely clunky to use now. It’s amazing what a difference .25 s can make.

The problem with these attacks is that they suck, literally worse than our autos in some cases.

It would have been fine if the attack threw out a Mirror blade that only bounced once. Decent damage, not too much, but enough to give the mesmer themselves some more sustained damage that didn’t rely on phantasms not dying/being shattered.

It’s definitely an interesting change. One thing that I like is that you can run Imagined Burden (GM, Domination) and apply cripple to every single person that is struck by the boomerang. A similar effect (but with immobilize) also occurs with the new Phantasmal Warden skill albeit only affecting three targets. I’ll throw on my Vigilant’s gear tonight for reset and see if there’s any potential.

Maybe it’s planned to get away from that “be in stealth and still attack” scheme. They removed it from Thief and honestly it’s more than healthy to also remove it from Mes. Yet I agree that we’d like to have something more impactful in return. But afaik those changes are ramping up for the Mirage / expansion in general. Let’s wait and see

expandas.7051:

It’s definitely an interesting change. One thing that I like is that you can run Imagined Burden (GM, Domination) and apply cripple to every single person that is struck by the boomerang.

I was actually wondering about this and meant to test it. Good to see this actually works, still Imagined Burden competes with too good trait at that tier and needs to be bumped down a tier.

Personally I can only describe it as dumb

The GS is a long ranged weapons with a short range phantasm effect which doesn’t make sense. I’m at a distance using all my skills when using my GS if a player gets in close enough to get hit by the phantasm pre attack I’m going for the GS5 skill instead to knock them back. I can’t imagine the situation were I’d actively get in close with a GS just to peg them with that GS 4 attack.

I don’t know whether to call it a nerf with the animation involved or useless but it really doesn’t add anything.

I really miss the “BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL” animation on asura using GS4…

The new animation doesn’t have that same awesomeness.

I found that the gs 4 skill was perfectly fine as it was before the “buff” but with the changes, the skill received more drawbacks than benefits due to the increased cast time and the reveal when used in stealth. If they were going to buff a gs skill then I personally believe they should of looked at mind spike. Currently, it seems to be the most underwhelming skill on gs mesmer as it does average damage, removes a single boon which is not really relevant in today’s boonspam meta, and it is on a rather lengthy 12 second cooldown. Perhaps if they removed the changes to gs 4 and put the extra damage and vulnerability application on gs 3 it would be a much more beneficial buff.

@K THEN You’d be right if the intention of this change was to buff GS, but that wasn’t the intention of the change. The change was, or so we were told, supposed to give the mesmer more sustained pressure. And it still fails miserably at that

OriOri.8724:

@K THEN You’d be right if the intention of this change was to buff GS, but that wasn’t the intention of the change. The change was, or so we were told, supposed to give the mesmer more sustained pressure. And it still fails miserably at that

o.O much like scepter on the elementalist I always thought the design philosophy for gs was to be an inconsistent burst weapon. If we want sustain damage then go condi…then again this change was probably made more for pve than pvp

K THEN.5162:

OriOri.8724:

@K THEN You’d be right if the intention of this change was to buff GS, but that wasn’t the intention of the change. The change was, or so we were told, supposed to give the mesmer more sustained pressure. And it still fails miserably at that

o.O much like scepter on the elementalist I always thought the design philosophy for gs was to be an inconsistent burst weapon. If we want sustain damage then go condi…then again this change was probably made more for pve than pvp

“Also in this update, we are implementing initial attacks on several phantasm skills, allowing the mesmer to deliver a primary attack in addition to the summon in order to provide a bit more constant pressure on your targets.”
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-February-22-2017

They definitely said it was for more constant pressure/sustain (also to make all phantasm summoning skills have similar attack affects). However, I definitely don’t believe this for a second. More than likely its so we can’t cast phantasms in stealth.

Overall, it definitely felt like a nerf to me. Its not going to be that useful in pve either as vulnerability is easy to apply and you still get the increased cast time that makes it feel more clunky. Getting out of stealth is already a big enough nerf for the vulnerability cast. Why can’t they decrease the cast time?

Just got the idea of the phantasmal berserker skill to knock down or stun your target rather that inflicting vulnerability. Aa, the idea makes me drool. Prob won’t happen. Maybe a daze? Please, purty please
Welp, I can always dream.

The problem is that they implemented this based on a mesmer community request. Many of us said that what made shield so good is that the phantasm skill also provides an additional effect.

But all the attacks they added are just minor things which barely change anything. Basically they were afraid to buff mesmer, and also they didn’t take too much time thinking of something interesting, so they added a lame minor effect which you don’t even think about and adds basically nothing to the gameplay.

If you go to my signature mesmer rework, you will see that I suggested effects for each weapon skill, designed so that the effect is the main thing and the phantasm only a “side-effect” (which is associated to an overall nerf of phantasms). This is the way I would have liked it to happen : I want the mesmer to control the large effect (in particular the damage) and the phantasm to provide a small but useful utility.