Guild Wars 2

Phantasmal Mage (Torch 5) is still a bit lackluster. A nice buff for this skill would be to allow the phantasm to proc 3s of revealed on targets. This would give mesmers some much needed counter play versus thieves without being over powered or changing most other match-ups.

I’m not sure it’d be balanced to have a weapon give both stealth and revealed on its own.

Sebrent.3625:

I’m not sure it’d be balanced to have a weapon give both stealth and revealed on its own.

I’m not sure what you think would be unbalanced about that.

That being said, I’m not convinced that having revealed on a phantasm at all would be balanced, but that has nothing to do with being on a weapon that gives stealth.

Can you imagine how annoying and random it’d make the mirror matchup, though?

ASP.8093:

Can you imagine how annoying and random it’d make the mirror matchup, though?

when it comes to mirror matchup, it all depends on the opener and the personal skill

Sebrent.3625:

I’m not sure it’d be balanced to have a weapon give both stealth and revealed on its own.

why not? When a GM trait like power block is totally immune to thieves (and future revenants), Mesmers could use some love.

Seems like a bandaid fix. I prefer the class actually getting fixes and the iMage not being total garbage for damage, just increase the damage of the base nuke of the phantasm to be competitive with other phantasms and confusion is the side effect.

They could also just speed up the projectile a tad, maybe adjust the damage values a bit.

this will force mesmers stick to torch. not everyone prefers run with torch in their build.

I don’t think it’d be balanced as it would be a way of “always winning” any “stealth wars”.

It also doesn’t answer the question of what the iMage brings against classes that don’t stealth.

Pyro-Fay is quite right as well that any phantasm whose attack reveals would likely be OP … we’re not talking about long cooldowns between attacks. You’d likely have perma-revealed. Throw in the Signet to reset Phantasm cooldowns and you’d almost definitely have perma-revealed.

Sebrent.3625:

Pyro-Fay is quite right as well that any phantasm whose attack reveals would likely be OP … we’re not talking about long cooldowns between attacks. You’d likely have perma-revealed. Throw in the Signet to reset Phantasm cooldowns and you’d almost definitely have perma-revealed.

I imagine if you’re a thief and a mesmer is popping their heal just to get a clunky facsimile of Sic ‘Em, either you’re no threat or they’re dead meat.

Possibly … but given that the base attack speed of iMage is 6 seconds, you likely wouldn’t even need to do that to summon a second one … or are we talking about a shorter Reveal than Sick’em?

Sick’em is a 10s reveal on a 40s cooldown. That’s only a 25% up-time at best. … can be improved to 32s cooldown for a 31.25% up-time.

To be close to the traited Sick’Em, the iMage revealed would have to only last 2s since 2/6 = 33.3…% which is already better than traited Sick’em.

I think getting Illusionary Membrane back without an ICD (or a shorter one, at least) and/or fixing our blocks would largely help Mesmers versus Thieves as well as against other classes.

I was figuring a 3s Reveal on each hit.

Figuring “uptime” like this is distorted because, well, what really matters is how long you can deny stealth — and, against thieves and mesmers and LB rangers (if this even matters against LB rangers), it’s usually only a matter of denying stealth long enough to burst/focus effectively.

10s on a long-ish cooldown is plenty when all you really want is to finish the fight in 10s anyway.

So a 50% up-time on Revealed … 100% with 2+…

… and it’s still in its current crap state against everyone else who couldn’t care less about stealth :-/

Just doesn’t feel like a good way to try to make this weapon more viable. Feels imbalanced in Mesmer vs stealther fights and still crap in Mesmer vs non-stealther fights.

If the focus is on handling Thieves … a Sword+Dagger Thief isn’t going to care given that they’ll continue to make use of their ample supply of dodges+evades.

Sebrent.3625:

Just doesn’t feel like a good way to try to make this weapon more viable.

Torch is already one of the better and more popular offhands, despite having absolute trash in the phantasm slot.

@ASP: I’m aware of this, hence the use of “more viable”.

The primary reason most find the iMage lackluster is its damage is horrible compared to the rest of the phantasms and it doesn’t provide utility the same way iWarden does.

This revealed would be to have it provide some utility, but, as a utility, I think it is (1) useless against a majority of opponents (2) too powerful against the few opponents it isn’t useless against.

ASP.8093:

Sebrent.3625:

Just doesn’t feel like a good way to try to make this weapon more viable.

Torch is already one of the better and more popular offhands, despite having absolute trash in the phantasm slot.

For PvP, in PvE it’s absolute trash and the only reason torch is used in spvp where it wasn’t used before in favor of focus or pistol is that the mesmer is so weak defensively and vulnerable at the moment to thieves that the only way to peel said thief is The Prestige.

Again, it’s basically a bandaid to a design problem that needs to be addressed at some point.

Look, it’s a condition based offhand weapon that for some reason finds its way to even power builds, and it’s The Prestige to not be so easily picked off by thief, so if you have to tack reveal on the phantasm as well you’re addressing the symptoms instead of teh root cause (poor defenses, especially against thieves).

Torch is already a pretty good pvp weapon set.

i would rather see focus 4 apply revealed whenever they walk through

please don’t talk about PvE, revealed isn’t a buff that will affect PvE in anyway to begin with.

Zenith.7301:

For PvP, in PvE it’s absolute trash and the only reason torch is used in spvp where it wasn’t used before in favor of focus or pistol is that the mesmer is so weak defensively and vulnerable at the moment to thieves that the only way to peel said thief is The Prestige.

Again, it’s basically a bandaid to a design problem that needs to be addressed at some point.

Look, it’s a condition based offhand weapon that for some reason finds its way to even power builds, and it’s The Prestige to not be so easily picked off by thief, so if you have to tack reveal on the phantasm as well you’re addressing the symptoms instead of teh root cause (poor defenses, especially against thieves).

It’s not just a band-aid against thieves. Stealth in general is really effective, and plays well with a mesmer’s focus on slipperiness over facetanking. On top of that, The Prestige is fast, it blinds, it’s a free little burst of damage that hits harder than a Sword auto-attacks, and once in a blue moon it’s useful as a blast finisher — it’s just an all-around awesome skill.

“Is it useful in PvE?” is usually the wrong question to ask. Many mechanics in this game are absolutely superfluous in PvE.

ASP.8093:

Zenith.7301:

For PvP, in PvE it’s absolute trash and the only reason torch is used in spvp where it wasn’t used before in favor of focus or pistol is that the mesmer is so weak defensively and vulnerable at the moment to thieves that the only way to peel said thief is The Prestige.

Again, it’s basically a bandaid to a design problem that needs to be addressed at some point.

Look, it’s a condition based offhand weapon that for some reason finds its way to even power builds, and it’s The Prestige to not be so easily picked off by thief, so if you have to tack reveal on the phantasm as well you’re addressing the symptoms instead of teh root cause (poor defenses, especially against thieves).

It’s not just a band-aid against thieves. Stealth in general is really effective, and plays well with a mesmer’s focus on slipperiness over facetanking. On top of that, The Prestige is fast, it blinds, it’s a free little burst of damage that hits harder than a Sword auto-attacks, and once in a blue moon it’s useful as a blast finisher — it’s just an all-around awesome skill.

“Is it useful in PvE?” is usually the wrong question to ask. Many mechanics in this game are absolutely superfluous in PvE.

Which is all the more reason to make them more useful in a format where there’s no weapon variety when in spvp every weapon, including something like that awful scepter, is used.

I’d rather they actually don’t tie a defense meant to defend the mesmer against its current predators into a single weapon, but rather tweak the utility skills, the heals, the shatter mechanic and traits.

A universal fix is far better than a specific weapon becoming the answer to every mesmer problem. By putting revealed on torch you’re pigeonholing mesmers into torch even more.

I think it would be better to just give it a better power ratio so that it’s more useful against every profession

Nothing OP to worry about. With a projectile speed like that, it’ll take a couple of try before iMage actually hit a target.

Hello, this is my favorite phantasmal mesmer, and i have much experience with it, because I always use (i play mesmer confusion), and what you really need is to increase the velocity of the projectile, really bounce as many allies as enemies, because sometimes bouncing projectiles, but did not complete the maximum number of bounces, and moreover, will increase the retaliation based in 5s and 20s as the ghostly shield recharge.

Developability give the phantasmal would be op because it has a trait that cleans conditions.