Guild Wars 2

Adrenalin.5719:

When thiefs are only allowed to have one viable build, Mesmer need to have only one viable build, too.

Justice.

One viable build? I beg to differ. we have many viable builds. We just had one that was OP.

Zenith.7301:

Higher reflect uptime, their wall of reflection is placed where they need it, not dependent on a targeted mob that may or may not move out of it while the guardian can place the wall on the group unlike the mesmer who can no longer place the bubble on the group without a target.
With traited spirit shield and wall guardian has far more projectile absorption.

If your group stacks on melee it is not a problem as the bubble should cover the whole team.
With Mimic Mesmer uptime on Feedback alone is higher. If you really care about projectiles you could also trait focus.

Stability for harpy/aether blade fractal? Hallowed Ground/Stand Your Ground is better than mantra of concentration.

Mantras are awful

Feel My Wrath has greater group quickness uptime than time warp.

True, they should change the recharge to be the same as TW (for balance purposes)

And then there’s the high uptime of group protection and aegis/blinds.

We give far better blind after the trait change (either on dodge or on shatter) and could share distortion with the whole group more often than guardians could share their aegis.

No mesmer is gonna shatter to just blind, and they sure as hell won’t take blinding dissipation over offensive traits.

Whether the group melees or not is inconsequential. In the cliffside fractal for example the cultist archers constantly spawn and plink away at your group for range more often than your focus pull is off cooldown, which means guardian wall works better there. Same for volcanic fractal.

With mimic you’re blowing a utility slot on a 90 sec cd to have a feedback that lasts around the same time of a traited wall of reflection. Traited focus’s reflection is unreliable, with curtain having elevation issues where projectiles from elevated mobs ignore it and iWarden as most phantasms gets destroyed immediately.

Guardian projectile defense is just far more practical and requires less investment. It also comes with the luxury of not requiring them to equip a garbage offhand and suffer a dps loss just so they can have a pull/reflect option, since the guardian greatsword is also one of their best weapons at no DPS cost.

Mesmer is there for portal and Time Warp slow on a few niche cases. Anywhere else, a guardian is better, less DPS loss to the group.

Aegis on virtue is instant whereas distortion share on mesmer requires signet cast times, investment into inspiration for further group dps loss, or requires you to shatter your phantasms for distortion usage to share it.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the direction they took with inspiration, and dom/illusions/dueling should have more useful traits like those instead of a litany of pvp interrupt/shatter traits, but mesmers still have ways to go if they want to be included in a group for anything other than portal.

Zenith.7301:

No mesmer is gonna shatter to just blind, and they sure as hell won’t take blinding dissipation over offensive traits.

Whether the group melees or not is inconsequential. In the cliffside fractal for example the cultist archers constantly spawn and plink away at your group for range more often than your focus pull is off cooldown, which means guardian wall works better there. Same for volcanic fractal.

With mimic you’re blowing a utility slot on a 90 sec cd to have a feedback that lasts around the same time of a traited wall of reflection. Traited focus’s reflection is unreliable, with curtain having elevation issues where projectiles from elevated mobs ignore it and iWarden as most phantasms gets destroyed immediately.

Guardian projectile defense is just far more practical and requires less investment. It also comes with the luxury of not requiring them to equip a garbage offhand and suffer a dps loss just so they can have a pull/reflect option, since the guardian greatsword is also one of their best weapons at no DPS cost.

Mesmer is there for portal and Time Warp slow on a few niche cases. Anywhere else, a guardian is better, less DPS loss to the group.

Aegis on virtue is instant whereas distortion share on mesmer requires signet cast times, investment into inspiration for further group dps loss, or requires you to shatter your phantasms for distortion usage to share it.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the direction they took with inspiration, and dom/illusions/dueling should have more useful traits like those instead of a litany of pvp interrupt/shatter traits, but mesmers still have ways to go if they want to be included in a group for anything other than portal.

Finally, someone on this forum who gets it. It seems like everyone is in complete denial. Mesmer isn’t in a good place in PvE. Go in the game, LFG Fractals 40+ and look for the group requirements. It’s not perfect, but it’s a simple and quick way to see how “great” mesmers are, compared to other classes. For a more professional look, check Brazil [DnT] video on mesmer or check Nike[DnT] stream. Mesmer is only good for time record speed clearing, for the rest 99% of the community, mesmer is subpar.

If you want to cite Brazil, he will tell you that a GOOD mesmer is better than guardian for high level fractals (distorsion share, reflects, time warp, portal)

I was only suggesting adding more damage percentage to compounding power because, with all honesty, how many times do you see Anet revert a nerf they made to a class? I think chances are harmonies mantras is going to remain at 3%. Anet isn’t going to change it because they think pvp mantra shatter builds were too powerful. This hurts pve mesmers. So, my suggestion is to boost the damage of pve mesmers in some other way. A pve mesmer who is traited for damage instead of reflects will take the illusion line, and its not like phantasms are killed in pve instantly, this is an exageration. You still benefit from the trait. If you have another suggestion besides just “revert nerf, revert nerf” let me know? This is just to help bring pve mesmer up to par with where it used to be so that pve does not take a hit because of what happened in pvp, which in unfair and unjustified.

p.s. Ya mesmer sustained damage is lower than the guardian. Its at least been this way since I played gw. The problem is if you up sword damage or phantasm damage than all the pvp community is going to go into hysteria, just like with this patch. Mesmers are brought into dungeons because of abilities, not dps. Many at Anet realize this. Its not like they are completely oblivious. Thats the reason why they are creating the chronomancer instead of simply boosting the dps of the mesmer. The only problem is we have to hope guardian ability + dps advantage does not beet out chronomancer ability all the time for casual runs.

I think you give them too much credit on their awareness around class design. They just don’t want to split pve/pvp skill balancing.

Zenith.7301:

I think you give them too much credit on their awareness around class design. They just don’t want to split pve/pvp skill balancing.

Their reasoning for not splitting skills in GW1 was that it would confuse players. GW1 had hundreds of skills with unique effects. It got to a point where they couldn’t avoid that anymore, and split the skills anyway. Everyone was happy. When GW2 was developed we asked them if GW2 will have split skills as well. Their answer was, and I’m paraphrasing, “we’ve learned from our past mistakes”. (I can’t provide a link to verify, it’s from my memory alone. As it was a very important issue to me, I believe that may memory does not fail me) A dodgy answer but we mostly took it as a yes. They didn’t split.

TLDR; They probably don’t split because they don’t want to confuse players. Balancing separately may have more quantity of skills to balance, but it’s much much easier to balance overall.

As long as they don’t split pve from pvp, there is going to tension between the pve’ers and pvp’ers. It appears that what one wants the other is diametrically opposed to. With the constant balancing for pvp, the pve’ers are going to get more angry and discouraged at the unfairness of these one-sided decisions. It may eventually get to the point that the pve’ers will start to go looking elsewhere.

Ithamir.5928:

Zenith.7301:

I think you give them too much credit on their awareness around class design. They just don’t want to split pve/pvp skill balancing.

Their reasoning for not splitting skills in GW1 was that it would confuse players. GW1 had hundreds of skills with unique effects. It got to a point where they couldn’t avoid that anymore, and split the skills anyway. Everyone was happy. When GW2 was developed we asked them if GW2 will have split skills as well. Their answer was, and I’m paraphrasing, “we’ve learned from our past mistakes”. (I can’t provide a link to verify, it’s from my memory alone. As it was a very important issue to me, I believe that may memory does not fail me) A dodgy answer but we mostly took it as a yes. They didn’t split.

TLDR; They probably don’t split because they don’t want to confuse players. Balancing separately may have more quantity of skills to balance, but it’s much much easier to balance overall.

Noobs are gonna be confused no matter what, and will be stomped by veterans no matter what.

Instead of condescending to its playerbase as a cheap excuse to do less work, they should stick with what worked in GW1.

There will never be balancing PvE with PvP. PvE is about doing as much damage as possible to large HP targets while PvP is balanced around a maximum of 20k hp health pools.

Ithamir.5928:

Zenith.7301:

I think you give them too much credit on their awareness around class design. They just don’t want to split pve/pvp skill balancing.

Their reasoning for not splitting skills in GW1 was that it would confuse players. GW1 had hundreds of skills with unique effects. It got to a point where they couldn’t avoid that anymore, and split the skills anyway. Everyone was happy. When GW2 was developed we asked them if GW2 will have split skills as well. Their answer was, and I’m paraphrasing, “we’ve learned from our past mistakes”. (I can’t provide a link to verify, it’s from my memory alone. As it was a very important issue to me, I believe that may memory does not fail me) A dodgy answer but we mostly took it as a yes. They didn’t split.

TLDR; They probably don’t split because they don’t want to confuse players. Balancing separately may have more quantity of skills to balance, but it’s much much easier to balance overall.

Then Anet must consider the players of their game to be really stupid. Really stupid!!

I’ve found the link! I can’t believe it. I had to filter search 2009-2010 articles. It’s an interview with Izzy, the main balance developer at the time. I believe that since then he’s moved to another area of the game. The part of interest is at the end of the piece. You can search for “split”.

Edit – For the lazies:
“That’s the main lesson they learnt from GW1. You have to split the skills according to the gameplay mode. If you don’t, you end up with GW1 situation, with its 17 modes which ends up being impossible to manage properly. From his own confession, Izzy had to put aside some of those modes like HA, AvA, TA which knew the fate GW1 players know…

Ideally, he’d like to have only two modes to balance, but he knows he can handle three which is the intended number atm. For the record, WvW is as of now based on PvE skills. With three modes, he knows he’ll be able to supply a decent work and make GW2 a real e-sport along Counterstrike or DOTA-likes."

I think it would be interesting if Harmonious Mantras actually INCREASED the cooldown significantly, but allowed the cooldown to work as it had previously (starting once the initial channel was complete).