Guild Wars 2

So, a while back, I asked how people felt about all the changes and nerfs that had happened to Mesmers and would probably continue to happen as Anet tries to balance a class with unique capabilities.
Then this patch hit.
And most people are incredibly angry, even though, frankly, we should expect this kind of thing.
But I look to the other classes I liked but never could convince myself to play: Necromancer and Ranger. Both these professions were considered a joke. It wasn’t so much that they were weak, it was the fact that they just weren’t as good as we were at… basically everything.
The recent changes to those classes make me wish I was willing to play a “dark” or “nature” profession right now. They are fantastic, and finally the weak builds/weapons of those professions are starting to come into line with the rest of the game.
But what to do with a class so odd from the rest it was hard to find a place for? Well, honestly, you have to break something down before you can rebuild it. We saw this exact thing with Guardian Spirit Weapons. Overnight, Spirit Weapons, which had a unique capability of being untargetable, went from marginally useful to utter garbage. For months, you were laughed at if you summoned one of those things, but now they are slowly rebuilding those summons and it’s starting to look pretty good.
I hear something similar happened with Ranger Spirits back in beta, which is why they started weak at launch.
So, I am hopeful and excited for the future of Mesmers because I have seen Anet work, and I know that eventually the class will stabilize into something even better (at least from a versatility and balance perspective) than it started. We saw some AMAZING changes with professions in GW1, especially Mesmer, and it became something wonderfully fun and effective.
That being said, these times of instability are incredibly frustrating for those of us who don’t like having to play something else in the meantime. I wish they had a way to fix all this at once, instead of gradually. Still, I am excited to see what Mesmer will become when the dust finally settles.

While I know it’s not necessarily justified (emotions rarely are), I’m not excited at all. I feel tired and frustrated and like I wasted a whole lot of time on this game.

I don’t understand what ANet is trying to do. I don’t understand why something must be broken before it can be fixed.

I admire your optimism. And I wish that people like you were working at Anet. Unfortunately though, I think the reality is quite bleak. I have faith in the resilience and ingenuity of the Mesmer community to come back in the face of these endless nerfs, but I have little to no faith that Anet will turn the nerf train around. Never in my life have I seen a company tinker and fiddle and nerf more than Anet. It’s like they can’t leave well enough alone. I’m not sure what their goal is, but this endless balancing is ruining classes. The blurred frenzy nerf alone is a serious kick in the nuts to sword mesmers everywhere. The PU buff is fantastic, but it does little to change the fact that the restructuring of the Illusions trait lines and all the other fiddling is a real blow to us today.

I think I can see what they’re trying to do. The class is not unplayable, so I’m interested to see how things change in the future.

The problem is we don’t get it all in one go – the process takes time, trial and error.

It’s like having someone cook you a plate of food, and serving it up to you unfinished piece by piece, and you are having to eat it as they continue to prepare it (maybe not an accurate analogy!).

Main issue is that the real balance team in Gw2 is the Spvp forum.

Which hates mes in any shape or form regardless of objective arguments.
You know, the place where appears a thread : “Please fix our bugs! – Bravo!Bravo! Which class are you? – Mesmer – Mesmers are fine with bugs, so kitten you keep them you don’t need fixes to perform OP”.

Yeah, that place full of cheese and wine has the control over balance.
I’m not confident.

I’m not much on PvP or WvW so my opinion of the changes for those really doesn’t count. However, I am searching for a new spec in PVE, given the loss of invulnerability on one-hand sword (guess I will go to scepter). The change sucks because evade allows conditions to tick during 2 seconds while you stand there in blurred frenzy whereas invulnerability did not allow the conditions to tick during its time. There is some interesting discussion of the prismatic alignment being pretty good now so maybe I will try that out some.

curtegg.5216:

The change sucks because evade allows conditions to tick during 2 seconds while you stand there in blurred frenzy whereas invulnerability did not allow the conditions to tick during its time.

Are you sure? I believe pre-patch that you still took damage during Blurry Frenzy on pre-existing conditions.

Yeah, you always took ticks from conditions during BF even before the patch.

I’m more excited for the past of Mesmering where there was:
Confusion/Glamour/Condition, Phantasm, Tanky, Shatter.

Because you know what the present for Mesmers is?
20/20/0/0/30
or
0/20/20/0/30

I assume in the future one of the above will be nerfed, and they’ll bring down sword’s effectiveness to the scepter’s level, which is fine because focus and pistol will be ‘balanced’ into near uselessness. “In order to give Mesmers more condition options, we’re nerfing all offhand damage by half and giving them a grandmaster trait that will proc one stack of a random condition—vulnerability included—on every crit. 10s internal cooldown. You’re welcome, mesmers.”

Meh – I’m glad I make sure to run multiple 80s. This way, if I’m offended by a current patch(nerf)-list, I can take a break for a bit. Gotta say, my Necro’s looking a bit … smexxy, right about now.

(Who am I kidding … been Mesmer from Day -1, it’s not like I’m going to stop maining the guy. Although, his EQ expenditures are getting a bit silly …)

To me, the real issue is a lack of communication with players. Anet says they’re listening but they rarely interact on their own forums except for general bug fixes and personal story help. I’m not suggesting that they respond to every post or even every thread as that would take way too much time away from game development. However, would it hurt to start one thread in every the profession forum and ask, “what’s the one thing everyone wants”?

What I want, particularly for the mesmer forums, is one thread every month where a dev actually talks to us consistently. Let us know where you want the profession to go and let us tell you where we want it to go. Then see if we can meet somewhere in the middle. I know it’s going to take a lot of effort. Any thread of this like will get thousands of replies and hundreds of pages. It will also attract people that would, “show their butt,” simply for the sake of disruptively drawing attention to themselves. However, it will also give us a heads up on upcoming changes.

For example, the drastic nerf to confusion should have been discussed in great length at least 4 to 6 weeks ahead of time. Worst case scenario would have been a dev telling us that it has to happen because the numbers show it’s potentially scaring new players from wvw. Then give us some options on how to fix it, allow us to give alternative suggestions, vote on which solution is best and implement it. Even if the result doesn’t please everyone, we will have had our chance to be heard and be forewarned that a huge nerf is coming. Instead of being suddenly, “punched in the chest,” on patch day like we usually are, we will have the chance to prepare. We won’t waist our time, money, energy and effort on gear for a build that’s neutered the very next day.

That’s what I want. Communication. Don’t just tell us you’re listening, Anet. Show us!

Crossplay.2067:

To me, the real issue is a lack of communication with players. Anet says they’re listening but they rarely interact on their own forums except for general bug fixes and personal story help. I’m not suggesting that they respond to every post or even every thread as that would take way too much time away from game development. However, would it hurt to start one thread in every the profession forum and ask, “what’s the one thing everyone wants”?

What I want, particularly for the mesmer forums, is one thread every month where a dev actually talks to us consistently. Let us know where you want the profession to go and let us tell you where we want it to go. Then see if we can meet somewhere in the middle. I know it’s going to take a lot of effort. Any thread of this like will get thousands of replies and hundreds of pages. It will also attract people that would, “show their butt,” simply for the sake of disruptively drawing attention to themselves. However, it will also give us a heads up on upcoming changes.

For example, the drastic nerf to confusion should have been discussed in great length at least 4 to 6 weeks ahead of time. Worst case scenario would have been a dev telling us that it has to happen because the numbers show it’s potentially scaring new players from wvw. Then give us some options on how to fix it, allow us to give alternative suggestions, vote on which solution is best and implement it. Even if the result doesn’t please everyone, we will have had our chance to be heard and be forewarned that a huge nerf is coming. Instead of being suddenly, “punched in the chest,” on patch day like we usually are, we will have the chance to prepare. We won’t waist our time, money, energy and effort on gear for a build that’s neutered the very next day.

That’s what I want. Communication. Don’t just tell us you’re listening, Anet. Show us!

AMEN!!! How hard is to delegate an Anet class spokesperson for each class, maybe not a head dev, but certainly an Anet employee who works as a representative or liaison to Anet on our behalf. Someone who posts frequently. This whole “silent and stoic” approch from a company ONLY works if you don’t fiddle so much with constant patches and nerfs and changes. I remember in the early days of WoW there wasn’t much mod posting, but they barely changed anything. I almost feel like, finish the game already! I honestly would prefer Anet cutting off play for a month so they can just do all their endless fiddling and be done with it. I hate build crafting and planning and studying the class only to have it obliterated with each new patch. Right now Anet is the biggest, baddest MMO on the planet, or at least the class act. Because of that most if us are here to stay. But they better watch out because when another MMO comes out that competes they are gonna lose all the players who have been burned by these endless nerfs.

I don’t want mesmer to be any more or less powerful than any other profession. What I do want is for its skills and traits to have some cohesion and to make sense.

It was the last profession added to the game, and it feels rushed and incredibly poorly thought-out.

Looking forward to returning to the game in a year or so when everything is settled and mesmer has had its total (and completely necessary) overhaul.

Excited about the future of mesmers? Hells yea I’m excited. At this point I’m not even worried or afraid of further nerfs for pve, I’m more like:
- opens a bag of chips –
“what will they do next o_o "

Crossplay.2067:

To me, the real issue is a lack of communication with players. Anet says they’re listening but they rarely interact on their own forums except for general bug fixes and personal story help. I’m not suggesting that they respond to every post or even every thread as that would take way too much time away from game development. However, would it hurt to start one thread in every the profession forum and ask, “what’s the one thing everyone wants”?

What I want, particularly for the mesmer forums, is one thread every month where a dev actually talks to us consistently. Let us know where you want the profession to go and let us tell you where we want it to go. Then see if we can meet somewhere in the middle. I know it’s going to take a lot of effort. Any thread of this like will get thousands of replies and hundreds of pages. It will also attract people that would, “show their butt,” simply for the sake of disruptively drawing attention to themselves. However, it will also give us a heads up on upcoming changes.

For example, the drastic nerf to confusion should have been discussed in great length at least 4 to 6 weeks ahead of time. Worst case scenario would have been a dev telling us that it has to happen because the numbers show it’s potentially scaring new players from wvw. Then give us some options on how to fix it, allow us to give alternative suggestions, vote on which solution is best and implement it. Even if the result doesn’t please everyone, we will have had our chance to be heard and be forewarned that a huge nerf is coming. Instead of being suddenly, “punched in the chest,” on patch day like we usually are, we will have the chance to prepare. We won’t waist our time, money, energy and effort on gear for a build that’s neutered the very next day.

That’s what I want. Communication. Don’t just tell us you’re listening, Anet. Show us!

to me, the real issue is the unreadiness of the community to adapt the new changes, to play with the new changes, to try new things out and grow up with the visions of the devs (and I played many MMOs before, so I can say ANet does a good job).

Are all the changes welcome? clearly not. But its by far not the apocalyptic scenario some people want to believe us.

It took me about 10 minutes to theorycraft a couple of builds with traits i never used before. and guess what: its fun. at least for me. I call it variation.

^Both of the above are good points.

It would be nice to see more communication regarding changes (although I can imagine this will open them up to a lot of unnecessary back and forth with antagonistic people).

And likewise we as players need to be flexible with the changes – they haven’t deleted the class.

I hope all these changes will make us open up to more hybrid builds that strike a good balance between direct dmg and condition dmg and trump over simplistic single-minded builds that based around only one source of damage.
Come on, we are agents of chaos. We should be unpredictable on the battlefield.

blutstein.2468:

to me, the real issue is the unreadiness of the community to adapt the new changes, to play with the new changes, to try new things out and grow up with the visions of the devs (and I played many MMOs before, so I can say ANet does a good job).

Are all the changes welcome? clearly not. But its by far not the apocalyptic scenario some people want to believe us.

It took me about 10 minutes to theorycraft a couple of builds with traits i never used before. and guess what: its fun. at least for me. I call it variation.

I actually agree with you here. Change can be good and I too look forward to seeing what’s new and how we can innovate. However, my original statement still stands. To use your example, theorycrafting 10 minutes after the patch drops is good but what would be great is if we knew the finalized upcoming patch notes 1 to 2 weeks in advance. That way we can theorycraft, gather all the armor, weapons, runes and sigils we need and have everything already ready by patch day. From then on it would be a simple test to see if our theories work in practice as they do on paper.

Hitting us with this much needed info on patch day is like when Sega decided it was a great idea to launch the Saturn during E3, on the same day they announced it. In fact, the players’ sentiment reflect those of developers and retailers whom were left out the loop and unprepared.

The reason I’m worried about the future of the mesmer is that the dev team has conclusively demonstrated that they have no idea how to appropriately approach balance.

While they might eventually reach balance with all the finesse of a blind quadriplegic, the interim stages could be extremely painful. I’d just as soon not spend the next 8 months of this class trying to make it work because the devs nerfed us down to the level of rangers, necros, and warriors.

Pyroatheist.9031:

The reason I’m worried about the future of the mesmer is that the dev team has conclusively demonstrated that they have no idea how to appropriately approach balance.

I totally agree with this sentiment. I would just say the devs know how to balance, and they do an amazing job of it, it just takes them a while to get there. In GW1 the Elementalist and Mesmer were rebuilt more or less from the ground up in the twilight of that game.
Let me re-iterate that, two classes were practically rebuilt when the game was about to end, and the other professions received a lot of changes. It was amazing when they finally got it all set. It’s a shame it took them till the end of that game to do it.
Anyone else wonder why they don’t just have a public test realm and be done with it?