Guild Wars 2

Since I brought it up as something I’d prefer over Mantras (if Mantras stay in their current state) in a few threads and every time someone said the idea might have merit, I figured I’ll write out my concept for Illusion-type spells.

The idea here is to have a type of skill which feels very mesmer-y by itself, without needing any traits or anything to evoke it.

Underlying idea
Illusion-type skills temporarily grant you something really strong. The concept ofc comes from Illusion of Life, which might not actually grant you something strong at all – usually it gets people killed hence it’s never used – but the idea has a lot of merit.
Illusion-type skills would briefly give you something very strong, followed by either taking it away again in a manner that it hurts, or actually giving you something negative, so that if you failed to exploit the moment of power, then you’re stuck with the debuff afterwards.

Specific abilities

Illusion of Life
The one we have already. I’d rework one aspect about this. It’s current weakness is that getting downed again during the revived time is actually pretty brutal since you die entirely. Coupled with the long cast time, this makes the skill worse than just letting your friend lie on the ground.
Effect: Up to 5 friendly players in the target area are temporarily revived and cannot be downed. At the end, they are downed again. Kills during the effect cannot rally the affected players.
Note: First, getting downed during the effect increases your downed debuff but you will immediately pop up again, half a second later or so. Second, this means that if they push you to red and then down you again, you still die. No change there. Third, I removed the “can rally”-part. This is on purpose. We’re looking at 15 seconds of always-back-up-instantly, that’s strong enough as it is, plus the inability to rally from kills is the downside inherent to this illusion.

Illusion of Health – healing
Effect: Regain all of your health. Over the next 10 seconds, lose all of the health gained this way.
Cooldown: 10 seconds
Cast time: instant
Note: Yes, this doesn’t actually heal you. Quite intentional, it’s a blam-full-heal on a 10s CD, in return you’re not healing anything at all.

Illusion of Might
Effect: Gain 5 stacks of Illusion of Might, increasing all of your damage by 10% per stack and decreasing all damage taken by 5% per stack. Lose 1 stack per second. After you have lost all stacks, gain 1 stack of Delusions of Might per second, decreasing your damage done by 10% per stack and increasing your damage taken by 5% per stack.
Cooldown: 40 seconds, starting from when you push the button, not when the effect ends.
Cast time: instant

Illusion of Freedom
Effect: Ignore all crowd control effects on you for the next 10 seconds, including those already applied to you. However, all crowd control effects on your do not lose duration during this time. When the effect ends, you will be stunned for 2 seconds if no stun or daze effect was applied to you during the duration.
Cooldown: 40 seconds, starting from when you push the button.
Cast time: instant, breaks stuns (well, kinda :P )

Illusion of Death – elite
Effect: Down target enemy. This does not count as a downed effect in regards to enemy debuffs or traits and will not increase their downed-counter. If the target enemy is not defeated after 6 seconds, they are revived, healed to full and have all conditions removed.
Cooldown: 120 seconds
Cast time: 2 seconds
Note: Yes, this isn’t balanced for 1v1 gameplay, the rest of the game isn’t, either. It should have a quite distinct effect of shattered glass shards flying off of the enemy when they’re downed, btw, so the target and their friends and your friends immediately know what is going on.

Why not remake Illusion of Life to Illusion of Vengeance.

Up to 5 allies in a target area gain Illusion of Vengeance. Allies who go or are downed with this buff instead get revived to your current health (can overheal allies, each ally can only be revived once in this way). If you are downed, allies affected will instead be healed to half your maximum health (including you, if you’re downed and affected by it). Any ally who was revived in this way and is downed at the end of this duration gets killed. The remaining revived allies are downed.

This makes it so in a fight, PvE, PvP, or WvW, you get a moment of Vengeance for a group. If you know you’re about to be overrun you can drop it on your team pre-emptively and allow your team to down and pop back up. Afterwards, instead of rallying, you just have to revive, assuming you managed to kill off your opponents (in WvW, you might not, but that’s just something you’ll have to deal with).

Ah, that’s a pretty cool idea, too. That way it works more reliable and also has a more interactive downside.

Although I can see a major downside of people trolling in JPs. Huehuehue.

Well they could always start restricting such “grief-able” skills to party-only.

Eh, I mean it’s not even that good of a troll, since they’d have to go down to end up down. It’s basically the same as IoL right now, actually.

Love these skills! I’ve seen you post about these before. I like them a lot. Future specialization perhaps?! Great job really!

Your elite reminds me too much of Moa/Humility, which is in essence very similar.