Let's Talk Utilities
Null Field, Feedback, Blink, Decoy, Mirror Images and Arcane Thievery are all cool, powerful, versatile and useful abilities. iDefender is boring but useful. The mantras are just a mess, though it should be noted Mesmers have no other source of stability. Nightmare Hounds in TA, anyone?
Yeah Decoy and feedback are great. I agree on the lack of general use utilities. I dislike Mantras too, boring to use and have to use all your trait points to make them worth taking in the first place.
Also the Signet that gives you random boons should work outside of combat again. And we could do with a speed boosting utility (passive speed boosting signet or a swiftness giver).
I think the utility Phantasms are pretty stupid too:-
The boon/condition stripper is only useful if you take up all 3 of your illusion spaces up with them, otherwise null field and arcane thievery outclass them.
The Defender has too little health to be useful in situations where you need that kind of damage reduction.
They both also take up spaces from other illusions and clog up your shatters if you want their effects.
The Glamours are obviously useful and double as combo fields if you can’t use them for their intended purpose. (Well, never tried with Portal.)
The mantras are so so, but are useful IFF you pair them with appropriate traits in mind.
- Restorative Mantra means every time you cast a mantra, you are actually casting a 4 second PBAoE heal with unlimited targets. At level 80, you will heal for at least 2.6k with no healing gear. Mantra of Pain works best with this in fights with minorly annoying unavoidable damage.
- The other mantra traits either give you an incentive to keep the mantras charged or lets you use them more often.
I don’t like the Phantasmal Defender and Disenchanter too much — they end up in the line of fire and die way too quick to get much mileage out of them.
I tried out the signets when I was lower level, but moved away from them while leveling up out of personal preference, so I really can’t comment on them too well at this point.
I like pretty much everything except Signets. My favorite one would be Decoy.
I’m only responsible for what I say, not for what you understand.
Hmmm I do enjoy the glamours, Blink, decoy and even mirror images to a certain rate.
Mantras need to much investment to become interesting enough and even then I dunnou …
The phantasmal defender while maybe useful bores me and the same can be said about the disenchanter.
Mimic is just hard to use not to mention the first hit damages you and the projectiles you absorb aren’t worth that risk and taking up a slot.
Overall I feel like most are either too unversatile and overly situational or simply not fun to use :/
Big fan of the mirror images – plops out 2 clones that can immediately be shattered to help you in many different situations. I also find that the domination and inspiration signets have nice passive attributes that add to condition dmg and throw me a random boon – I’m mainly just doing PvE with my level 46 mesmer so not sure how well these would do in other situations- I find that I do change them for dungeons and WvW
Mantras in general are just horrible, especially our Heal mantra. And yes, agreed.. why don’t we have a source of stability?
< Ferguson’s Crossing >
WAY too many alts to list here.
WAY too many alts to list here.
The Defender has too little health to be useful in situations where you need that kind of damage reduction.
While I think he is boring as kittens, he can be very sturdy if you have the traits to boost Phantasm resilience and high Toughness.
Mantras are not “horrible”. They are quite okay, just very annoying and awkward to use. They are actually technically better than normal utilities that do similar things. The healing mantra is on really low cooldown, Mantra of resolve is a very strong condition remover while mantra of distraction is two fast instant interrupts. Mantra of concentration isn’t great, but the ability to break stun twice is helpful, particularly in PvP type environments where people have multiple stuns. Mantra of Pain – the troubled poster child of mantras, is actually good spike damage. You can cast it in the middle of anything, and it’s at 1200 range. I hated on it for a long time, convinced that its only purpose of existence was to abuse the mantra traits, but it’s quite helpful once I actually tried to use it.
I find that Mesmers have a lot of great utilities that are very powerful. Every class has some skills that are extremely situation-specific, but perhaps because of the really good utilities, a lot of the other utilities just don’t measure up and don’t get used quite as often.
Mantras in general are just horrible, especially our Heal mantra. And yes, agreed.. why don’t we have a source of stability?
I apparently completely spaced and forgot about a tier 3 utility (I believe it’s either a signet or mantra) that grants us stability. DOH!
< Ferguson’s Crossing >
WAY too many alts to list here.
WAY too many alts to list here.
Mantras are not “horrible”. They are quite okay, just very annoying and awkward to use. They are actually technically better than normal utilities that do similar things. The healing mantra is on really low cooldown, Mantra of resolve is a very strong condition remover while mantra of distraction is two fast instant interrupts. Mantra of concentration isn’t great, but the ability to break stun twice is helpful, particularly in PvP type environments where people have multiple stuns. Mantra of Pain – the troubled poster child of mantras, is actually good spike damage. You can cast it in the middle of anything, and it’s at 1200 range. I hated on it for a long time, convinced that its only purpose of existence was to abuse the mantra traits, but it’s quite helpful once I actually tried to use it.
I find that Mesmers have a lot of great utilities that are very powerful. Every class has some skills that are extremely situation-specific, but perhaps because of the really good utilities, a lot of the other utilities just don’t measure up and don’t get used quite as often.
Our heal mantra is a perfect example of the gripe I’ve got with it. Both charges of “Mantra of Recovery” expended STILL heal for less than our starter heal, “Ether Feast”. Even slotting and gearing for +HEALING doesn’t counterbalance this. I think that’s rather stupid. Add into this the fact that while “Mantra of Recovery” is able to be cast while using other skills AND it’s got a short cast time.. in the heat of battle I regularly forget how many charges I have left. So it suddenly goes from a 2 second cooldown to a 10 second cool down with a 4.5 second casting time. While “Ether Feast” does have a 20 second cool down.. that’s ONE press every 20 seconds that does MORE healing (with only 1 second of cast time) than “Mantra of Recovery” heals in the same 20 seconds.
“Ether Feast” is 20 seconds cast time each time every time, nice and predictable… and gives me MORE total health (because I almost always have 3 illusions up.
I’d also like to ask why so many other classes have a heal that passively grants them health-per-attack or health-per-cast… but we don’t?
< Ferguson’s Crossing >
WAY too many alts to list here.
WAY too many alts to list here.
The lack of healing options on mesmers dissapoints me. But mantra’s are just downright obnoxious. They’re basically “simple but strong” utilities that DO NOT recharge unless you manually recharge them by dazing yourself for 4 seconds essentially, the only time that’s actually good is if you’re in a fight that lasts only as long as you have your charges for. Seriously you’re in so much down time trying to use a SINGLE mantra regularly, doing a full blown mantra build is just…. insane.
I don’t even have a solution for Mantras honestly, that style of “pre-charge one use” ability just doesn’t work in this game. I’ve played another MMO that has that which is Allods, basically most casted spells could be pre-cast to be used instantly in a fight which worked fine since you’re not losing anything by using that, it’s just a bonus. Warlocks in DAoC also had this mechanic, but their WHOLE spell casting gimmick revolved around pre-casting chambers, so that’s just the whole class itself. Mantra’s you have to give up things for.
I was actually sort of excited about Mantra before Beta just because of how much I loved Warlock Chambers, it just doesn’t work in this game lol. If Mantra’s were basically the Mesmer’s Class Mechanic instead of shattering it probably could’ve been better.
(edited by Knote.2904)
I would like Glamours more if they actually lasted for as long as their tooltips say. Currently all Glamours last for a significantly shorter duration than what is shown on their tooltips. Also, Veil is crap.
The only good Manipulation skill we have is Blink, the other three are useless (IoL), stupid (Mimic) and buggy (Arcane Thievery).
Mantras in general take too long to charge, taking more than one without Empowered Mantras (which encourages you to not use your Mantras) and you’ll have your hands full juggling them. Plus they aren’t even good unless you trait them heavily.
Our Signets are mostly very niche: each works decently with a specific build, but rarely would you want use them together. SoD is the only generally useful Signet we have and only for its active effect.
Illusion utilities are generally quite good, although Phantasmal Disenchanter needs a buff.
Arcane Thievery can be dodges and probably blocked, also if you’re not facing your target it will go off and do nothing.
We have good regeneration mixed in with some protection, also, permanent retaliation can be specced for and is good but they’ll probably nerf it when nerfing the guardian.
But yeah most of our utlitities are not that good or have specific niches which you cannot rely on for spvp, in wvwvw and dungeons they’re good.
It is not a targeting issue (although it certainly is more hassle to use than most other condition removals), it’s the fact that it frequently doesn’t steal all boons and transfer all conditions: in fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen it work properly unless I have just one condition.
Quite frequently AT will send off the Poison, 10x Vulnerability and Cripple, but not the 15 stacks of Bleed that’s about to kill me.
As far as I can tell it tries to remove up to 3 conditions and steal up to 3 boons. Whenever you have more than 3 it will remove 3 based on a ranking system with the conditions which should be constant, I have no clue what the order in which they’re removed is.
It doesn’t seem to be based on amount of stacks or the duration, it will remove that 1 second of cripple and leave the 15 stacks of bleed, if you’re unlucky.
I don’t know if it’s our best condition removal ability, mantra is a hassle long term and null field doesn’t last long, anyway, against a true condition spam build none of our abilities will work, so I choose Arcane Thievery for the boons it steals and the extra damage of putting the conditions on your enemy.
The only utility skill I ALWAYS have is Null Field (the other condition removal options, the mantra and phantasm, are woefully inadequate). Decoy is used most of the time when solo, but I swap it for feedback in most group situations and ALWAYS in WvW. Blink is usually the 3rd one, but again in WvW it’s less useful when compared to Portal or Veil.
As for elite, I always use Time Warp. Moa is meh, Time warp is the real “I WIN” button.
I would like Glamours more if they actually lasted for as long as their tooltips say. Currently all Glamours last for a significantly shorter duration than what is shown on their tooltips. Also, Veil is crap.
The only good Manipulation skill we have is Blink, the other three are useless (IoL), stupid (Mimic) and buggy (Arcane Thievery).
Mantras in general take too long to charge, taking more than one without Empowered Mantras (which encourages you to not use your Mantras) and you’ll have your hands full juggling them. Plus they aren’t even good unless you trait them heavily.
Our Signets are mostly very niche: each works decently with a specific build, but rarely would you want use them together. SoD is the only generally useful Signet we have and only for its active effect.
Illusion utilities are generally quite good, although Phantasmal Disenchanter needs a buff.
Disenchanter is actually amazing.
It strips 2 boons/2 conditions per hit, and hits like 5 people with a 5 second base cooldown.
All mantras all day every day.
I would like Glamours more if they actually lasted for as long as their tooltips say. Currently all Glamours last for a significantly shorter duration than what is shown on their tooltips. Also, Veil is crap.
The only good Manipulation skill we have is Blink, the other three are useless (IoL), stupid (Mimic) and buggy (Arcane Thievery).
Mantras in general take too long to charge, taking more than one without Empowered Mantras (which encourages you to not use your Mantras) and you’ll have your hands full juggling them. Plus they aren’t even good unless you trait them heavily.
Our Signets are mostly very niche: each works decently with a specific build, but rarely would you want use them together. SoD is the only generally useful Signet we have and only for its active effect.
Illusion utilities are generally quite good, although Phantasmal Disenchanter needs a buff.
Disenchanter is actually amazing.
It strips 2 boons/2 conditions per hit, and hits like 5 people with a 5 second base cooldown.
Didn’t know it already strips two boons/conditions. That was one of my suggestions for polishing the Mesmer. The cast time could use a little toning down though, when I need condition removal I need it now; a 1.5 second delay can make a lot of difference.
Allow me to address some individual skills that have been singled out in responses so far. Note everything I’m about to say is purely my opinion, and I’d be happy to discuss these (but I won’t be back until later today).
Mantra of Distraction is REALLY good. It gives you 2 interrupts in a fight, much better than Signet of Domination’s one. Wait, there’s more! The interrupt is instantaneous which means it is actually a true interrupt skill. You can use it to interrupt that 1second healing skill whilst the mesmer stood next to you has to sit out the cast time of Signet of Domination and ultimately misses the interrupt. Traiting into Domination also allows Mantra of Distraction to stack up masses of vulnerability just from the minor traits. Right now, I actually prefer MoD over SoD.
Mantra of Resolve is also okay, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it buffed slightly.
Mantra of Concentration is terrible and can not compare to the guardian skill “Stand Your Ground!” which completely blows it out of the water. To save you having to look it up, SYG is a shout (instant cast), AoE 5 second stability and retaliation on a 30 second cooldown.
Mantra of Pain, while having its niche uses, needs to be reworked. My issue with this skill is the fact the only thing it does is deal damage. There is no utility element here. Make it apply vulnerability or something – anything – that allows it to live up to the name of utility skill.
Illusion of Life is the fastest casting and fastest recharging non-elite revive skill in the game. It is AoE and if the ally fails to kill a foe they merely go back into downed state. This can be used on an ally who then just runs around a corner to safety so that they can be easily ressed when it ends. Sadly, as with all resses, it is somewhat overshadowed by the fact everyone can combat res which makes the situations where you’d rather use a res skill over an F res very small. Still, in comparison to other res skills in the game, I’d argue this is one of the best.
Mimic has its niche, such as reflecting Kill Shot, but that niche is so small you’d only ever bring if you knew you were 1v1ing a rifle warrior :| I don’t really understand how Anet ever thought this skill was remotely good. Are we missing something? Is the tooltip missing information about a functionality that makes this skill insane? So far I’ve only really used it to make some fun screenshots with its shield-like animation.
I personally think the devs made a mistake in allocating our stun breakers. Skills like Signet of Midnight are mediocre, but become great because of the stun break. However, this is then overshadowed by skills like Decoy which are already fantastic and then have a stun breaker thrown on top.
I can understand Decoy having a stun break to some degree.
Mirror Images on the other hand is just unnecessary
Mirror Images has it’s own advantages. Decoy stealths you and drops 1 clone. Mirror Images on the other hand, doesn’t stealth you and drops 2 clones. For a shatter type Mesmer, it is probably much more useful as you can have 2 clones with 1 button as compared to 1.
Also, no cast time too.
MoD is indeed a good skill, but it still suffers from the clumsiness of having to spend 4 seconds to recharge the Mantra. I think reducing all Mantra channel times down to 3s would help a lot.
MoP, MoRes and MoC still need work of course. In general I’d like to see Mantras be buffed and Mantra traits be nerfed/removed.
Not that I think Mimic is the a great skill, but it has abilities that are not described on the tooltip.
First off, just like the tool tip, it does absorb the first projectile and allows you to “echo” it back later. The echo is cumbersome, because its a sec or two to cast, which is unwarranted. It should be quicker than that IMHO.
BUT the spell is also a shield. And against ranged, it will “reflect” those projectiles back to the target!
So use it as a “gap closer” for when using main hand sword. Its a walking barrier that allows you to get close to your target.
I’ve used occasionally in sPvP, against rangers with their bow attacks, but also when Hunter’s Call sends all those hawks at you. Those hawks barely scratch you.
(edited by SlimChance.6593)
@SlimChance
It doesn’t really “absorb” the first ranged attack. You receive full damage and get the ability to echo the attack that you have received. But yeah, I agree, the reflect for the rest of the duration is somewhat nice. Though it’d be nice to know what skill your echo has.
I’m only responsible for what I say, not for what you understand.
Illusion utilities are generally quite good, although Phantasmal Disenchanter needs a buff.
Disenchanter is actually amazing.
It strips 2 boons/2 conditions per hit, and hits like 5 people with a 5 second base cooldown.
I’d say the only buff it needs it’s more of a bug fix, that it appears next to the target instead of the caster as if it were melee ranged.
While the Block/Reflect of Mimic is amazing, there is one problem. It must absorb a ranged attack before that part comes into play. Therefore despite the Block being highly useful against melee, it will never proc unless you get hit by a ranged attack first. Taking damage from the absorbed attack is also finicky making the initial effect much, much worse than the follow-up effect.
Overall it is just a highly messy skill.
In my Polish the Mesmer thread, I suggested changing Mimic to work like this:
Fire a fast-moving projectile that interrupts the target. If a skill is interrupted, Mimic temporarily becomes that skill.
This may cause animation issues with using melee attacks with an unsuitable weapon, but I’m sure that’s easily solved.
Not sure why everyone is saying we have no stability skills; here is a list of utilities that break stun:
Blink, Mirror Images, Decoy, Signet of Midnight, Mantra of Concentration (which gives stability and breaks stun).
You can also used Phase Retreat to at least get away from enemies while waiting for skill recharge.
In PvE as a condition damage mesmer I use mostly Feedback, Blink, Signet of Domination (usually all the time), Signet of Illusions, Null Field in high condition situations along with Mantra of Resolve and maybe Disenchanter, as well as Illusion of Life.
I really don’t understand why you guys don’t like IoL. I used it ALL THE TIME in dungeons. Means you can keep moving and revive party members who got stomped by some aoe or res someone far away without having to run over to them. Seriously saves butts in long tricky fights. It would be more useful in PvP if it had a shorter cooldown but still a viable utility for a staff mesmer with 3 warlocks pumping out your damage on a boss fight while you run around buffing and supporting your group.
stability <> break stun, which breaks stun only, not the other effects, and it does not prevent it either.
Lack of stability is our weakness for sure… Only Mantra of Concentration and its only 2s of stability per charge with the 25s cooldown to reload it ^^
Not sure why everyone is saying we have no stability skills; here is a list of utilities that break stun:
Blink, Mirror Images, Decoy, Signet of Midnight, Mantra of Concentration (which gives stability and breaks stun).
You can also used Phase Retreat to at least get away from enemies while waiting for skill recharge.
Stability and break stun are completely different. The former is a proactive play designed to prevent your key skill from being interrupted. The latter is an oh kitten button designed to get you out of a tricky situation.
Our only stability comes from Mantra of Concentration. Its power is significantly weaker than other stability skills because it can be instant cast and used while casting another skill. It is here where I begin to question whether Anet put any thought into the skill. As I said previously, stability is a proactive play. That means I want to use it BEFORE I use my key skill, not during. It gets better – Power Break is also weaker than other stability skills because it also breaks stun. Wait what? It’s now both proactive… and reactive… in the same skill? You’re probably quick to argue PB is designed to break stun and then provide protection against chain CCing, but Decoy breaks stun and turns you invisible, Mirror Images breaks stun and lets you use Distortion and Signet of Midnight breaks stun and blinds the next CC. Everything about Mantra of Concentration – going right down to its core concept – is just backwards.
I really don’t understand why you guys don’t like IoL. I used it ALL THE TIME in dungeons. Means you can keep moving and revive party members who got stomped by some aoe or res someone far away without having to run over to them. Seriously saves butts in long tricky fights.
It’s not IoL that sucks; it’s res skills as a whole. There are very few bosses in this game who render F ressing impossible, and even fewer if you’re taking Medic’s Feedback, and fewer still (have we hit 0 yet?) if you’re a coordinated team who can quickly 4man res someone. Even when you are facing one of these bosses, a res every 2 minutes is far from ideal. Furthermore, the boss needs to be spawning ads for the IoLed player to kill, or you haven’t actually achieved anything; if they run to safety so you can F res them afterwards, you haven’t allowed yourself to “keep moving and… res someone far away without having to run over to them” at all.
The utility slot is much better used for something that will actually keep your allies alive in the first place, such as Null Field, Feedback, healing traited mantras, or even Blink. Blink will cut out the “running over to” your ally you speak of and will give you more survivability yourself with a much shorter cooldown to boot.
It seems to me the res skills were made with PvP in mind. They can be useful in 8v8 when you have 4 people trying to stomp your ally and no AoE CC available, but in 5v5s that isn’t going to happen. We’ll just have to sit back and see how the meta develops on those.
MIRROR IMAGES. need i say more?
Glamours. feedback is the better IMO, because veil is very specific, portal is a wvw thing, and null field is out done by the disenchanter.
All the others I enjoy playing around with. they all have their unique purposes, but aren’t too specified(except illusion of life. someone needs to explain why it’s there.)
Mantras are my least favorite.
I also do not get much mileage out of the clone/phantasm utilities except underwater (and they are a huge part of my underwater strategies).
The rez skill, I do not think I have ever even tried it so no comment.
I find solid uses for most of the other utilities. In fact, I like so many of them that I swap out 1 or 2 (for my standard pve or SPvP setups) on a near weekly basis.
(edited by Bombul.2506)
Mimic has its niche, such as reflecting Kill Shot, but that niche is so small you’d only ever bring if you knew you were 1v1ing a rifle warrior :| I don’t really understand how Anet ever thought this skill was remotely good. Are we missing something? Is the tooltip missing information about a functionality that makes this skill insane? So far I’ve only really used it to make some fun screenshots with its shield-like animation.
Indeed the tool tip is missing something. I overlooked this ability for a long time because of that fact. Once you absord a ranged attack, this ability becomes a complete sheild to all hostile abilities for the remainder of the channeling. You are also mobile while channeling.
I believe (although I have still not proven this to my satisfaction) that many more skills then one would assume are considered ranged. My current theory is that it is based on skill range (anything greater then 120 or 240 maybe) therefore traits that increase skill range also change what skills cause retaliation and the initializing of the block effect.
I would love if someone could give me the specifics of what “ranged attack” means for this skill.
The Mantras are a bit poopy, true.
Conceptually mind you, not talking about power or usefulness here.
I’d potentially replace them with Illusions-like states which have an ongoing effect but an inverse effect when they end.
In other words:
Mantra of Pain
Recite a Mantra of pain and destruction, greatly augmenting your damaging capabilities.
When the Mantra ends the power lashes out against you, damaging you and leaving you weakened.
Lasts 10s, giving you Fury and increasing damage done by 10%. At the end you lose 25% health and suffer Weakness for 5 seconds.
Mantra of Distraction
Recite a Mantra of confusion and distraction, causing any dazeing effect against your current target to double in duration and causing damage whenever the target manages to use an ability.
When the Mantra ends you suffer part of it’s effects yourself.
Lasts 15s, causing double daze duration and keeping up 3 stacks of Confusion. At the end of the Mantra you suffer 3 stacks of Confusion for 10 seconds.
Mantra of Concentration
Recite a Mantra, granting you Stability and increased movement speed.
When the Mantra ends or the Stability is lost, you are crippled and cannot benefit from Swiftness.
Lasts 20 seconds, granting Swiftness and Stability. If the Stability is lost in any way or the effect ends you are crippled for 10 seconds and cannot benefit from Swiftness for those 10 seconds, even if Crippled is cured.
Mantra of Resolve
Recite a Mantra, granting you partial immunity from Conditions.
When the Mantra ends, you cannot be afflicted by boons for a limited amount of time.
Lasts 20 seconds. While the Mantra lasts, any Condition lasts only half it’s normal duration, but it is stored. When the Mantra ends, you are “immune” to boons for ~15s.
Mantra of Recovery
Recite a Mantra, granting you rapid healing .
When the Mantra ends or your health reaches maximum, you take increased damage for a short amount of time.
Lasts 10 seconds, granting you Regeneration and healing some HP every second. If your health reaches maximum or the Mantra ends, suffer 20 stacks of Vulnerability for 5 seconds.
The strength of heart to face oneself has been made manifest. The persona Carighan has appeared.