Guild Wars 2

I’d like to see mantra that would give swiftness for like 10-15 sec when activated.
Right now there we either have to wield focus or have centaur runes, both of which requires us to change our playstyle…

You could replace it with mantra of pain which is utterly useless.

You can’t have a manta that grants swiftness on a CD that is as low as MoP. MoP might not do a ton of damage but that isn’t why we use it. We use it in Mantra healing builds. Please don’t suggest they replace it cause what ever they give us will have a much higher CD and severally hurt a major support build that we can got.

or maybe add it to mantra of concentration. That’s another one that isn’t all that useful at the moment

Mantra of Pain… useless? It’s spammable and can be chained with autos.

Esplen.3940:

Mantra of Pain… useless? It’s spammable and can be chained with autos.

As far as i can tell, it’s better to keep autoattacking, instead of wasting my time charging MoP…

As for support builds, i won’t argue, because i haven’t tried it yet and i did read about people liking it. Also, i’m coming from PvE perspective. I guess it has it’s uses in PvP.

Personally I’d rip out Mantras entirely (I think they showed that the concept doesn’t work when they had to increase the charges, seeing how Mantras as a concept should not need more than one charge as they are “just” pre-casted normal abilities), and replace them with more Illusions.

Illusion of Swiftness, Illusion of Immortality (maybe as an elite :P ), Illusion of Power, and so on.
Always grant you powerful benefit A for X seconds, then incurable debuff B for Y seconds.

• Do not remove Mantra of Pain. If you can’t use it, don’t use it. But it barely ever leaves my first utility slot.
• Do not remove Mantras. They’re an awkward playstyle for lots of players, but essential for others.

Personally, I’d also try to run with GS/Staff, but the lack of movement speed makes me use the focus. But it’s not just that. iWarden is an awesome Phantasm (imagine he weren’t dumb as bread), curtain is an awesome utility (for pulling) and but traited for reflecting makes guardians drool at mesmers.

It’s time that the developers separate PvP/WvW zones stronger than before. Rethink every skill and change it accordingly. While Retaliation and Confusion were pretty strong versus players (so very few mobs got them), they should make those stronger against mobs. MoP could receive a +50% dmg buff for PvE. Making GS#3 steal buffs in PvE … the list is endless. And that even before inventing new skills.

Oh, I like the idea behind Mantras. But do you really think the current implementation reflects what Mantras were supposed to be, pre-casted, pre-loaded abilities?

As an example, why is a direct-damage ability like Mantra of Pain not a carbon-copy of the Warrior Throw Bolas. Instead of a 0,5s activation time it is instant-cast, but it needs to be pre-charged, the charge casting 1,25s-1,50s. So we pay with a longer cast time, but we can pre-charge it.
Because ultimately that’s the point of the way Mantras charge, no? Superior frontloaded power, but loss of power the longer the fight drags on.

(I am aware Throw Bolas isn’t a raw damage skill, although tbh the immobilize could fit in nicely, the pain is paralysing you)

Anyhow the point is, the Mantra-concept did not work out. It was then changed into a direction which tries to erode the special nature Mantra skills were originally supposed to have, they’re no longer “inverted” skills.
Personally, I don’t like that. Either give me proper Mantras, or just take them away entirely and drop the whole pre-cast concept.

Mantras were meant to be precasted and give either instant access to abilities or burst-like abilities. Both were wonderfully implemented. But with the latest changes (2x reduction in casttime), it’s not really necessary to precast them anymore. Other classes also have the abilities with higher casttime (esp reviving skills (which it quite pointless … casting 3.5s to revive an ally while you could just press F and revive at the same time)).
Alot Mesmers complained that Mantras are too clunky and ANet changed that. Actually I preferred the previous (longer casttime) with other effects. But they provide you exactly what they were meant for. You charge healing mantra and can heal anytime (while reviving or downed).

For me the current flaws are:

• Grandmaster trait which let’s you deal more damage for unused Mantras. Mantras were meant to be precharged before fighting each mob (most) and used for each. This doesn’t work for this trait. Maybe make it a “autocharge” trait.
• -20% cooldown trait for Mantra of Pain.
• +1 Charge trait in Domination line. Only a single mantra is a damaging one.
• +Toughness while charging. The value is noticable but doesn’t really help you while charging. Either grant stability (with cd), aegis (with cd) or even invul (with cd) while casting.
• Reduce the charge CD from healing and damage mantra to 1s to 0.25s.

If you do those, I wouldn’t mind the old casttime.

Nretep.2564:

• Do not remove Mantra of Pain. If you can’t use it, don’t use it. But it barely ever leaves my first utility slot.
• Do not remove Mantras. They’re an awkward playstyle for lots of players, but essential for others.

Personally, I’d also try to run with GS/Staff, but the lack of movement speed makes me use the focus. But it’s not just that. iWarden is an awesome Phantasm (imagine he weren’t dumb as bread), curtain is an awesome utility (for pulling) and but traited for reflecting makes guardians drool at mesmers.

It’s time that the developers separate PvP/WvW zones stronger than before. Rethink every skill and change it accordingly. While Retaliation and Confusion were pretty strong versus players (so very few mobs got them), they should make those stronger against mobs. MoP could receive a +50% dmg buff for PvE. Making GS#3 steal buffs in PvE … the list is endless. And that even before inventing new skills.

Yeah, of course, focus skills are very cool, but so are other skills from other weapons.
With mesmer it’s kinda hard to stick with same weapons for a long time, at least for me. But the thing is sometimes you wanna run gs/staff and there are a lot of parts in dungeons or elsewhere that you could use swiftness, so you gotta wait forever to get out of combat so you can swith to sword/focus to get that swiftness and then switch back to other set, because focus is not always best secondary, since most targets are not static and so it’s kinda easy to waste warden.

And i agree with you on seperating zones definetly. Since according to forums, every class is op in WvWvW and PvP, anet keeps nerfing them to hell and making them useless in PvE.

Well, since I’m lvl80 (with 100% map), I barely go into the open world anymore. So for me only FotM, instances and some bosses count.

There are quite alot mobs vulnerable to the iWarden. His damage, hitcount and reflect make him a very useful phantasm. In terms of reflecting, the meser has like 2x the possibilities of a guardian. Focus is crucial here. I can ditch the lower CD ot minor stats of other weapons, the focus trait is the most powerful one. You can set an iWarden and walk into it with your sword. High damage, high bleed and immune to projectiles for several seconds, just remember to use Sword#2 after his whirl.

The curtain pull is the greatest pull of the game. The curtain grants swiftness (high uptime with focus trait), causes cripple, can pull and can reflect. Swiftness is not the only reason I run around with the focus.

With my current build, I have one free utility slot – depending on the situation -, but in a team, swiftness is barely needed. I also tell my teammates to not use movement signets; it’s pointless to run faster if you have to wait anyways. AoE swiftness is great, single swiftness usually is pointless.

For exploring, a movement signet might be nice, but with traited focus and signet of midnight, I have a pretty high uptime of swiftness. Furthermore with Blink (range traited) in one of the utility slots.

serialkicker.5274:

I’d like to see mantra that would give swiftness for like 10-15 sec when activated.
Right now there we either have to wield focus or have centaur runes, both of which requires us to change our playstyle…

You could replace it with mantra of pain which is utterly useless.

Esplen.3940:

Mantra of Pain… useless? It’s spammable and can be chained with autos.

I, too, think that “useless” is definitely too strong a word. A huge part of most mantra builds is the ability to spam MoP and put out AOE heals every few seconds. On top of that, with three charges, three illusions shattering, and autoattack, that’s quite a bit of burst with Power/Prec/CritDmg gear. Works pretty well in WvW, and the survivability of the build (in large part due to MoP) is fantastic, even in glass cannon gear.

I understand that there are much better choices for that utility slot if you’re not running a mantra build (which I’m assuming you must not be), but it’d be nice if we wouldn’t petition to replace an ability that is pivotal to a build.

How about “Mantra of Agility” – 10 to 15 Sec cooldown

Restores 50% endurance and grants 10 seconds of swiftness per charge.

.. Thoughts?

Nretep.2564:

Mantras were meant to be precasted and give either instant access to abilities or burst-like abilities. Both were wonderfully implemented. But with the latest changes (2x reduction in casttime), it’s not really necessary to precast them anymore. Other classes also have the abilities with higher casttime (esp reviving skills (which it quite pointless … casting 3.5s to revive an ally while you could just press F and revive at the same time)).
Alot Mesmers complained that Mantras are too clunky and ANet changed that. Actually I preferred the previous (longer casttime) with other effects. But they provide you exactly what they were meant for. You charge healing mantra and can heal anytime (while reviving or downed).

For me the current flaws are:

• Grandmaster trait which let’s you deal more damage for unused Mantras. Mantras were meant to be precharged before fighting each mob (most) and used for each. This doesn’t work for this trait. Maybe make it a “autocharge” trait.
• -20% cooldown trait for Mantra of Pain.
• +1 Charge trait in Domination line. Only a single mantra is a damaging one.
• +Toughness while charging. The value is noticable but doesn’t really help you while charging. Either grant stability (with cd), aegis (with cd) or even invul (with cd) while casting.
• Reduce the charge CD from healing and damage mantra to 1s to 0.25s.

If you do those, I wouldn’t mind the old casttime.

You know, even when invul on mantra cast could be a very good buff (and needed) for mantra mesmers it could be a lil OP for other type of mesmers. Theres high chances a lot of mesmers just take MoP to be able to chain Blurred Frenzy, Distortion and MoP for a wooping 2 + 3 (or 4) + 2.75(?) secs of invulnerability and probably you could add another blurred frenzy at the end for 2 more secs.

^
If it actually were invulerability it’d have a long cooldown and probably only half of the mantra charge time.
But yeah, you can increase the chain with sylvari’s mortar ulti. No need for the mantra.

Usually stability or aegis should be more appropriate.

This is mantra discussion mostly off-topic to the thread – if Anet wants a mantra of swiftness they can simply add it, no need to tack it onto other things.

And the underlying request is to finally give us decent swiftness skills. Curtain in hamstrung by the stacking limit, ideally I would like to see that fixed but I guess its complicated. Considering that our best swiftness source is operating at reduced effectiveness, I believe new skills that alleviate this issue are in order. Maybe even a passive effect with 25% runspeed like almost every other profession has.

How about adding passive swiftness to Decoy? It is an often used utility in wvw and spvp.

Nretep.2564:

Well, since I’m lvl80 (with 100% map), I barely go into the open world anymore. So for me only FotM, instances and some bosses count.

Give it a chance! The world of GW2 is amazingly well-crafted, and you can do a single zone for 2-3 evenings during a week and still constantly find new events.

I really think not doing “normal” PvE takes most of the experience out of PvE.

Xavi.6591:

How about adding passive swiftness to Decoy? It is an often used utility in wvw and spvp.

That’d make an already mandatory skill even worse.
How about adding it to Illusion of Life instead?

Chaos Archangel.5071:

How about “Mantra of Agility” – 10 to 15 Sec cooldown

Restores 50% endurance and grants 10 seconds of swiftness per charge.

.. Thoughts?

50% endurance sounds kind of overkill to me, even overpowered :O. Also, using just this mantra on a 10-15 second cooldown gives more than 100% swiftness uptime. In my oppinion, if this were to work it should give 25% endurance,, 5 swiftness per charge, on a 10 cooldown, between each charge activation is a 5 second cooldown. This would give 66% swiftness uptime without traits and boon duration, with mantra traits (20% cooldown, 3charges): well, alot more!
A good idea but i had something like this in mind:
Mantra of celerity CD: 20
Power sap CD: 3
Apply criple for 3 seconds to your target, while applying 7 seconds of swiftness to yourself. You don’t have to cripple a target to receive swiftnes (so it can be used out of combat aswell).
I think having a utlity that only gives swiftness and is only useull out o combat is kind of silly, so with this suggestion i stay true to the mesmer concept, buffing yourself and debuffing your target at the same time.
Also, maybe the cripple could be aoe with half effect on the other targets?
Id take this utility in my roaming build to catch runners or make some breatjing space if im out of defensive cooldowns, even without mantra traits.

Carighan.6758:

Xavi.6591:

How about adding passive swiftness to Decoy? It is an often used utility in wvw and spvp.

That’d make an already mandatory skill even worse.
How about adding it to Illusion of Life instead?

Why would it make it worse?

Passive: 25% Swiftness
Active: Decoy (same as now).

More Mesmers would benefit from Swiftness if it was attached to the Decoy skill than Illusions of Life which only a small percentage of Mesmers use (Phantasm mesmers, not shatter mesmers). It would be better than Mantras or Signets as well.

How many of these topics must we have? If you really need to travel long distances, you just equip the focus and Signet of Inspiration. That will give you plenty of swiftness. You don’t need to switch playstyle, just switch one weapon and one skill.

Yes but nearly everyone already uses Decoy. The goal is to make utility skills equally useful. Right now, Decay is a lot more useful than the others, so adding even more beneficial effects to it is the wrong thing to do.

Kasama.8941:

How many of these topics must we have? If you really need to travel long distances, you just equip the focus and Signet of Inspiration. That will give you plenty of swiftness. You don’t need to switch playstyle, just switch one weapon and one skill.

That is still a terrible band-aid like solution to get perma-swiftness just like having to use centaur runes. When I come across some enemy invaders in wvw, hopefully they will pause for my cd on Signet of Illusions to expire so I can swap it and my focus out before we battle.

For my perma swiftness i just use runes of air + focus, its actually part of my build. In my oppinion runes of air are betterthan centaur, because t also gives a usefull combat bonus, the 10% critdmg and lighning strike. I think centaur gives things like bleed duration, useless stuff. The focus is also not as useless as people think! I have a video in my signature where i use it if youre interested

I’m not a huge fan of Runes of Air in WvW for the simple fact that if you stealth and then get hit while in stealth, your Runes of Air could proc and because this causes damage to your opponent, you would unstealth right away.