Guild Wars 2

As was pointed out in another forum concerning elementalists auto attacks, even when a mesmer specs for damage, our damage comes from burst. Otherwise we’re somewhat relying on phantasms to help a bit.

So this is probably a very unpopular decision but I’m going to lay it out anyway;

The reason the BASE damage (ignoring burst from F1 right now) is so low as a mesmer is because the devs have to balance phantasm damage. It’s basically the same with Ranger damage except our base feels lower until we get at least 2 phantasms out.

So what if the phantasms stopped doing big damage? What if they stay somewhat utility in some manner and the damage be given either 1) To the mesmer or 2) to your clones. Instead of clones slightly dinking you, maybe they’re minor but higher in damage.

This would help the damage situation in PVE most but I can imagine elsewhere. Then some of the burst damage from F1 can be toned down if its given in some way back to the base. Bursting is still possible after getting an opponent down a bit further.

Now I mostly PVE as the title says but given the way WvW works, your phantasms aren’t doing jack in a zerg anyway.

I just think Devs have to try and balance our damage too much off magical christmas land where phantasms and going full blast and this would ALSO give people to use the Mesmer mechanics more often like they stated they wanted since we’re not saccing the damage by doing it.

Just some thoughts and curious how badly people WANT to hang onto their phantasm damage over turning them into utility like the ones on our utilities.

I wouldn’t mind utility phantasms, but frankly there is no place to put all that damage. Clones are mutually exclusive to phantasms while still having the same “AI uptime” issue in PvP, and most of our other skills are autoattacks or utility. Autoattacking while our illusions plink away is what we’re doing already. And you want to tone down F1, not buff it further.

Also, even with 3 phantasms the damage is “meh” if you factor in the setup time and/or loss of our healing skill. Single target and dies with the enemy, can’t hold a candle to an ele.

If you want to facetank you just have to take a facetank class. I know there are strange people in this world who care about PvE and hold some deep fascination and regard for it, however in PvP a Mesmer can’t stand toe to toe with an enemy in a fight and has to spend his time running, kiting, duking, stealthing, etc. That’s where sustained damage from phantasms comes in as it’s their job to do that for him.

So what you’re actually asking for is another class for PvE, one that’s purple in color with butterfly effects, but that can change out its phantasm summons for face smash skills and much 1 spam. I wouldn’t put money on Anet doing this.

Use mantra of pain, spam it on trash with auto attacks for loot and tagging. Recast it between trash.

Bosses our damage fairs much better so long as they don’t have some kind of BS mechanic where you need a buff to hurt it (looking at you Arah P2) and can maintain phantasms. Duelist is great for staying alive and doing decent damage.

Don’t get me wrong, mesmer isn’t great for PvE but it’s at least serviceable, if Anet allows them to take much reduced damage from AoE then it would be perfect. I know phantasms are immune to some AoE on some world bosses and fractal bosses but it needs extending.

But what if you take the phantasms damage and cut it by, let’s say, half. Now, put that missing damage into your normal clones. Make them actually HIT for a little something. So having 2 clones and a phantasm up would be like having 1 and a half phantasms. Phantasms come with the benefit of some great utility skill so their still good but basically make phantasms AND clones do the same damage.

We have access to clone making stuff more readily then phantasms so now, for PVE or pvp or whatever, shattering is still fine because you can get back up there fast enough. As far as burst, take away like 20% if needed and put it into the core autoattacks to increase sustained (also helped by clone damage mattering) while decreasing the burst as bad as it is. Might have to buff up auto attack a bit more since in bosses, you’d want at LEAST 2 phantasms going to be comparable to others while this scribble idea has only 1.5 that amount but its just an idea.

Mantra of Pain works great for now to assist, I agree.

I think the discussions will look different with HoT. Right now, the boss use deadly AOE to make up for the lack of AI. Right now, you can stand in front of packed mobs and AA to victory. Right now, you only care about DPS, the highest DPS wins (ele, warrior…).
There is hope that this will be different in HoT and then PvE may look a bit more like PvP, and this discussion would be less relevant.

Loxsus.3841:

But what if you take the phantasms damage and cut it by, let’s say, half. Now, put that missing damage into your normal clones. Make them actually HIT for a little something. So having 2 clones and a phantasm up would be like having 1 and a half phantasms. Phantasms come with the benefit of some great utility skill so their still good but basically make phantasms AND clones do the same damage.

You realise getting 3 phantasms up in PvE takes about 5s, meaning such a change would be a huge, unnecessary nerf?

Photoloss.4817:

Loxsus.3841:

But what if you take the phantasms damage and cut it by, let’s say, half. Now, put that missing damage into your normal clones. Make them actually HIT for a little something. So having 2 clones and a phantasm up would be like having 1 and a half phantasms. Phantasms come with the benefit of some great utility skill so their still good but basically make phantasms AND clones do the same damage.

You realise getting 3 phantasms up in PvE takes about 5s, meaning such a change would be a huge, unnecessary nerf?

It also takes less than that for a boss to cleave them down with 1 autoattack.

I wonder if you’ve actually done a boss like Molten Duo or Mossman or Archdiviner on fractal 50.

Tying mesmer damage to phantasms is bad. They should be utility skills. Take the damage from phantasms and bake it into the wimpy Blurred Frenzy and autoattacks/Cry of Frustration.

In beta there was a point where clones were doing 25% of the damage the mesmer could do with his autoattack chain, so they were good for something ebsides shatter fodder.

Either way the current design with shatters is bad. Mindwrack is always going to be held back by people crying about it doing too much damage. Expect a nerf soon to it for pvp reasons while mesmers get nothing in PvE in return.

I’m all for reshuffling damage, but your suggestions on where to put it are bad. Giving it to clones would be absolutely terrible for anything besides those AoE-spammy bosses.
Shatters are problematic due to PvP burst, CoF also has a long cooldown. Plus our illusion generation isn’t that much better in PvE, especially against those bosses where phantasms actually die.

Blurred Frenzy and Confusing Images can also be used for PvP burst, as can Chaos Storm and GS.

So, I repeat, where do you want to put that damage without incurring PvP-motivated nerfs (again…) or gutting our theoretical maximum when phantasms don’t instantly go splat?

Photoloss.4817:

I’m all for reshuffling damage, but your suggestions on where to put it are bad. Giving it to clones would be absolutely terrible for anything besides those AoE-spammy bosses.
Shatters are problematic due to PvP burst, CoF also has a long cooldown. Plus our illusion generation isn’t that much better in PvE, especially against those bosses where phantasms actually die.

Blurred Frenzy and Confusing Images can also be used for PvP burst, as can Chaos Storm and GS.

So, I repeat, where do you want to put that damage without incurring PvP-motivated nerfs (again…) or gutting our theoretical maximum when phantasms don’t instantly go splat?

You make mindwrack burst take a hit by making 50% of its damage a DoT portion called “despair”, and that way you can give it higher damage potential. The DoT portion cannot be cleansed, it’s a status effect.

Make mesmer less about a star aligned mindwrack burst that leaves the mesmer limp if it doesn’t connect and give him some sustained pressure in return.

Blurred Frenzy already barely breaks even in DPS with the autoattack, and the mesmer autoattacks are TERRIBLE.

Meanwhile some thief gets a version of blurred frenzy that also stuns, does about 50% more damage, and can be used 3 times in a row.

Mesmer needs to be something more than a portal/time warp bot in any group scenario.

I doubt that will happen though as this class appears to be swarmed by 1v1 heroes, and they don’t want any changes that might alter that focus, much like thieves have been touchy about their precious 1v1 builds.

I’m not denying a change would be better, but what should be changed that can’t be abused in PvP?

Your MW idea actually sounds good, how about this: MW gains the confusion from CoF but loses some direct damage. Maybe buff Mental Anguish a bit so all-out shatter is still viable.
Then rework Cof: now creates pulsing AoE fields around each destroyed illusion, causing heavy direct damage and pulsing confusion, bleed or torment. Still not good for “sustained dps”, but at >20s cd you can mix it in every time your phant cd’s are up for a huge spike, essentially our version of Meteor Shower. PvP counterplay would obviously be to walk out of the circles, if you facetank meteor+lava font you deserve to die too.
I’m still a little concerned about the point control capability, but we simply need more “heavy damage, but hard to land on a decent player” skills.

Confusion wouldn’t work, because it wouldn’t scale at all with a berserker gearset, making it an inferior skill in scaling compared to warrior/thief/guard/ele. Hybrid skills and weapons as a rule of thumb suck in PvE because they’re not receiving 100% stat benefit, and often for hybrid skills and weapons both the power and condi side coefficients are BAD.

Just look at ranger weapons for an example of hybrid crap gone wrong. Useless shortbow, terrible mainhand axe (power based, weak auto on a weapon with mostly condi skills). Greatsword had Maul with bleed and they had to change that finally to vulnerability.

And the problem is you can’t tie damage to cooldown skills. You need to buff the autoattacks, because the amount you’d need to buff a 20 sec cd skill to make up for the sustained DPS difference between a mesmer’s autoattack and a thief or warrior or ele’s autoattacks would make that 20 sec cd skill really, really spiky or borderline OP DoT.

The damage source mesmer needs buffing from needs to be a frequent enough damage source.

I like the cry of frustration idea for aoe, but I think they won’t even bother with such a change at this point given how they’re putting all the aoe eggs in the wells basket.

Hell, diversion should be aoe baseline and the daze duration based on the amount of illusions sacrificed.

Zenith.7301:

Confusion wouldn’t work, because it wouldn’t scale at all with a berserker gearset, making it an inferior skill in scaling compared to warrior/thief/guard/ele. Hybrid skills and weapons as a rule of thumb suck in PvE because they’re not receiving 100% stat benefit, and often for hybrid skills and weapons both the power and condi side coefficients are BAD.

Just look at ranger weapons for an example of hybrid crap gone wrong. Useless shortbow, terrible mainhand axe (power based, weak auto on a weapon with mostly condi skills). Greatsword had Maul with bleed and they had to change that finally to vulnerability.

And the problem is you can’t tie damage to cooldown skills. You need to buff the autoattacks, because the amount you’d need to buff a 20 sec cd skill to make up for the sustained DPS difference between a mesmer’s autoattack and a thief or warrior or ele’s autoattacks would make that 20 sec cd skill really, really spiky or borderline OP DoT.

The damage source mesmer needs buffing from needs to be a frequent enough damage source.

I like the cry of frustration idea for aoe, but I think they won’t even bother with such a change at this point given how they’re putting all the aoe eggs in the wells basket.

The confusion should be in addition to heavy direct damage so the skill stays relevant to condition builds (and MW replacing CoF for condi shatter), it’s entirely intended to be worthless in zerk gear. Hybrid seems rather UP anyway, so I doubt that’s a threat in any game mode right now. Obviously the “intended” balance would be for the skill to work well in all zerk.

Of course buffing autoattacks is an “easy way out” for PvE, but how much can you buff them? Imagine taking half our phantasm and MW damage and boosting all autoattacks proportionally, GS1 would 1shot glass from 1200 range…
Or we’re forced into sword/MoP, which is fun to use but boring as the only viable option.

Wells are bad because 1) they have “super-powerful group support” in addition to damage, 2) they also have long cooldowns so they’re not better than my CoF, 3) they require you to go Chrono, which means the entire class will fold over if wells are nerfed for PvP, Alacrity uptime is too low or the dps loss from even taking it is too high over core builds. And we lose our precious utility slots, when PvE mes would already like to trade 2 weapon skills for 1 extra utility in several cases.

GS wouldn’t 1-shot anything.

I’m talking about buffing mesmer autoattacks to the level of a fire ball or long range shot for ranged weapons, and to the level of thief sword or guardian sword.

Basically about a 25ish % damage difference in autoattacks, you’re not doubling autoattack damage.

Zenith.7301:

GS wouldn’t 1-shot anything.

I’m talking about buffing mesmer autoattacks to the level of a fire ball or long range shot for ranged weapons, and to the level of thief sword or guardian sword.

Basically about a 25ish % damage difference in autoattacks, you’re not doubling autoattack damage.

Ah okay, I thought you were speaking within the context of previous suggetions. A 25% buff plus some extra condi stacks on staff probably wouldn’t break much, especially if MW/PvP stats are reduced a bit to compensate.

Well I was happy to come back and check on this thread to see I’m not the only one displeased with so much damage depending on phantasms. Giving it back to the weapons/clones seemed the safest bet but other ideas are great. I doubt A-net will ever do this as it would be a big overhaul and if they had any intention of caring about this kind of thing, they would have done so in the big overhaul from specializations already.

I can dream though.

Not only was auto attack damage designed with the idea of having 3 phantasms out constantly somehow, the numbers havn’t really changed much since early beta where clones did the same auto attack damage as you.

Levetty.1279:

Not only was auto attack damage designed with the idea of having 3 phantasms out constantly somehow, the numbers havn’t really changed much since early beta where clones did the same auto attack damage as you.

Magical christmas land of PVE. And the burst from PVP hinders the other aspects of the game for mesmers. I’ve been holding out hope but maybe the Mesmer is just NOT designed for PVE play nearly as much given its pvp utility. I don’t want this to be the case but everytime one of my phantasms dies in pve I cry inside … and out >_>