Guild Wars 2

Just wondering if anyone else is wishing/anticipating for this.

ANet has said that the Mesmer is currently the roughest class in the BWEs, and hasn’t really made any significant changes other then the really nice Clones don’t overwrite Phantasms bit (And AI changes so that actually will swing at Clones … sometimes).

I just keep checking the Update Notices and hoping the Mesmer finally gets its fair share of attention from the Devs. Rather then the unsaid and seemingly repeated:
“We’ll get to you and balance/fix/polish you after THIS task on X class, but first we need to kill that potential exploit in one of your skills. No worries, we’ll make it good again when we get to balancing, fixing, and polishing your class … someday.”

I know that may not be true, but I can’t help but feel that ANet treats Mesmers the lowest priority class to work on. Just wondering when the Devs will shine Sauron’s Eye … ahem I mean their attention on Mesmers.

/rambling and venting after reading the Patch Notes.

Eh, just getting irked by the bugs tying into our core Illusion’s mechanics. Condition Duration, HP for Clones/Illusions being non-existant on summoning (With Signet of Illusions), and leftover grumblings from the BWEs for Mesmers.
Especially after yet another “I.Warden is summoned! The Rabbit nearby sneezed! Its Super Effective! I.Warden is dead before showing up!” Along with loosing 6x Superior Runes of the Centaur for Magic Find %, meaning my movement speed feels nil once more.

I guess most WvW or sPvP mesmers hope they don’t “shine Sauron’s Eye” on us. Mainly because there are some buggy traits and combinations that feel a little to good to-be true.

If they would “fix” Condition Duration, HP for Clones/Illusions and add the “missing” extra bounce to clones, i pretty much know what build i will play, until they “rebalanced” it again.

Atm i have no problem at all in WvW/PvP, i’m actually very surprised how well i’m doing and in WvW i rarely loose any 1v1 or 1v2 fights.

I simply rationalize this with “my build and play skills are so good”

I tend to agree with the OP. The profession has been lacking some serious polish for awhile. It’s not “bad”, but it’s very rough and unreliable – especially in certain situations.

I understand that it’s only been a month since launch and there are a lot of actual game issues that require attention. But it really sucks to have broken and redundant traits still – some that harken back to the days when Clones could still do damage and were just never removed.

-All of the Phantasm Boon traits are broken such that having more than one conflicts horribly (Fury, Retaliation, and regeneration), two of which are minors in the same path and so unavoidable.

-Shatters still aren’t very balanced, Mind Wrack is the only one really worthwhile for a single Illusion shatter because they haven’t worked on weighting the other shatters yet. So everything is balanced around the potential of a 3 Illusion Shatter, so anything less than that is 1/3rd or 2/3rds of a ‘balanced’ skill (Except diversion which doesn’t stack and is only really good for breaking through stacks of Defiant on bosses) the very fact that a broken trait like Illusionary Persona that causes a single illusion shatter to deal more damage than a normal 3 illusion shatter without it wasn’t immediately flagged and changed just goes to show how little they’ve focused on balancing shatter numbers recently.

-Clones aren’t remotely balanced either. Staff Clones are incredible, Sword clones are kinda meh, GS clones are good if you have Sharper Images, and Scepter clones only if you have on-death traits.

-Phantasms aren’t really balanced with one another. i.e. Swordsman vs. iDuelist. I really wish they’d just make each sort of Phantasm unique and then give them more survivability. That way they don’t have to worry about the OP nature of having 3 iWarlocks out during a large event and I don’t have to worry about avoiding using half of my skills because doing so would destroy my 15k damage every ~5 seconds set-up. Whether you like setting-up and forgetting about phantasms or not, it’s bad design since it causes conflict with at least 3 of your other weapon skills and discourages Shattering.

I guess most WvW or sPvP mesmers hope they don’t “shine Sauron’s Eye” on us.

This, basically.

Phantasms aren’t really balanced with one another. i.e. Swordsman vs. iDuelist.

I know, it’s sad how bad iDuelist is compared to iSwordsman, isn’t it?

-Shatters still aren’t very balanced, Mind Wrack is the only one really worthwhile for a single Illusion shatter because they haven’t worked on weighting the other shatters yet. So everything is balanced around the potential of a 3 Illusion Shatter, so anything less than that is 1/3rd or 2/3rds of a ‘balanced’ skill

Lol, no. Do you realize how overpowered it would be for a 4x Mind Wrack without any reduction in damage per MW? Good god I’d crit for 10k with it. I really don’t think it’s fair to drop over half the HP of a poor kitten after I took the other half off with a double Phantasm combo.

For unbalanced Phantasms, compare Swordsman to Mage. Or Whaler to Duelist or something.

Oh man, Whaler is the pimp.

Mesmer’s own Hundred Blades right there.

I know, it’s sad how bad iDuelist is compared to iSwordsman, isn’t it?

Condescending much? I was actually referring to the fact that you’ll generally use one or the other of these phantasms and Duelist is usually better because of it’s longer range and thought it deals slightly less damage, it’s ability to proc Sharper Images upwards of 8x per round of attacks more than makes up for that.

Though perhaps a different example would have been easier to understand.

Lol, no. Do you realize how overpowered it would be for a 4x Mind Wrack without any reduction in damage per MW? Good god I’d crit for 10k with it. I really don’t think it’s fair to drop over half the HP of a poor kitten after I took the other half off with a double Phantasm combo.

Again, you don’t even understand the reference. Notice the key word “weighting”. Currently Mind Wrack is weighted so that a single Illusion deals about 50-55% of the shatter’s maximum damage. This was done so as to make single illusion shatters more worthwhile since, as I said, without that you were shattering at 33% or 66% of the skill’s potential if you only had 1 or 2 Illusions out. Now you deal ~55/77% of the max damage with 1 or 2 Illusions out.

This combined with how Illusionary Persona works means that a single Illusion Mind Wrack with IP deals more damage than than a 3 Illusion Mind Wrack does without it, since Illusionary Persona mimics the per Illusion damage of the Shatter.

I too await ANYTHING, ANYTHING to make the class playable. It’s ok as it is but the bugs just kitten you over by not enabling to take the route you wish to take just because they don’t work for 80% of the instances where it should work. Like extra bounce, I would actually want to get a build around it but since only I get the bounce it’s pretty pathetic. It’s not even specified what gets the bounce and it’s only one of many bugs that bother me. Anet ignores the mesmer and I have no idea why. The shatter mechanic is pretty stupid, there is no reward of destroying clones or phantasms unless you play a heavy confusion build which is still unreliable since illusions miss moving targets when detonating 90% of the time.

Condescending much? I was actually referring to the fact that you’ll generally use one or the other of these phantasms and Duelist is usually better because of it’s longer range and thought it deals slightly less damage, it’s ability to proc Sharper Images upwards of 8x per round of attacks more than makes up for that.

Odd. I see them as balanced just fine. iDuelist is slightly safer, does better damage with Condition damage builds, does worse damage with power-based builds (including Sharper Image damage for both). iS has generally more interesting combo finishers (leap versus projectile), although the Pistol trait is apparently bugged to give too many finisher procs.

Though perhaps a different example would have been easier to understand.

Indeed: it would have made much more sense to compare iMage and iWarlock, or something, where there is a real difference, rather than a perceived difference fostered by bads who use Sharper Images phantasm army as a crutch.

Again, you don’t even understand the reference.

This combined with how Illusionary Persona works means that a single Illusion Mind Wrack with IP deals more damage than than a 3 Illusion Mind Wrack does without it, since Illusionary Persona mimics the per Illusion damage of the Shatter.

That’s an interesting conclusion you reached considering I use Illusory Persona and Mind Wrack every 10 seconds I’ve spent in combat over the last two weeks or so. It’s been quite a long time since I haven’t had 30 points in Illusion.

Your entire “weighting” example is more or less incorrect … which is pretty clear if you actually use Illusory Persona in game.

Maybe there is some real issue at low power levels, but I haven’t seen it with heavy power investment. I crit for around 2200 x2 for a 1-illusion Mind Wrack. I crit for around 1950 x4 for a 3-illusion Mind Wrack. Edit: I don’t recall what sort of buffs I had at the time, so it’s possible a normal MW would have been closer to 1850 x4. E.g. I was probably at trolls, which is infested with people and interference. Then again this applies to both numbers I mentioned.

More illusions are a benefit to me, and IP itself is a benefit to me. I’m not seeing the problem.

Like extra bounce, I would actually want to get a build around it but since only I get the bounce it’s pretty pathetic. It’s not even specified what gets the bounce and it’s only one of many bugs that bother me. Anet ignores the mesmer and I have no idea why.

You know, as cool as it would be, Elasticity applied to staff clones would be riding the line of “overpowered” pretty hard. That would make staff clones do a kittenon of damage …

My phantasm vs. phantasm comment was more towards any situation in which you don’t want to summon a clone or even another phantasm because a single phantasm type fits your situation better. It’s bad design – with other professions you don’t refuse to switch over to your other weapon set and use a skill there because it conflicts with your other set’s skill (i.e. in nearly any big event 3 iWarlocks are going to out dps anything else you can do). Therefore, it would make more sense to me to make each phantasm unique (only 1 of each type out at a time) and then buff them to compensate. That would remove the aforementioned issue, give you incentive to shatter them (since once the CD is up you can just resummon), etc.

Also, I don’t think you’re getting the point on my ‘weighting’ and ‘Illusionary Persona" comments. I’m saying that the other shatters should be similarly weighted (or front-loaded) like Mind Wrack is. Essentially, each additional Illusion is worth less than the first, making it not as necessary to have a full 3 Illusions to get a viable effect.

Maybe an example will help. You already know that F2/F3/F4 are all the exact same effect for each Illusion, Mind Wrack is different.

Using stats from my Mesmer in the mists the damage (non-crit) for Mind Wrack is:

1 Illusion: 1x 955 damage (955 total, 47% of damage potential)
2 Illusions: 2x 756 damage (1512 total, 75% of damage potential)
3 Illusions: 3x 675 damage (2025 total, 100% of damage potential)

So the first illusion is worth 47% of the total damage, and adding an additional illusion only gets you 28% more, and the last gets you 25% (these percentages vary slightly based on power).

Now add in Illusionary Persona to the mix, the way Illusionary Persona works is that it mimics the exact same effect that each Illusion does. For the rest of the shatters this doesn’t matter since the effect stays the same, but since the per illusion damage changes depending on how many Illusions you have on Mind Wrack this makes it extremely effective.

So with IP it now becomes (comparing to 2025 max damage without the trait):

1 Illusion: 2x 955 damage (1910 total, 94% of damage potential)
2 Illusions: 3x 756 damage (2268 total, 112% of damage potential)
3 Illusions: 4x 675 damage (2700 total, 133% of damage potential)

Again, the percentages change slightly depending on the situation but stay close to those approximate amounts.

The point I am illustrating is that Illusionary Persona is extremely powerful with Mind Wrack, never mind it’s other effects. So powerful that a single Illusion shatter becomes nearly as powerful as a 3 Illusion shatter without it. So, my original point was that if it’s okay for the trait to effect Mind Wrack so drastically and not be changed (this has been in games for awhile, well before release) then it seems like they just need to rebalance the skill entirely.

MMO’s run on a time scale of years. It’s been a month. Expecting everything to happen over night while they are busy fixing problems that actually make the game literally unplayable is unrealistic. If you play a game at launch, expect polish to be lacking. If the mesmer doesn’t make you happy right now, play something else until they get to it.

Voodoo Tina

MMO’s run on a time scale of years. It’s been a month. Expecting everything to happen over night while they are busy fixing problems that actually make the game literally unplayable is unrealistic. If you play a game at launch, expect polish to be lacking. If the mesmer doesn’t make you happy right now, play something else until they get to it.

Have you seen a lot of the patch notes? a lot of their fixes are for incredibly minor issues. Meanwhile Illusionary Retreat is still popping us under the ground.

It’s beyond that though. Many mesmers feel a little neglected. Since BWE 2 we have seen very little change beyond bug fixes and a trait added or swapped around. The class still feels a little clunky and inharmonious. Meanwhile classes that have been polished to a near spit shine are still being tweaked while mesmer just gets their tooltips adjusted. It’s a little bit aggravating,

So powerful that a single Illusion shatter becomes nearly as powerful as a 3 Illusion shatter without it.

Of the other 3 Shatters aside from MW, F2 is the only one where more is “really” better in practice. As a result, F3 and F4 are typically low-Illusion Shatters anyways. The benefit of IP becomes the fact that you can use those at 0 Illusions, which is a gigantic change.

E.g. the effect of IP for F3 and F4 are just as drastic as for a “x1 Mind Wrack”, if not more.

F2 is the only one where you can make a real case that “IP should be as potent for F2 as it is for the other Shatters”. And 1 out of 4 being “comparatively less-synergistic with” IP is not bad.

Hildebert.4196:

Meanwhile classes that have been polished to a near spit shine are still being tweaked while mesmer just gets their tooltips adjusted. It’s a little bit aggravating,

Subjective much? Enlighten me, which classes would that be? Maybe a look at the other classes forum will help you find examples. Oh wait…

Minor issues tend to be the easiest things to fix. If a major issue could be fixed in two seconds, it would be.

Of course, then you’d have half a million people griping about how oh no, they fixed that issue quickly, why couldn’t they fix <insert pet peeve issue here>.

wintermute

Subjective much? Enlighten me, which classes would that be? Maybe a look at the other classes forum will help you find examples. Oh wait…

No need to be rude.
I was mostly referring to warrior, elementalist, and ranger. Three of their classes that have been around the longest and have had the most amount of time to be polished. Classes whose mechanic works well (some debate over ranger pets) and traits that aren’t total kitten.

Just look at the most recent patch notes. Necro got some well-deserved bug fixes, other classes got traits and skills tweaked around while mesmer gets some more tooltips updated.

Well, I did not mean this to come across that offensive, point taken. I do however, not agree with your sentiment that the mesmer’s problem stems from a lack of polishing, and more from problems with translating the classes’ concept to pve. The same is true for Elementalists, who suffer from extreme squishieness and rangers, who basically can’t use their pet at all in dungeons for example. Warriors, for example, happen to work extremely well in solo pve because dealing quick, raw damage while maintaining a good baseline survivability is part of their concept.

Personally, my idea for a fix would be pve only traits, that change what your skills do to make them work better in a pve environment. For example:

- Unfailing Phantasms: Your Phantasms are invulnerable until their first attack animation is finished. Ends after 5s if they can’t find a way to their target. (Yes iwarden, I’m looking at you.) =)
- Autonomous Illusions: As long as your are in combat, your illusions switch to your target, should their current target die before them. Only works for targets already engaged in combat with you.
- Selfish Staff: Your Winds of Chaos move twice as fast and no longer have a chance to cause vulnerability (this is actually a huge boost to staff single target damage, since vulnerability does absolutely nothing for you if you’re alone and using a staff, maybe its too strong even), they now always prioritizes enemies over friendlies, regardless of range (because 5s of might are worth next to nothing, and fury is equally pointless for a condition build, which you should be if you’re using staff clones).
- Escalated Elasticity: Your clones’ staff attacks bounce as yours do.
- Vigilant Warden: Your iwarden now can be placed as a ground targeted ability, but needs a target selected to link to.

Don’t nail me on anything, just throwing around ideas here. =)

Of the other 3 Shatters aside from MW, F2 is the only one where more is “really” better in practice. As a result, F3 and F4 are typically low-Illusion Shatters anyways. The benefit of IP becomes the fact that you can use those at 0 Illusions, which is a gigantic change.

E.g. the effect of IP for F3 and F4 are just as drastic as for a “x1 Mind Wrack”, if not more.

F2 is the only one where you can make a real case that “IP should be as potent for F2 as it is for the other Shatters”. And 1 out of 4 being “comparatively less-synergistic with” IP is not bad.

No no no, those were two separate points you’re combining them.

1) F2, F3, F4 should be rebalanced so that they are more front-loaded like F1 is. That way a single Illusion shatter is more worthwhile. I.e. Distortion grants 2s for a single Illusion and +0.5 seconds for each additional Illusion. That way there is a benefit to shattering more illusions, but the unreliability of Illusions isn’t as big of an issue.

2) Illusionary Persona needs to be rebalanced to take into account the weighting. In my example I showed that how it currently works causes a single Illusion shatter to deal as much damage as a 3 Illusion shatter without it. I’m trying to tell you that it’s TOO powerful in that regard and that if it’s okay for Mind Wrack to be balanced like that then it should just be innate. As you said, IP is worth it just for the ability to do a Shatter without any Illusions (especially Distortion), the fact that affects F1 so drastically and that isn’t even a big deal to them is a bad thing.

1) F2, F3, F4 should be rebalanced so that they are more front-loaded like F1 is. That way a single Illusion shatter is more worthwhile. I.e. Distortion grants 2s for a single Illusion and +0.5 seconds for each additional Illusion. That way there is a benefit to shattering more illusions, but the unreliability of Illusions isn’t as big of an issue.

F3 and F4 are already frontloaded. A Daze grants “silence” and interrupt. 3 Dazes grants the same interrupt and a little more silence.

F4 lets you avoid the big whateverthekitten you’re trying to avoid. A 3x F4 will let you avoid whatever you were trying to avoid, plus some bonus collateral attacks.

As I said, F2 is the only one where your argument has any basis.

2) Illusionary Persona needs to be rebalanced to take into account the weighting. In my example I showed that how it currently works causes a single Illusion shatter to deal as much damage as a 3 Illusion shatter without it.

It is not. My 1x+IP MW crits for 5200 damage. My 3x/noIP MW crits for 6300. That’s a 21% increase.

“As much” damage is your baseless spin you’re attempting to apply to your argument in order to justify your view of the world.

Bottom line is that 1x Mind Wracks are dumb in any event. You’re arguing that bad and sub-standard method is more technically efficient using an irrelevant metric than a more effective and more relevant method.

MW has a 10s cooldown. I have way too many illusions in any build to come close to shattering 3x every 10 seconds for MW alone. If I waste a MW cooldown on a 1x shatter, I really don’t mind that IP helps cover some of the abject failure of Mind Wracking with only 1 illusion. Part and parcel of the trait, and consistent with IP’s effect on F3/F4.

As you said, IP is worth it just for the ability to do a Shatter without any Illusions (especially Distortion), the fact that affects F1 so drastically and that isn’t even a big deal to them is a bad thing.

Don’t even try to pull this kitten with me.

The current characteristic where IP supports a 0x/1x shatter relatively more than a 3x shatter only mirrors its performance scaling with F3/F4. Hence, IP works consistently across most of the shatters (except F2).

There is -zero- reason why IP should perform linearly for F1, and then in an exponential decay fashion for F3/F4.

Nice flip-flop on your assessment of F3/F4 between the beginning and end of your post though.

if it’s okay for Mind Wrack to be balanced like that then it should just be innate.

What is innate? The scaling? The scaling is already innate. IP’s affect on scaling is consistent for F1, F3, and F4. What are you kittening about? That F2 should be re-tuned for some irrelevant perception of balance?

F3 and F4 are already frontloaded. A Daze grants “silence” and interrupt. 3 Dazes grants the same interrupt and a little more silence.

F4 lets you avoid the big whateverthekitten you’re trying to avoid. A 3x F4 will let you avoid whatever you were trying to avoid, plus some bonus collateral attacks.

As I said, F2 is the only one where your argument has any basis.

Wow… you really don’t understand this concept at all do you?

Weighted means that the first Illusion is worth more than each of the additional Illusions. Mind Wrack follows this since you get nearly 50% of the max damage from an initial hit. A single illusion shatter is more worthwhile because it’s worth more than just 1/3rd of the effect. The other shatters do not follow this, they are each exactly 1/3rd of the effect, in fact Diversion doesn’t even really scale with Illusions since Daze doesn’t stack, unless you stagger the distance between your Illusions the dazes all just overwrite one another (though each will remove a stack of Determined from a boss, which is one of it’s best uses).

You seem very angry about this, possibly because you don’t understand what we’re discussing since you keep insisting on something which just isn’t true.

It is not. My 1x+IP MW crits for 5200 damage. My 3x/noIP MW crits for 6300. That’s a 21% increase.

No, it doesn’t. Use your skills and look at the actual damage – you know you can go to the mists and test it right? I gave you exact numbers. You realize if you test something with completely different builds it’s a flawed test, right? With with ONLY 30 points in Illusions and no IP select and 1,839 power a triple illusion shatter hits for 696 × 3=2088. When you select the IP trait and leave everything else the same, a single Illusion shatter + IP hits for 1,006*2 = 2,012. So 96% of the damage of a full mind wrack without it.

Furthermore, the chances of critting 3x is much less than critting 3×. Even assuming a high crit rate of 50% the chances of critting on the 3 Illusions without IP for that damage is 12.5%; on the single Illusion with IP scenario it’s 25%. Base crit bonus is +50%, so that results in an average bonus crit damage 6.25% damage increase for the Triple w/o IP scenario, for an average damage of 2,218.50. With IP on the single Illusion shatter the average damage would be +12.5% = 2,263.50. So on average, you’ll deal MORE damage with IP and only a single illusion than without it with 3 Illusions.

The current characteristic where IP supports a 0x/1x shatter relatively more than a 3x shatter only mirrors its performance scaling with F3/F4. Hence, IP works consistently across most of the shatters (except F2).

No. IP changes the scaling of the shatters differently. Besides granting the ability to do a single Illusion shatter without any Illusions out, your 1/2/3 Shatter Illusion scaling changes to:

F1: ~47%/75%/100% of max damage -> ~95%/112%/133% of max damage.
F2/F3/F4: 33%/66%/100% of max effect -> 66%/100%/133% of max effect

Now again, let me try to explain this so you understand it. F1 is different because it scales differently than the other shatters. With F2/F3/F4 the effect per Illusion stays the same, just the number of Illusions increases. So if without IP each Illusion is 33.33% of the potential effect (3 Illusions being 100% of the potential effect) then with IP changes the scaling to ~133% (33.33% * 4). Since F1 scales such that the first Illusion is worth nearly half of the potential effect and the latter Illusions add less, then IP gives an incredible bonus to that skill, not only increasing it’s max potential to 133%, but significantly increasing it’s base effect to levels comparable to the full effect without the trait.

Test it. It’s a pretty incredible bonus if you can actually wrap your mind around it. And if you still don’t believe me that F1 scales differently than the other shatters, then you can read Jon Peters himself saying they changed it in the below link (he mistakenly refers to it as Shtter Delusions):

http://www.guildwarsinsider.com/interview-gw2-game-designer-jon-peters/

Mesmer Shatter: We updated how the Shatter Delusions skill works; now the damage scale based on the number of illusions is no longer linear. This has no effect on shattering 3 illusions, but gave shattering a single illusion a lot more play, which was really nice for quick PvE fights, or big PvP fights where maintaining 3 illusions can be difficult.

Actually Dastion, F1, F3 and F4 are all frontloaded to favour a single-illusion shatter.

Only F2 isn’t. And the person you quoted, though somewhat misunderstanding you, still presented the point why Diversion and Distortion are favouring a single illusion shatter.

Ofc, neither of those two favours 2-illusion shatters over 3-illusion shatters.

So for F1, x1 > x2 > x3.
For F2, x1 = x2 = x3.
For F3, x1 > x2 = x3.
For F4, x1 >= x2 >= x3. (this depends on timing, assuming you’re good it’s x1 > x2 = x3 again.