Guild Wars 2

Since there are a lot of opinions floating around. And we have some very unclear hint from a dev that they will be looked at the skill. Let’s discuss what issues people currently have with portals and what can be said pro or against them.

The dev remark can be found here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/WvsW-is-unplayable-because-of-mesmer-portal-abuse/first#post285938

I myself play a mesmer. And I fear the skill will be mainly nerfed because of all the rendering issues.

Let’s first be clear about one thing. The rendering bugs need to be fixed. That I hope we can all agree on. This is an issue that turns up with portals, but it is not caused by the portals itself.

It merely happens more often using a portal, because you might be moving people from outside the rendering range (measured by numbers if I read dev posts correct) into the rendering range, where they will not show for some seconds while the game unloads some other players before showing the ‘new’ ones.

Then onto the utility side of the skill.
1. Number of people one can portal.

Perhaps an endless number is a bit much at times. But I would not like to see it restricted to grouped people. That would mean I cannot help out that single fellow from my realm being pestered by a group of enemies with a portal. Also since the actual portal duration is very restricted, you cannot get hundreds to move in range and use it reliably.

2. Portal use past walls or up cliffs.

Actually the main reason why I think the skill should be in the game. To give your side a feature that otherwise would not be there.

For example, if my server is defending a keep against an overwhelming number of people. I can use the portal to get defenders past the zerg and into the fight. Without this, lots of fights would simply end quicker and make the zerg even stronger than it already is in this game.

For the sake of the underdog, keep this feature alive.

There are a lot more points to be made I’m sure. But this can be a good start to get the debate going. Let’s hear what you all think about portals!

And hopefully we can get a dev to go into the changes they are planning and the reasons behind them.

Regards,

Puz

If we assume that the rendering issues are separate from portal…then I see no issues with portal itself.

Every portal “exploit” can be countered, or really isn’t a huge exploit at all.

People ported inside your keep? Probably should have swept it for hiding mesmers when you took it. I actually ported folks inside a keep once…and the crazy thing is that someone (enemy) even found me in the keep first! But I knocked him off the ledge, and apparently he didnt’ see fit to come back or warn his team that a mesmer was hiding in their keep.

Mesmer speeding up siege golems? So what? This is what portal is for! Moving players around the map quickly. This is not an exploit at all.

Mesmer snuck into your siege line and ported a bunch of people there? Hey, sounds like a valid tactic to me! You could have killed the mesmer or AoE’d the hell out of the portal to stop it.

Tbh portal as a group strat isn’t all that great. The enemy can see exactly where you are planning to drop your team to, so they always know exactly where you are planning to hit once they move, anyone smart will have their eyes on the portal entry point in tpvp. If you can see exactly the point where you can expect up to five people to suddenly show up, and you don’t use that to your advantage, well then playability.

I use it more for personal kiting/ escape.

Mesmer portal is stupid powerful in WvW. You have to scour every nook and cranny of a keep or a tower to hunt for mesmers or they will just teleport their whole server back into the place without having to bother to seiging it. With towers it’s not such a big deal but the outer wall on some of these keeps gives mesmers quite a few areas to hide. The abilty of mesmers to get whole groups past gates and walls makes it the single most powerful profession in WvW bar none.

Honestly everyone seems to be picking up on this “clever” tactic and pretty soon everyone who enjoys WvW will be rolling a mesmer because of how powerful portal is. Eventually majority of our time in WvW will be spend hunting a class that can go invisible for long periods of time in the hopes of preventing them from bypassing the very mechanics that make WvW special. May as well just rename WvW “Mesmer Hide and Seek Match”.

Mesmer portal is working as intended but its working far too well, I hope it can be adjusted in a way that still makes the ability unique and interesting without leaving it in the overpowered state its in.

The rendering issues should absolutely be fixed.

For sanity’s sake some sort of TEMPORARY limitation on mesmer portals should probably be introduced while they work on the rendering issue.

As far as I’m concerned sneakily teleporting people past walls and cliffs is exactly what the portal is for.

Ergo Proxy.6219:

Honestly everyone seems to be picking up on this “clever” tactic and pretty soon everyone who enjoys WvW will be rolling a mesmer because of how powerful portal is. Eventually majority of our time in WvW will be spend hunting a class that can go invisible for long periods of time in the hopes of preventing them from bypassing the very mechanics that make WvW special. May as well just rename WvW “Mesmer Hide and Seek Match”.

Mesmers have 3 possible stealth skills: Mass Invisibility 5s every 90s (elite), Decoy 3s every 40s (utility), and The Prestige 3s every 30s (torch). They also have a trait to increase stealth duration by 1 second at the top of chaos line. Not sure I would qualify that is being able to “go invisible for long periods of time” however. So my max possible self stealth time from using all 3 in succession with the increased to duration trait is 14 seconds and that is only if all 3 are not on cool-down already. Mass Invisibility is not nearly as effective an other elites (like Time Warp) so is usually not slotted and the torch is just plain terrible compared to…… well anything else. Some could argue that the torch is better than nothing, perhaps best used as a night light in dark caves. The focus or pistol for an off-hand are much better options.

The invisible people is not a portal problem, it’s a problem with the culling which ANet has already acknowledged.

I agree about the rendering issues, aside from that i can’t see the problem with the skill itself. Using it to ‘stealth’ a large group could be considered an exploit, but that’s due to the rendering issues, not the skill. You might as well remove thieves all together if you wanna get rid of skills that cause rendering issues.

The argument about how the majority of the time in WvW is hunting mesmers out of a base is silly. there’s only so many places they can hide, once you figure them out, it’ll take 2 mins tops to check all the places, maybe less with a handful of ppl doing it.

As mentioned, teleporting people around is basically what it’s designed for. You can’t blame the Mesmers for using it to help their team. The skill is fine, people just haven’t figured out how to work around it. Not the fault of the mesmer

So…the complaint here is Team A is defending a keep, B attacking. B breaks through and claims the keep.

Mesmer from A is sitting in the keep, which Team B didn’t bother to defend or make sure was clear. He uses portal to bring people back in after Team B leaves the keep and moves on to other objectives.

Here’s what’s wrong with this:

1) Team B did not properly clear all enemies from the keep before moving on. And don’t claim stealth, it doesn’t last nearly long enough. And few if any keeps are so big that a Mesmer can hide for long.

2) Team B left without providing defense for the keep

3) Team B didn’t bother to see where all of team A’s forces ran to and keep an eye on them

In short, B was stupid, relied on zerg rushes to claim keeps and then rush to the next one without thinking, and lost as a result. I have no sympathy.

Also, keep in mind portal doesn’t stay up that long, nor is the range that long. Team A) had a major force standing right there and B didn’t bother to prep defenses. My lack of sympathy continues.

EDIT: This is separate of the rendering issue. That is a larger concern and should be addressed.

Ergo Proxy.6219:

Honestly everyone seems to be picking up on this “clever” tactic and pretty soon everyone who enjoys WvW will be rolling a mesmer because of how powerful portal is. Eventually majority of our time in WvW will be spend hunting a class that can go invisible for long periods of time in the hopes of preventing them from bypassing the very mechanics that make WvW special. May as well just rename WvW “Mesmer Hide and Seek Match”.

Mesmer portal is working as intended but its working far too well, I hope it can be adjusted in a way that still makes the ability unique and interesting without leaving it in the overpowered state its in.

Mesmers can’t stealth that long, and one of their stealths poops out a clone, which means you still see that someone is there. They have to aboid aggroing guards or the dreaded orange X will appear letting anyone looking at the map know that something is awry.

As someone else said, if there is such a terrible defense on the keep that they don’t notice

-an enemy running around inside
-an army massing outside their walls
-lack of enemy zerg anywhere on the map

then I firmly believe you deserve to lose that keep.

I have a reasonable proposal that’d work for everyone.

Drop portal wholesale, and give Mesmer a timeloop style spell – ie it reverts the Mesmer’s location/health/stamina to where it was say 10 or 20 seconds ago.

Functionally, this can be used like portal; to swap between two locations during a fight, and get out of harms way. It can also be used as an “Oh crap” button which Portal is also useful for, and it can be used to rollback jumping puzzle errors (My most frequent use xD)

It can’t however be used to help allies (Unless it was made an AoE), nor does it create an exploitable portal, nor does it allow forward momentum, only backwards so it can’t be used to push forces into the fray, only withdraw safely from action.

Drakh.3128:

Ergo Proxy.6219:

Honestly everyone seems to be picking up on this “clever” tactic and pretty soon everyone who enjoys WvW will be rolling a mesmer because of how powerful portal is. Eventually majority of our time in WvW will be spend hunting a class that can go invisible for long periods of time in the hopes of preventing them from bypassing the very mechanics that make WvW special. May as well just rename WvW “Mesmer Hide and Seek Match”.

Mesmers have 3 possible stealth skills: Mass Invisibility 5s every 90s (elite), Decoy 3s every 40s (utility), and The Prestige 3s every 30s (torch). They also have a trait to increase stealth duration by 1 second at the top of chaos line. Not sure I would qualify that is being able to “go invisible for long periods of time” however. So my max possible self stealth time from using all 3 in succession with the increased to duration trait is 14 seconds and that is only if all 3 are not on cool-down already. Mass Invisibility is not nearly as effective an other elites (like Time Warp) so is usually not slotted and the torch is just plain terrible compared to…… well anything else. Some could argue that the torch is better than nothing, perhaps best used as a night light in dark caves. The focus or pistol for an off-hand are much better options.

The invisible people is not a portal problem, it’s a problem with the culling which ANet has already acknowledged.

We also have Veil, but that one is kinda lame, since everyone would see the wall and that the stealth is shorter than the wall.. counter productive.. unless you use it right before a portal, so people ports in stealthed for 4s? I guess..

Imo, Mass Invisibilty is decent. I’m currently planning to get Lyssa runes when I hit 60 on my mesmer. It has 90s CD and coupled with Lyssa runes gives me an opportunity to cure myself from every conditions and gain all boons for 6.5s(with boon durations) every 90s. The only let down is the 2s cast time.