Guild Wars 2

My Mesmer has become my primary PvE character because I like how well it supplements a group. Also reflects are pretty awesome.

However there are a number of annoyances that are tied to Mesmer mechanics that cause me grief.

• Illusions spawning and attacking on their own. – Often I’ll be fighting a mob in the world and after killing it, will still be stuck in combat for a few seconds. This is normal. However should I dodge during this second, Deceptive Evasion will spawn an illusion which will then attack the nearest enemy, for no reason, thus keeping me in combat for longer.

• Temporal Curtain has a similar problem in that while it’s supposed to speed you up with Swiftness it will often get you stuck in combat too because some mob decides to walk through it, thus triggering combat and nullifying the benefit of Swiftness.

• The bug with Phantasmal Warden not attacking has been reported a number of times. I assume this will be fixed soon, but it’s annoying nonetheless.

• Can we please have a trait that resets our Phantasm cooldown if the Phantasm lives less than 4 seconds? (Excluding Shatter of course).

• Why are Phantasms tied to a particular target, rather than being temporary minions? It’s such an non-intuitive mechanic to have Phantasms die once their target dies and really gimps Mesmers in certain situations where targets die quickly.

• Why can’t Phantasms be summoned against invulnerable targets? I noticed this during the Marionette fight with the Mine-layer champion. I was stuck on the platform with another Mesmer and together we couldn’t put out enough DPS because we couldn’t summon Phantasms before the actual target became vulnerable (which only lasts 6 seconds).

Anyway, I like the class but feel the whole Phantasm/Illusion mechanic follows some sort of weird and non-intuitive mechanism that doesn’t make sense and gimps the class unnecessarily.

Dee Jay.2460:

• Illusions spawning and attacking on their own. – Often I’ll be fighting a mob in the world and after killing it, will still be stuck in combat for a few seconds. This is normal. However should I dodge during this second, Deceptive Evasion will spawn an illusion which will then attack the nearest enemy, for no reason, thus keeping me in combat for longer.

• Temporal Curtain has a similar problem in that while it’s supposed to speed you up with Swiftness it will often get you stuck in combat too because some mob decides to walk through it, thus triggering combat and nullifying the benefit of Swiftness.

• Can we please have a trait that resets our Phantasm cooldown if the Phantasm lives less than 4 seconds?

• Why are Phantasms tied to a particular target, rather than being temporary minions? It’s such an non-intuitive mechanic to have Phantasms die once their target dies and really gimps Mesmers in certain situations where targets die quickly.

• Why can’t Phantasms be summoned against invulnerable targets? I noticed this during the Marionette fight with the Mine-layer champion. I was stuck on the platform with another Mesmer and together we couldn’t put out enough DPS because we couldn’t summon Phantasms before the actual target became vulnerable (which only lasts 6 seconds).

Anyway, I like the class but feel the whole Phantasm/Illusion mechanic follows some sort of weird and non-intuitive mechanism that doesn’t make sense and gimps the class unnecessarily.

(1) I don’t think anything can be done about this.

(2) Agreed, it is annoying. Sadly, they would have to remove the cripple effect to change this.

(3) This trait would be very overpowered. Summon sword phantasm, let it attack. Shatter it. Summon sword phantasm. Shatter it. Repeat.

(4) I believe a change like this could be overpowered in PvP, but on PvE trash fights this would be nice. Just summon iWarden’s to make things better or just rely on your sword auto for trash.

(5) It’s the same reason we do not summon a phantasm if the enemy is blocking or evading. The invuln is just blocking the attack from happening. This will not be changed because it would be overpowered in PvP where you would no longer be allowed to dodge/block phantasms.

While some of these changes would be nice, they would impact PvP in too serious a way and make mesmers very powerful. Note I ignored your phantasmal warden not attacking comment because it definitely needs to be fixed.

Long answer put short, because the PvP crowd would cry their eyes out to get our PvE capabilities nerfed into oblivion. Again.

As much as I would love a phantasm heavy build that doesn’t rely on shattering every other second.. giving Phantasms any kind of higher survivability other then a oneshot or chance to reset them would make the PvP crowd cry so kitten hard we’d drown scarlet in their tears.

1. Don’t use deceptive evasion in PvE to solve that problem. That being said, it is a bit annoying, even in Pvp that DE clones don’t take your target.
2. Temporal curtain is the result of a bandaid fix applied in the betas to prevent infinite swiftness stacking. However, with Anet bandaid fixes become features :-/
3. Phantasmal warden is broken, yeah. They broke it a couple months ago. I don’t really have hope that it’ll be fixed soon. Maybe in 4-5 months?
4. Place your phantasms more carefully and that problem will go away. If you drop them right before a big aoe, they’ll die, so don’t do that.
5. Ever heard mesmers complain about horrible illusion ai? Neither have I. Having illusions tied to one single target allows us to avoid the horrible ai problems that rangers and necros encounter. Additionally it provides us with more flexibility for a skilled player by placing illusions on targets to spread out both your shatter effects and phantasm attacks.
6. Pretty sure the mine layer stun lasts 10s. Additionally, you can summon phantasms while it is vulnerable, and they persist during the invulnerable phase…which shouldn’t last longer than 2-3 seconds if you fight it properly. As far as summoning them goes, phantasms are attacks. Attacks don’t hit invulnerable targets. It provides some counter play to phantasm builds, and forces you to think just a bit before throwing out phantasms.

@AkkiChan: Lol. You realize that phantasms have around 4x higher hp in pve than in pvp, right?

1. I wish I could say that the constructive and thought-provoking threads helped but, from what I’ve seen, the fastest way to get the devs to act is to enough players to whine about it. I suspect illusion targeting will be fixed when the devs break something relative to it and the players set the forums on fire.

2. You can try using Into the Void right after you run over your Temporal Curtain. This will get rid of it and, last I checked (and I admit, I haven’t played in months,) pulls don’t put you into combat directly. If they do now, you can still use the same trick but do it after the enemy runs over the curtain. This is likely to interrupt any attack you needed to dodge and pull them away from you. However, you have to keep in mind that there is a one-second cooldown between when Temporal Curtain is placed and when Into the Void can be used. This was due to players whining.

3. How long did it take them to fix the Berzerker? I’d use that as a measuring stick.

4. That should be standard, not a trait. Illusion cooldowns should always be reset when there are no illusions present. Of course, if this comes at the risk of breaking something else, I’d rather things stay as they are.

5. I’d rather they not persist. Pet AI is horrible. Just ask any minionmancer or every ranger. At least we get to blow our pets up when they’re naughty.

6. That was “fixed” a long time ago. Now blinds, blocks and line-of-sight can mess with our summoning. What irks me is that this created situations in WvW where enemies could hit me but I couldn’t hit them, even with auto-attacks. I bet they still haven’t fixed that.