As long as this game exists, mesmer has been nerfed all the time. And now I’m not talking about 1v1’s, no not at all, I’m talking about mesmer in WvW. From roaming to large scale WvW, the only buffs we got are PU and phantasm damage/hp increase. Now as you can probably see yourself, both buffs have almost 0 effect on the somewhat larger scale of WvW.
Mesmer started of nice: Confusion was still strong, mesmer was the counter against the fast and hard hitting specs. Back then, people were still running dps food beacuse crit -> steal life had no internal cooldown. This is one of the reasons why the confusion was also so good, is because it lasted long enough and it didnt get removed really fast by shout warriors and/or purging flames. As much as I loved this spec, I also see a lot downsides from it. The major one would be that it’s just an almost brainless ‘’spam 2/3 aoes to win’’ spec. It was even so easy that even the mesmers with the smallest experience on their mesmer could do the job. I totally agree on the nerf from arenanet and think it was a good step including the nerf on retaliation (which still deals 20% too much damage in my honest opinion).
The sad thing about this all is that they never really got to fill up this gap they created. It was almost like you removed a total gameplay content from 1 profession with 1 change. Then again, the confusion nerf was more than enough to nerf mesmer. The Blinding Befuddlement nerf was totally unnecessary.
With the introduction of dire armor, which I was waiting for for months, a confusion/tank spec could actually be worth as mesmer. Timing your chaos armor well enough to get well timed diminishing returns, not like retaliation as chaos armor is impossible to stack and nearly impossible to keep up 24/7.
My hope was still not gone for mesmer, so I tried other builds and stumbled upon shatter mesmer. Eventhough this was less damage, it was still pretty usefull. This was mostly possible due the support of guardians and warriors and because blurred frenzy would ignore retaliation. The good sides of shatter mesmer were the boon removal and the short cooldown immobilizes combined with the fast hitting ’’spikes’’.
Now of course this had to be nerfed too because this was clearly overpowered and mesmer should never be even close to the GLEN meta so they changed it that blurred frenzy, a skill that hits 8 times, is affected by retaliation. Great! Thanks for that!
Then recently they introduced Triumphant Distortion which allows you to, if you actually kill people, gain 3 seconds of distortion every 10-15 seconds. I really like the trait, but it’s still not usefull unless you have a good team around you to help you with stability, healings, condition removal and of course: to kill people. If 1 of these lacks, there’s a fair chance you will die unless you keep running around with the hopes you wont get picked off.
I don’t understand something here: We are a support profession, yet we have always had the meta of doing as much damage possible. We have support skills, yet they never got buffed or even considered getting a buff. The statements of Arenanet where they said they would: 1. listen to the comunnity, and 2. allow every profession to be usefull at any game content, totally failed with mesmer. Mesmer in early game was more balanced around the game than what it is now, after all the ’’balances’’.
There has been multiple threads going on how to make mesmer kinda viable in big groups, without even changing too much. It’s not even a change to let them deal more damage, because there are surely other ways to work around that.
You come up with interrupt traits, yet they get insta-nerfed or totally dont work together with any other traits. You make 2 mantra’s aoe, yet you leave the other 2 as they are which 100% need the change too. This was a fair shot to get to a grandmaster trait that would allow mantra’s go aoe, but you failed to grab that chance to make interrupt mesmer viable on large scale.
TLDR: You can’t give a super powerful skill as veil to a profession that gets nerfed into the ground on that specific game type where the skill is so strong at. It forces single players to go roll the profession, drop the skill and look how other people around them have fun in the game while you are kiting 24/7, killing very few on the backline or are playing skillfull in the melee, though as mentioned before you will need a lot support for that and it only works if you’re killing. Then again, the damage you deal is pathetic compared to what tank guardians and warriors do vs your full zerker mesmer.
There are so many options to buff to make mesmer usefull besides of veil, even without dealing too much damage. Either buff mesmer or just give veil to another profession.
/Doiid – BlackDevil.9268