Meta mesmer before chrono did more than just portal, and the discovery and smart usage of portals on top of reflects, iWarden chaining, mob pulling and blink tricks makes far more mechanical creativity than just spamming alacrity generation skills.
It’s been a very long time since most of those were wanted from mesmers. Guardians did reflects and mob pulling far better than us while also providing far higher dps. Realistically the only thing that made us objectively useful was portal; as exhibited by speedrun mesmers literally just holding an fgs by the door ready to run for a portal while everyone else did the dpsing.
We went from smart use of Power Block on bosses to it being useless garbage, reflects were marginalized, pulls were marginalized.
You mean the all of 8 hours that power block worked through defiance? Past that it wasn’t really ever used, since trying to block some skills for 15 seconds was a waste of time and effort. Reflects and pulls were certainly nerfed, but guardians did both of those better anyway…
You use shatters that you wouldn’t use otherwise and at significant DPS cost just to keep that stupid boon running so everybody else can actually do something.
I don’t think you know how to play PvE chrono very well if you think this is true.
You can spin the whole vanilla WoW totem bot however you want, but the chrono is there for one thing and that’s alacrity generation.
Not to pick at nits here, but you seem to be forgetting that at least half of our purpose is quickness generation.
And let’s not sit here and pretend like ele and revenant aren’t providing utility while still being top tier DPS.
The role of an ele in a raid is to press 1, 2, and 5 repeatedly. If they need to switch to water or something else for utility, somebody else in the raid has screwed up. Same for a revenant outside of being a boon duration totem for the chrono. On top of that, revenant hasn’t been top-tier dps for months now, not sure what you’re talking about.
Mesmer and ranger players who bought into the vanilla game under the premise of being a DPS class as they advertised got screwed with this bait and switch of elite professions.
Wait what? Since when did Anet ever advertise specific classes as dps classes? You’re just expecting things that were never promised.
Yes, I understand that it’s reasonable to feel disappointed that Mesmer isn’t able to be the top dps class if that’s what you want to do, but it’s unreasonable to expect that Anet has an obligation to make every class able to do everything. The balance team’s first and only priority is to make every class viable in every mode of play. Nothing more, nothing less.
Check the posting history from Robert Hrouda (dungeon dev long fired after AC revamp), he basically said rangers were low on burst because they were supposed to be THE sustained dps class.
Jon Peters in the early days of vanilla, in a pre-release AMA session, said rather specifically that mesmer would be a highly offensive class doing even more damage than the necromancer, whom they also trumpeted as a high dps class.
And just because Revenant isn’t an elementalist does not make them NOT top tier DPS. The nerf to their auto was more than offset by the change to sword #3, giving them a net DPS gain. In terms of DPS, shiro/glint revenant are in the upper tier of damage dealers.
By comparison, chronomancer is abysmally low, more so than even a druid and that’s pretty bad to begin with.
I’m not disappointed at Anet missing the mark on one class. I’ve mained ranger, necromancer, and mesmer since this game’s release, and they’ve missed the mark on all those three.
I don’t even need mesmer/ranger/necro to be top dps or equal dps to an ele; I just want the gap to not be as horrendously bad as it is.
Look at WoW or FFXIV, they have gaps, but not to the degree where classes are turned away from specific roles. FFXIV has about a 5% max DPS discrepancy between classes, and WoW at most 10-15%. GW2 DPS discrepancies are immense by comparison.
