Guild Wars 2

Fixing thread.

/15char

Zenith.7301:

Use meteor shower in wvw and I noticed a lesser count of meteors, though I’ll be willing to grant that’s not the best test scenario since I’m targeting moving targets and the varying amount of people within the meteor area at those times can muddy that up.

Meteor Shower hits exactly 24 times with and without tw. When under the effect of tw/quickness the shower simply executes 50% faster – a DPS increase.

Fay.2357:

Zenith.7301:

They didn’t normalize phantasm cooldowns, please keep up with the changes before calling them lies. They flat out increased phantasm cooldowns for spvp reasons.

Yes, they did normalize phantasm cooldowns. A couple were significantly shorter than others, and so they increased those to be in line with the rest. This happened within the first couple months of release iirc.

Zenith.7301:

I’d also love to know what “myriad” condition removals you have outside slotting null field, because I can tell you my ele can clear conditions baseline with his weaponskills as can a necro, but I’m either giving up mobility, stunbreaks, or cc in my utility bar to deal with conditions since all mesmer weaponskills are virtually empty of side utility except for the odd few miserable stacks of vulnerability or a short duration cripple.

Well, you can take the removal mantra, null field, pDisenchanter is extremely potent, traiting mender’s purity allows any heal to remove conditions and it synergizes extremely well with the heal mantra. You can also trait for removal on the torch skills, though that’s more niche. Lastly, you can trait to remove conditions when shattering, and that’s a really powerful condition removal if you choose to build that way.

Zenith.7301:

Clone generation WAS nerfed. Deceptive Evasion used to be a minor trait in dueling, in place of sharpened images. PvP complaints came in, and it was turned into a major trait instead. Not everyone wants sharper images in their build, but deceptive evasion was good for any shatter build, hell it’s good for the sole reason of othere feast and compounding power by keeping your c lone uptime up. So now if you want deceptive evasion, you have to give up something else.

I’m not sure how many ways I need to tell you you’re wrong, but you’re still wrong.

Zenith.7301:

Shatter damage WAS nerfed. We used to have significant might stacking via shattered strength in the master illusions minor trait, and they took it away. Apparently maintaining 15+ stacks of might is something only warriors and elementalists should be able to do by themselves.

No, they nerfed the might stacking, and they nerfed it about 3 weeks after having buffed it, apparently deciding they didn’t want us to stack might. They never touched shatter damage.

Ok now I’m pretty sure you’re just trolling or being obtuse. Phantasm cooldowns were not changed to be “normalized”, they do different amounts of damage with different effects so putting them all on the same (higher, they didn’t reduce the cd on any of them) cooldown is stupid to begin with. Look at iwarden, it still has a higher cooldown than the other ones, as does illusionary mage while phantasmal swordsman has a whopping 10 secs lower cd than iMage. Can you please stop being so dishonest.

Then you give a non-answer to deceptive evasion. Another troll or meaningless reply.

Shatter damage was touched if the standard damage a shatter build could do with shattered strength was nerfed by nerfing access to might stacking. You are so dishonest and nitpicky about this, it’s as if they took away ele might stacking, it wouldn’t be called nerfing the damage of their skills. The numbers on their abilities and that of many classes in pvp is often balanced around the access to boons certain classes have.

For all practical purposes when they nerfed shattered strength, they nerfed builds reliant on shatter for damage.

And if you’re just going to keep lawyerin, I’m gonna pass on this convo. Because it’s getting tiresome arguing with a guy who says shatter isn’t nerfed when specs centered around it have been abandoned in favor of other ones.

Zenith.7301:

Ok now I’m pretty sure you’re just trolling or being obtuse. Phantasm cooldowns were not changed to be “normalized”, they do different amounts of damage with different effects so putting them all on the same (higher, they didn’t reduce the cd on any of them) cooldown is stupid to begin with. Look at iwarden, it still has a higher cooldown than the other ones, as does illusionary mage while phantasmal swordsman has a whopping 10 secs lower cd than iMage. Can you please stop being so dishonest.

The iMage is still a bit of an anomaly on the high side, but the others make sense. The iWarden has strong utility in addition to the damage, and so it has a higher cooldown.

Zenith.7301:

Then you give a non-answer to deceptive evasion. Another troll or meaningless reply.

Ok, let me be crystal clear. What you said happened never happened. Literally every part of what you said was completely false. Deceptive evasion was never a minor trait. It was never moved. You’re completely wrong.

Zenith.7301:

Shatter damage was touched if the standard damage a shatter build could do with shattered strength was nerfed by nerfing access to might stacking. You are so dishonest and nitpicky about this, it’s as if they took away ele might stacking, it wouldn’t be called nerfing the damage of their skills. The numbers on their abilities and that of many classes in pvp is often balanced around the access to boons certain classes have.

You’re ignoring what actually happened. Shattered strength use to provide one stack of might for 3 seconds per clone. They buffed it to 3 for 10s, decided (mistakenly, imo) that it was too strong and nerfed it down to 1 for 10s.

So, the end result of this buffing and nerfing was still an overall buff. The turbocharged state only lasted for about 3 weeks, you can hardly call this period of buff/nerf “gutting shatter damage”.

Zenith.7301:

Because it’s getting tiresome arguing with a guy who says shatter isn’t nerfed when specs centered around it have been abandoned in favor of other ones.

And this can be seen in the fact that most popular PvP builds still rely on shatters….ah right, that actually contradicts your statement.

Wow, this guy is actually suffering from amnesia. Deceptive Evasion WAS a minor trait. It was in place of sharpened images.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/45269-why-is-deceptive-evasion-forced-on-us/

Note the date. BETA. Deceptive Evasion EXISTED as a minor. Maybe you weren’t here when the class was actually better and got nerfed to hell due to spvp whine. I’ve been here since the very first beta events I don’t need to be told what did and didn’t happen.

Fay.2357:

Zenith.7301:

Clone generation WAS nerfed. Deceptive Evasion used to be a minor trait in dueling, in place of sharpened images. PvP complaints came in, and it was turned into a major trait instead. Not everyone wants sharper images in their build, but deceptive evasion was good for any shatter build, hell it’s good for the sole reason of othere feast and compounding power by keeping your c lone uptime up. So now if you want deceptive evasion, you have to give up something else.

I’m not sure how many ways I need to tell you you’re wrong, but you’re still wrong.

He’s actually right about that. DE was a minor trait in early game (i guess it was still in beta though). It was there and got nerfed really early. But I don’t think that it was nerfed because some guys complained but anet realizing that this would give mesmers a good trait in 15(3) points.

Zenith.7301:

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/45269-why-is-deceptive-evasion-forced-on-us/

Btw ppl in this topic bring good reasons to DE to be major trait

Mak.2657:

Zenith.7301:

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/45269-why-is-deceptive-evasion-forced-on-us/

Btw ppl in this topic bring good reasons to DE to be major trait

Those reasons were clones despawning phantasms, which is no longer the case and poor ai issues with the DE clones aggroing to the wrong targets if put in combat and keeping you in combat.

Terrible reasons to remove DE as a minor. There are many minors on other classes that are even better. It was just fashionable to ask for mesmer nerfs, it’s why clones lost their damage and are now useless in PvE besides being shatter fodder (which you don’t want to do to begin with, because you destroy your phantasms which do more damage than a 3 clone shatter itself).

People playing mesmer today don’t know what it used to be. Just like rangers today (there was a time where greatsword rangers were actually scary and their autoattack chain hit hard, they were nerfed to the ground and it has taken them 2+ year to build rangers back up).

Zenith.7301:

Wow, this guy is actually suffering from amnesia. Deceptive Evasion WAS a minor trait. It was in place of sharpened images.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/45269-why-is-deceptive-evasion-forced-on-us/

Note the date. BETA. Deceptive Evasion EXISTED as a minor. Maybe you weren’t here when the class was actually better and got nerfed to hell due to spvp whine. I’ve been here since the very first beta events I don’t need to be told what did and didn’t happen.

Two things.

1. Beta is beta. Saying something was “nerfed in beta” is equivalent to saying “The devs weren’t actually finished making the game yet, and made changes before it was released.” Any changes that happened before release can’t actually be called a nerf or a buff, that’s just ludicrous. I’ll just keep my view on changes that happened once the game was actually finished.

2. There’s a lot of extremely good reasons as to why DE is a major and SI is a minor. There’s literally no situation where having SI can be a bad thing. There are, however, quite a few builds that purposefully choose not to take DE for one reason or another. This could be for aggro purposes, if you want clones specifically on certain targets for a reason, if you don’t want them to overwrite phantasms, there’s quite a few potential situations where DE is non-optimal.

lol well that reply was surprising. Yeah, I’m done.

“It never happened!” people show it did " Well, I don’t count beta as happening."

Zenith.7301:

Those reasons were clones despawning phantasms, which is no longer the case

It is still issue in some builds, when you already have 3 phantasms up (easier with new healing signet). And I’m more about idea then such “active” trait should selectable, not minor trait.
Mb you are right. I personally prefer to DE be minor trait (same as PB works on autos ) because of playing shatter builds mostly. Just not sure that would be healthy.

BUFFS FOR MESMERS! (some riot sign there)

Zenith.7301:

lol well that reply was surprising. Yeah, I’m done.

I’m glad you were able to come up with a cogent argument to back up your assertions, this was a productive series of forum posts.

Mak.2657:

Zenith.7301:

Those reasons were clones despawning phantasms, which is no longer the case

It is still issue in some builds, when you already have 3 phantasms up (easier with new healing signet). And I’m more about idea then such “active” trait should selectable, not minor trait.
Mb you are right. I personally prefer to DE be minor trait (same as PB works on autos ) because of playing shatter builds mostly. Just not sure that would be healthy.

BUFFS FOR MESMERS! (some riot sign there)

I’d love for all those on clone death traits to be baked into clones themselves. The clones are so useless in a pve environment.

I think a fix as well would be revamping shatter and making it only consume clones, and adjust (condense) the damage to 1-2 clones. That way mesmers still use shatters in pve.

And just give illusions and any pets aoe immunity in pve or the 80-90% aoe reduction WoW has so the illusions are not immediately dying.

Can’t even summon a phantasm on tequatl it dies before it even does the damage to the aoe under the leg.

Damage offered by Mesmer is average, but complemented by a large number of illusions, conditions & boons, projectiles reflection and special effects. Fighting style is very flexible. He has incredible strong skill-set for party members when you can use it properly.
*Reflecting deals damage, protects you, your illusions and party members,
*time warp makes them quicker,
*trained shatters, mantra, null field, illusionary disenchanter remove conditions, boons from enemy,
*you can easily copy boons or give them which is really helpful in team game,
*even your “easy to kill” clones take some damage and pull enemy of your allies.

However the mechanic can be useless sometimes and it have to be repair. (for example Sometimes we can lose illusion when it doesn’t make any damage). Small number of weapons and meta builds makes us weaker either – but it doesn’t make that profession bad. Someone wrote he doesn’t want to be in party with Mesmer because that class doesn’t do anything special – you didn’t play with good Mesmer.

We need fixes and changes, but no one can take one of the most unique mechanic and utilities.

Mesmer has the greatest potential to most easily missed.

I’d like to apologize for my language.

Fay.2357:

Look, I’m not exactly pleased with the state of the class right now, but I like to make sure my complaints have a solid basis in reality.

it’s tough to believe you are not fine with class as is right now, because you do vocally calling people wrong and / or discredit other people’s complaints.

So, I’d love to see your list of what YOU are not happy about, because from the posts I’ve seen you made, you sure sound like you are perfectly fine with the current state of the Mesmer class.

Rome.7124:

Fay.2357:

Look, I’m not exactly pleased with the state of the class right now, but I like to make sure my complaints have a solid basis in reality.

it’s tough to believe you are not fine with class as is right now, because you do vocally calling people wrong and / or discredit other people’s complaints.

So, I’d love to see your list of what YOU are not happy about, because from the posts I’ve seen you made, you sure sound like you are perfectly fine with the current state of the Mesmer class.

Forum warriors do one thing and one thing only: they argue. That’s what they get on forums for. So just ignore them.

Rome.7124:

Fay.2357:

Look, I’m not exactly pleased with the state of the class right now, but I like to make sure my complaints have a solid basis in reality.

it’s tough to believe you are not fine with class as is right now, because you do vocally calling people wrong and / or discredit other people’s complaints.

So, I’d love to see your list of what YOU are not happy about, because from the posts I’ve seen you made, you sure sound like you are perfectly fine with the current state of the Mesmer class.

Huh, and here I thought Pyro was well-known here. Unless you’re new? From what I remember he got banned here because Anet kept breaking our class, and there’s a lot of sarcasm in his posts if you can’t tell.

Rome.7124:

it’s tough to believe you are not fine with class as is right now, because you do vocally calling people wrong and / or discredit other people’s complaints.

So, I’d love to see your list of what YOU are not happy about, because from the posts I’ve seen you made, you sure sound like you are perfectly fine with the current state of the Mesmer class.

Let’s see…

The scepter autoattack is absolutely awful. They slapped a half-hearted bandaid onto it and called it a job well done. It needs a total rework, many ideas have been given, they’ve ignored everything. It’s an absolute disgrace.

The iMage is the worst phantasm in the game. It’s been the worst for a very very long time. We’ve been asking for a rework to make it non-awful for ages and haven’t gotten anything. They recently buffed completely random numbers on it in the hope that we’d just shut up and stop complaining, but since they don’t actually understand our class at all, the numbers were the wrong numbers and it’s still awful.

The mainhand sword is still a shadow of what it used to be before being hit with countless nerfs. It used to be a fantastic utility and damage weapon. Then, blurred frenzy was hit with a double-nerf in one patch. A year or so later, iLeap was effectively deleted from the weapon. iLeap is still awful compared to its old utility, even with the teleporting implemented. You can’t use it to break stuns, can’t use it for mobility, you can just spam 3 twice and hope that the animation lock lets you swap before it gets killed by random aoe.

The new grandmaster traits that were released were, and are, an absolute farce. Disruptors sustainment and bountiful dissilusionment are both indescribably awful traits. The simple fact that multiple people at anet must have said ‘yes, this is a good idea. Let’s do it!’ is incredibly disheartening. The fact that they’re still wasting spots in our trait trees that could be taken up by something other than trash code is even worse.

Power block is arguably in an even sadder state than those other two traits. On release, power block was a strong and interesting trait that instantly created a really great style of mesmer play that hadn’t truly been seen since GW1. Unfortunately, the devs immediately decided that that was a mistake, and nerfed it into a state that’s just as functionally awful as disruptors sustainment or BD. The fact that it was almost a fantastic addition to our class before being snatched out from under us is just flat out insulting.

Overnerfing traits has been a theme for a long time with anet’s relationship to mesmer.

Blinding Befuddlement was turned from a really handy trait that added utility and damage in a lot of interesting ways into something that is once again, just useless scrap code in their database. They both nerfed it with a massive ICD and lowered the duration. It’s now not in a usable state.

The dissipation traits were slammed in a single nerf-ridden patch. Not only were they made blockable, dodgeable, and blindable in one patch, they also severely nerfed the strength of the bleeds that debilitating dissipation applies. These traits at least are still very viable, just the amount of nerfing that occurred in that one patch was patently absurd.

A long time ago, I made a build that functioned around a particular minor trait: vengeful images. This caused phantasms to have retaliation, allowing you to do some really interesting things by combining the damage transfer on the pDefender with high retaliation uptime. You can look it up if you want, it’s called the Immortal build. Unfortunately, anet decided to take what was an interesting trait and fun build and delete it from the game in a single patch. The trait was nerfed to providing 5 seconds of retaliation on summon, and it’s now once again just a useless scrap of code cluttering up their database.

Mesmers still have absolutely abysmal options for aoe anything. Compared to so many other classes, we have no aoe control, no aoe damage, and little aoe support. Literally the only handy things we have are portal and veil for large-group support. This makes obtaining loot, dealing damage, and generally being useful in other ways than as a veilbot in WvW an immense struggle that nobody has actually solved yet. This is a complaint that’s been getting aired since the beginning of the game, and in that time anet has made 1 or 2 half-hearted efforts to improve the situation.

The mesmer signets remain some of the worst designed signets in the game. There are incredibly few builds that actually utilize signets as signets; for both the active and passive effects. Additionally, the signet traits are scattered and disjointed, causing the creation of any build relying on signets to be haphazard and incredibly forced.

Part 2

Edity bit:

BUGS! Mesmer is unbelievably buggy. We’ve suffered from more extensive and disruptive bugs than any other class in the game. This is in part due to the fact that the devs don’t play/understand the class, and so don’t notice when things go wrong, and partly -redacted to avoid infractions-. Some big ones include

• They recently broke clone offhands again. They started broken, got fixed after a year of complaining, aaaaaand it’s gone again
• Some of our skills still don’t do the proper damage, particularly after tweaks to change how the damage functions
• Some of our traits don’t interact properly with each other. It took years to get masterful reflection working with blurred inscriptions. It’ll probably take another year to get TD working with it.
• Afaik, several of the cd traits still have wonky interactions with our counter-attack spells. This results in decreasing effectiveness based on how you actually use them, which is pretty awful
• They introduced a fun bug that basically makes harmonious mantras pointless to run in open world PvE where persistent trait effects are stripped from your character if you change level
• There’s still an incredibly annoying bug where sometimes a long cd skill like portal will have its cooldown copied onto other utilities for no good reason.
• Something happened to mimic, doesn’t seem to work anymore
• Bounce logic on iMage is still very wonky, and is part of the reason it’s so awful

The final insult is that mesmers have lacked a good ranged mainhand power weapon since the beginning of the game. We’ve been nearly unanimously asking for mainhand pistol literally since the beginning of the game. When finally after years of asking, anet releases new weapons….we get shield. Another defensive offhand. Another defensive offhand to be tossed into the pile of other offhands that we already have floating around and have less than no need for. It’s basically anet thumbing their noses and taunting us with how close we could be to being a viable and interesting class, but never actually letting us obtain it.

Right, that got a bit longer than I anticipated. I’ve got plenty more gripes that I haven’t put down here, as many people on this forum could probably tell you. I’ve been known as the most cynical person with regards to anet balancing and content decisions for quite some time now. I hope this little list is sufficient to show you how absolutely not pleased I am with the current state of mesmer in this game.

Searching your post for “bug”, 0 results…

Bugs are probably one of the most ignored aspects of our class.

frifox.5283:

Searching your post for “bug”, 0 results…

Bugs are probably one of the most ignored aspects of our class.

Sorry. Had to pick and choose, didn’t want to fill up 3 posts This was less a ‘lets go through and pick out everything’ and more of a ’I’m going to rant until it feels like I’m getting too long’.

Edit: Screw it, gonna edit it a rant paragraph about bugs.

Fun fact, in beta they toyed around with diversion being an aoe daze, as it should have been. Spvp whine got it to the pathetic state it is in, where now you need a master trait to make it aoe.

It’s kinda hilarious a hammer/mace warrior provides more frequent lockdown than a mesmer and it’s aoe control to boot, and their CC weapon does bucketloads of damage with high base numbers as all warrior weapons do.

Or you can be a /p thief and control on demand. All of their weapons CC without trait investment. Mesmer has to kill his phantasms (damage) to affect a single target with an unreliable daze that depends on the travel distance of the clone to the casting target.

But awful autoattacks are not strictly a mesmer problem. Rangers and necromancers suffer the same issues (the ranger’s greatsword used to be even better than the warrior greatsword, just to give an indicator of how far it has fallen). The necromancer was nerfed to HELL in beta.

Pretty much every class you see that kinda sucks in the game, was one of the classes that received significant nerfs by the end of beta.

In beta they’d do balance patches every 2 weeks, sometimes weekly. On live you get tooltip fixes every 3-4 months and a few insignificant number tweaks or irrelevant additions to skills every 6 months.

Then you have brilliant development ideas, for example with the ranger greatsword the issue always was its autoattack chain doing pitiful damage and maul having to big a windup. Instead of fixing its damage issues, a particular developer went in and wanted to remove the built in evade from the greatsword auto chain and put it on swoop (the built in evade on the attack chain is the lifeblood of any frontline ranger build, rangers don’t have enough mitigation tools beside it to stay in large scale melee). The outrage in the ranger community over such an unnecessary change caused the developer to simply put the evade on swoop and buff the final hit of the autoattack chain by 10%. Basically a change nobody asked for and the damage buff was way too marginal to make the greatsword a competitive pve weapon (rangers only use it over main hand sword because the main hand sword displaces mobs and its animation lock can be a liability in some encounters).

Zenith.7301:

Fun fact, in beta they toyed around with diversion being an aoe daze, as it should have been. Spvp whine got it to the pathetic state it is in, where now you need a master trait to make it aoe.

It’s kinda hilarious a hammer/mace warrior provides more frequent lockdown than a mesmer and it’s aoe control to boot, and their CC weapon does bucketloads of damage with high base numbers as all warrior weapons do.

Or you can be a /p thief and control on demand. All of their weapons CC without trait investment. Mesmer has to kill his phantasms (damage) to affect a single target with an unreliable daze that depends on the travel distance of the clone to the casting target.

But awful autoattacks are not strictly a mesmer problem. Rangers and necromancers suffer the same issues (the ranger’s greatsword used to be even better than the warrior greatsword, just to give an indicator of how far it has fallen). The necromancer was nerfed to HELL in beta.

Pretty much every class you see that kinda sucks in the game, was one of the classes that received significant nerfs by the end of beta.

In beta they’d do balance patches every 2 weeks, sometimes weekly. On live you get tooltip fixes every 3-4 months and a few insignificant number tweaks or irrelevant additions to skills every 6 months.

Then you have brilliant development ideas, for example with the ranger greatsword the issue always was its autoattack chain doing pitiful damage and maul having to big a windup. Instead of fixing its damage issues, a particular developer went in and wanted to remove the built in evade from the greatsword auto chain and put it on swoop (the built in evade on the attack chain is the lifeblood of any frontline ranger build, rangers don’t have enough mitigation tools beside it to stay in large scale melee). The outrage in the ranger community over such an unnecessary change caused the developer to simply put the evade on swoop and buff the final hit of the autoattack chain by 10%. Basically a change nobody asked for and the damage buff was way too marginal to make the greatsword a competitive pve weapon (rangers only use it over main hand sword because the main hand sword displaces mobs and its animation lock can be a liability in some encounters).

That makes me sad about Diversion…Not to mention it’s on a really crap cooldown, compared to the said Hammer Warrs where they swing around all day everyday…Sigh.

Warrior ability cooldowns if you bother to take a look at them all have ridiculously short cd’s. Just look at 100b, a skill that dies so much damage on a ~6 sec cd. Eviscerate does more damage than a shatter and you can’t really kill warrior’s adrenaline unlike clones which you can just spam your cleave for days.

And hell, look at pistol whip, it’s blurred frenzy with double the damage, a built in stun, and can be chained 2-3 times in a row.

Also it’s no mystery warrior and thieves do well because their weapon autoattacks all have high base numbers. The warrior mainhand axe just dwarfs any autoattack damage from the ranger, mesmer, and necro.

Zenith.7301:

warrior mainhand axe just dwarfs any autoattack damage from the ranger, mesmer, and necro.

Mesmer coefficients / dmg for weapon skills are low because ANet expects mesmers to reach full dps potential with the help of phantasms (or pets for rangers, minions for necros). What they are refusing to acknowledge is how fragile phantasms are, effectively preventing us from reaching that potential “high” dps. Phantasms are more fragile than a fully glass ele yet do half the ele’s damage.

ANet justifies our low dps because we have utility that ele doesnt have. Reflects, crowd control, interrupts, aoe stability, aoe condi cleanse, timewarp, portal.

PS: talking about pve, pvp is a gamemode I’ve never bothered with.

Xyonon.3987:

Jurica.1742:

Only reason to take mesmer into PvP is portal?
Yeah, portal is good, but mesmer has high burst(can 100-0 a guardian)

Maybe if he’s brain afk… The mesmer burst dpends on the enemies armor type, build and stupidity. You can 100-0 other zerks yes, but who else plays zerk in competitive pvp? Thief, another mes and maybe 1500 range away rangers. Yet you won’t burst a thief, since a proper thief will evade ALL your highly predictable skills. A ranger won’t even let you near him or / and has plenty of evade or invuln skills to block the initial burst. Same goes for guard and ele. Necro and war are just unburstable due to their hp pool and all those guys will destroy you after your failed burst. If enemies know the mesmer, if they are at same skill level as you are, they will deny your shatter burst and then either kill you or ignore you when you run away.

Jurica.1742:

, high mobility(say what you want but phase retreat, blink and portal mean mesmer has insane mobility) a high amount of boon rip, excellent stomp/resurrection negation and to that mesmer has Moa which is an instant +1 for your team in a fight.

Mobility =/= save skills. If you blink to get from point A to B, you’re dead to me. Portal, as I said, yes. And PR is sure good for movement too. Boon rip is the best thing we have, but I wouldn’t argue with stomp. Most classes can stomp better than us (more often), resurrection negation yes. Moa … cheesy skill and very unreliable. I admit it’s hard to keep an eye on a mes in a TF, but 3 min cd is also fairly enough. It’s rather personal preference to take this skill I guess and I honestly haven’t used it enough to bring a proper statement.

Jurica.1742:

Slow unless you run traveler, sort of, yes. But traveler doesn’t ruin your damage a lot. It will make a difference of maybe 1 or 2k in a burst and either way a lot of damage when you burst goes wasted because you’ll put in more damage than the enemy has HP.

Good one.

Jurica.1742:

Worst class in PvP? Hell no. All classes are decent in PvP at the moment, each has it’s pro’s and cons. Just because mesmer is harder to play doesn’t mean it’s worse. Mesmer comps are actually a lot better than cele comps but they are much harder to pull off.

“All classes are decent” sounds more like a green peace slogan :P. So if you won’t mess up a single thing and if you hit all your shatter skills, wich is the difficulty about mesmer, then you are on pair with other classes in pvp? Even if I think that’s not even correct, what does this basicly mean? He’s weaker, easier to deny and overall the worst class in pvp. Comon, don’t lie to yourself like a masochist enjoing to play something like that.

Jurica.1742:

Why is mesmer not played a lot? Minimum room for error, extremely unforgiving and takes a lot of time to get good at and then even if you get good, if your team is not supporting you like it should, peeling for you, healing you, cleansing you ect you will be food again, another reason why people don’t like mesmer much. Necro is in a similar spot, very little room for error, more than mesmer but lower mobility, depends on its team a lot too, but then you get a skilled necro like Noscoc on your team, you support him well and he will in a way carry you all. A good necro is devastating for the enemy team. Same goes with mesmer.
Most people play mesmer like it’s a warrior and are because of that food to everyone and then rage and delete the class. It’s a kitten class if you don’t take the time to learn it and if you play it like it shouldn’t be played.

The mesmer is overall just weaker, that’s what you say here. I pretty much support your statement that a good necro carries you around. But a good mesmer? He’s one of those who would like to have such a necro buddy. I don’t say mesmer are useless in PvP. But I say if you would have put so much effort you have put into the mesmer to learn and master in any other class, you would be stronger than you are right now. And this is what bugs me. It’s not like I failed in my mesmer carieer, it’s rather that once you get decent enemies you’ll notice that they know how to deny you and once you start playing like them, you smile at most mesmers.

I’m not sure what, but something about this person’s posts I find hilarious. It could be the very dramatic pessimism, or maybe there is some subtle sarcasm.

To me it’s just frustrating to see multiples of some classes in big events like the WTS finals, yet no mesmers or rangers. (Frustrating for both classes to be sure.)

Mesmer will never be fixed and yet we keep coming back… It is the sign of an abused wife who cannot leave her brutal drunk of a husband in my view. For me, I enjoy the mind focused aspect of the mesmer, a profession based in illusion and deception. Unfortunately, that deception is next to impossible to achieve. I for one would welcome a main hand pistol, and part of me still feels that aanet will introduce one in this coming expansion, if only to ensure that when they officially confirm what they are giving us they will not be asked to please explain their wanton disregard and disinterest. One thing I do wonder, has anyone directly asked a developer what the hell are they thinking giving us a new offhand. A new offhand cripples our build diversity, as it forces us to essentially play exactly the same as we have been for the last couple of years.

I myself am desperate for a more reliable interupt mechanism, one which we can trigger more frequently, than every 8 or so seconds, (my math suggests that at maximum efficiency we could maybe interrupt once every 4-5 seconds if we factor in mantra’s, diversion, signet weapon swapping and sword off hand) But to achieve that sort of efficiency is insane. Why can we not get a single low cooldown (5s or) 0.5 second daze to add better synergy in our skills. Hell I would even take a total reworking of our offhand pistol skill to enable it to fufill the desperate need we have for a way to make so many of our grand master traits actually do something.

Fay, your earlier post contains much of my sentiments, as do your arrangements Zenith, I know with the change to power block from where it was in the first glorious days (allowing us to interrupt around defiance) I thought that aanet had intended to open a new role for mesmers in the Meta. Sure the function that let it make bosses unable to do anything for 10s was too much, but surely they could have kept the ability to let us interrupt and proc our traits, it would have made all the difference.

frifox.5283:

Zenith.7301:

warrior mainhand axe just dwarfs any autoattack damage from the ranger, mesmer, and necro.

Mesmer coefficients / dmg for weapon skills are low because ANet expects mesmers to reach full dps potential with the help of phantasms (or pets for rangers, minions for necros). What they are refusing to acknowledge is how fragile phantasms are, effectively preventing us from reaching that potential “high” dps. Phantasms are more fragile than a fully glass ele yet do half the ele’s damage.

ANet justifies our low dps because we have utility that ele doesnt have. Reflects, crowd control, interrupts, aoe stability, aoe condi cleanse, timewarp, portal.

PS: talking about pve, pvp is a gamemode I’ve never bothered with.

Yeah, for example. I traited persisting images for 20% hp on phantasms, used the signet for 50% extra hp on illusions, and still a single abomination autoattack swing in arah 1 shots them.

Pets need 90% aoe/cleave damage reduction if not total immunity in pve, period.

Another problem is the cooldown on our phantasms is entirely based around pvp scenarios. When mobs die so quick in pve, you just blew a 15+ sec cd phantasm only to watch it die a few seconds later after the mob dies.

Really, I’m surprised they haven’t given us the Kasmeer treatment. If you look, her phantasms stay spawned despite mob death and follow her. That’s how it should function, our images should be bound to us and attack what we are attacking and shatter on who we are targeting when we issue the command.

As far as utility, while we bring reflects and portal, eles bring condi clear, fire fields, and fury on top of useful conjures. And so do guardians. The only classes with utility worse than the mesmer imo are necromancer and ranger.

The developers simply have done a terrible job with pets and minions in this game, they refuse to give pets aoe immunity because two rangers might switch aggro on something like lupicus, yet classes are able to solo the kitten thing already. If minion aggro on bosses could be exploited, simply remove minions off the aggro table of bosses. If we’re balanced around having minions up, then those minions need close to 99% uptime.

Even then, we don’t have much in the way of cleaving phantasms. If they fixed pets to not die from aoe and be off the aggro table, our clones would reliably stay up in PvE. Then we could change shatter so it doesn’t shatter phantasms and buff its damage around the use of 1-2 clones so we can use shatter for aoe purposes without killing our sustained damage.

They also need to switch signet of midnight to provide 25% run speed instead already or buff the kitten swiftness duration and fix the swiftness stacking on temporal curtain.

Signet of Illusions should be reworked to something else. Signet of Inspiration needs to have its interval shortened to 4-5 seconds and apply two boons at a time.

Power Block’s 2 sec stability is pitiful, increase it to 3-4. Mantra of Pain needs a good damage boost, it hits for less than the final chain of our autoattack. Make each charge apply 7-8 stacks of vulnerability for 10 seconds.

Cry of Frustration needs to not be totally useless. And just can all those garbage new traits they gave us for something useful.

I was watching the Revenant skills and traits on Dulfy, and if they don’t revamp necro/mesmer/ranger for HoT, it’s going to be pointless playing any of these classes.

If phantasms would scale with my runes and sigils, if they would become invulnerable with a minor trait when I dodge, when they actually hit their target (watching at you iWL), if they would be summoned fast enough rather than being rdy when the enemy champ or trahmob is already dead, that’s a world I want to live in.

As for rangers and necros: Ranger have kittenty base damge but engouh modifiers to accept that, yet sword AA is underwhelming with it’s mechanic and the cleave breaker in it. And their pets F1-F4(F5 soon) suck atm. Pets respond too slow and if I call my pet back I want it next to me, not 5m away in a lava pool. And Necros just don’t cleave and have no good utility, their current dagger dmg is “ok”.

Even the modifiers are problematic because some of them rely on full endurance or flanking the target when in many scenarios doing so is not feasible. And yeah those are the better modifiers, but rangers also suffer from their power based weapon traits being stuck in the toughness and vitality lines.

I’m also annoyed that with the mesmer, the signet recharge reduction trait hasn’t been merged with something else like the others did. Not that the active effects for them except for inspiration are worth much.

It’s why I’m worried about the revenant. In 2 years they didn’t even get remotely close to fixing the weaker classes and having some semblance of class balance, and for this expansion instead of pouring their assets into fixing the classes they introduce another profession, and a heavy armor one at that as if heavy armor professions weren’t favored enough already.

speaking of nerf, was illusion skills ever require 3/4-1 sec cast time?
has the mesmer’s clone have more health in the the beginning?
has the phantasm skill do more damage in the beginning?
because i ran phantasm build and i found that phantasm do sub par damage and took too long to cast while other class have near to instance activation time

What is least played is reserved for the special and the elite :P I am proud of being the least played class – even though it all seems pretty easy and second-nature to me xD Sometimes it’s all about play style, none of the other classes really did it for me. The satisfaction of all the crazy finger work and mobility and besting your opponents is just ahhhhh

takatsu.9416:

What is least played is reserved for the special and the elite :P I am proud of being the least played class – even though it all seems pretty easy and second-nature to me xD Sometimes it’s all about play style, none of the other classes really did it for me. The satisfaction of all the crazy finger work and mobility and besting your opponents is just ahhhhh

Best response to this thread! And that is why mesmers are preps Jim Carrey Voice FABULOUSSSSSSSSSS!

WTS finals, 20 players, all classes represented…. except Mesmer. This thread has never been more relevant.

Hlord.5940:

speaking of nerf, was illusion skills ever require 3/4-1 sec cast time?
has the mesmer’s clone have more health in the the beginning?
has the phantasm skill do more damage in the beginning?
because i ran phantasm build and i found that phantasm do sub par damage and took too long to cast while other class have near to instance activation time

Signet of illusions was bugged for a long time and gave 300% extra illusion health. It has since been fixed so is now only 50% extra health. A pretty substantial nerf/fix to phantasm builds.
Funfact: The signet works with rockdog/parrot as well :]

Neptune.2570:

WTS finals, 20 players, all classes represented…. except Mesmer. This thread has never been more relevant.

There was one Mesmer, supecutie , played for 2 matches but after changed for a thief…
Really a terrible situation for Mesmers in tpvp, even necromancers and rangers were in a better situation during WTS.

Indrea.7803:

Neptune.2570:

WTS finals, 20 players, all classes represented…. except Mesmer. This thread has never been more relevant.

There was one Mesmer, supecutie , played for 2 matches but after changed for a thief…
Really a terrible situation for Mesmers in tpvp, even necromancers and rangers were in a better situation during WTS.

Hell even in regular tpvp matches. I see mesmers maybe once every 10 matches in ranked (aside from me). And when I do they are usually from OMFG.

jportell.2197:

Indrea.7803:

Neptune.2570:

WTS finals, 20 players, all classes represented…. except Mesmer. This thread has never been more relevant.

There was one Mesmer, supecutie , played for 2 matches but after changed for a thief…
Really a terrible situation for Mesmers in tpvp, even necromancers and rangers were in a better situation during WTS.

Hell even in regular tpvp matches. I see mesmers maybe once every 10 matches in ranked (aside from me). And when I do they are usually from OMFG.

I’m in EU, to say the true tPvP is the only area in which I see some mesmers compared to other areas (wvw and pve), but it’s in my experience the least represented profession nowadays even there: also, practically every Mesmer is terrible except someone that play very well; Mesmer’ s players are or incredible or ridiculous.

Hlord.5940:

speaking of nerf, was illusion skills ever require 3/4-1 sec cast time?
has the mesmer’s clone have more health in the the beginning?
has the phantasm skill do more damage in the beginning?
because i ran phantasm build and i found that phantasm do sub par damage and took too long to cast while other class have near to instance activation time

Never played beta, but in some preview vids the were summoned faster, nearly instant. But also 2 at once, so I think it’s just for demo. There’s also a demo vid where the GS aa and chaos storm dealt damage ~loel~

Phantasm and clone hp has been increased in a patch long time ago, just for pve. But they (maybe bugged again) ninjanerfed the HP a few patches ago into the ground, now they are terrible weak again …

I guess they increased the utility phants cast time once, but I’m not sure though.

jportell.2197:

Indrea.7803:

Neptune.2570:

WTS finals, 20 players, all classes represented…. except Mesmer. This thread has never been more relevant.

There was one Mesmer, supecutie , played for 2 matches but after changed for a thief…
Really a terrible situation for Mesmers in tpvp, even necromancers and rangers were in a better situation during WTS.

Hell even in regular tpvp matches. I see mesmers maybe once every 10 matches in ranked (aside from me). And when I do they are usually from OMFG.

Then I proceeded to interrupt the hell out of him :p

Ross Biddle.2367:

jportell.2197:

Indrea.7803:

Neptune.2570:

WTS finals, 20 players, all classes represented…. except Mesmer. This thread has never been more relevant.

There was one Mesmer, supecutie , played for 2 matches but after changed for a thief…
Really a terrible situation for Mesmers in tpvp, even necromancers and rangers were in a better situation during WTS.

Hell even in regular tpvp matches. I see mesmers maybe once every 10 matches in ranked (aside from me). And when I do they are usually from OMFG.

Then I proceeded to interrupt the hell out of him :p

After i blew up every other person on your team and portal stomped your necro in the middle of a team fight but yes. Your onterrupts were annoying.

In regards to the rant about bugs, it is also worth adding that when balance patches do finally roll around and they start talking about all the buffs they are going to give classes Mesmers proceed to only get bug fixes (which they describe as buffs) which don’t actually fix anything half the time.

Also we really need to make a bigger noise about how big a slap in the face this shield kitten is in the expansion, it might not be too late.

Zenith.7301:

Really, I’m surprised they haven’t given us the Kasmeer treatment. If you look, her phantasms stay spawned despite mob death and follow her. That’s how it should function, our images should be bound to us and attack what we are attacking and shatter on who we are targeting when we issue the command.

The mechanic is so bad that they don’t even have NPCs suffer from using it?

They rally do hate Mesmers.

Levetty.1279:

They really do hate Mesmers.

I don’t think its even hate. At this point – they just have no idea what to do with our class or even how to properly play it. For example, if you check out our grandmaster traits that we received, they are an absolute kitten

The devs have lost the trust of many hardcore mesmer fans. I believe in the back of our minds many of us are hopeful but due to nerf induced trauma we just want them to leave us alone.

This coupled with a non-user friendly and at times overcomplicated profession mechanic that pigeon-holes us into certain viable builds, our lack of effective aoe damage/support, an unclear and not so well defined role in teams and the general negativity of most mesmers on the forums and on sub-reddits makes Mesmer an unwelcoming class for some players.

I have only been playing gw2 for a year now but due to a surplass of free time I have read up a lot on the past. As a newer player, I am probably not as pessimistic as lot of people in this thread but throughout this year I have become increasingly frustrated and I can understand why older players are frustrated too.

My two favorite classes are Mesmer and Necro and I absolutely love trying to come up with my own builds. I look at the traitlines and I see a lot of interesting ideas that the devs have tried to implement but I try them out time and time again and they just suck. It’s a very disrespectful thing to say to the devs given the amount of time they put in making this game but I can’t phrase it any other way. My apologies.

I will not apologise for what I am about to say next however. In the coming 2 years there are a lot of newer and shinier MMOs coming out. Up until now GW2 has had the luxury of having no real competitors but that will soon change. No new chicken-nado finisher or golden pig on the gem store or tiny living story update is going to save you from this fact.

I think as a business you probably realized this when you decided to push pvp tournaments, release into the chinese market, make an expansion, and float your ideas about class specializations to keep the children quiet for now. But I tell you what, Skyforge is looking mighty interesting to me and so does Everquest Next.

But until then, mesmer will always forever be my favorite. I have a thing for saving wounded animals. :P

All I got to say is I played many classes that just have zero chance of killing a bunker with certain builds but the mesmer is another story. Set it up as condi torment or zerk shatter and it doesn’t matter, removes tons of boons and has HUGE burst potential. Once when I was fighting a bunker guard (using sentinels amulet) I got him to waste a couple of his cooldowns and took him from 100% to downed state in less than 3 seconds. When playing condi it is nothing to keep a 1k+ torment tick on another player along with spamming tons of confusion on them at the same time.

If you can’t play mesmer effectively its your fault. As to why its not found in most high end teams is simple; it requires too much teamwork, support, and has next to zero chance at surviving fights if trying to stay on point. The issue isn’t the mesmer, it’s the game type.

Allison The Strange.4519:

The issue isn’t the mesmer, it’s the game type.

Since the Mesmer (like all the other professions) are supposed to fit into certain game types, then the issue is still the Mesmer and how it performs in the available modes.

This last paragraph is precious xD

Allison The Strange.4519:

If you can’t play mesmer effectively its your fault.

So since there’s great mesmers that can play mesmer effectively, we’d obviously find them in high level pvp, right?

Allison The Strange.4519:

As to why its not found in most high end teams is simple; it requires too much teamwork, support, and has next to zero chance at surviving fights if trying to stay on point.

Oh, ok. So what you’re saying is that even if you’re fantastic at mesmer, you’ll still suck in high end PvP…but it’s your fault. Got it.

Allison The Strange.4519:

If you can’t play mesmer effectively its your fault

This has to be the… no… just no……….

The gist of what he (or she) said isn’t really wrong.