Guild Wars 2

Overall Feel

The overall feel of Mirage is….okish. 4/10 at best. It has a lot of clunky mechanics, a lot of really bad traits, and overall just doesn’t really feel smooth to play. The mechanics don’t combo well with any other classes and overall seem more like gimmicks than actual usable mechanics.

Axe Skills

Autoattack: The auto is rather weak. The power coefficients are very low and the conditions it applies are ok but not great. The third skill in the chain is quite good, but it takes a while to get there, especially with all the other skills you need to be using.

Suggestion: The power coefficients here need to be increased. The action speed of the attacks should probably be boosted slightly, and the conditions should be increased either in duration or potency.

Axe 2: This skill feels really clunky. It feels like it should have an evade…but has no evade, so you’ll take a lot of damage from this skill if you’re not careful. The dps it does is reasonable for a fairly spammy skill, but the slow animation combined with locked in movement and no evade just makes it very unsatisfying to use.

Suggestion: This skill requires either an evade frame while using it or a much much faster animation.

Axe 3: This skill is just flat out non-functional. On a featureless flat plain it works great, but any sort of terrain will completely ruin it. The initial leap backwards has a wonderful habit of knocking you off of whatever you’re standing on, and the secondary leap forwards will usually just faceplant you into a wall and miss the target. On top of that, it doesn’t even have any aoe component, so you’re getting a really janky leap that doesn’t work for the possible reward of a single target hit of confusion.

Suggestion: This skill needs to get an aoe component to the attack. Additionally, the leap forwards needs to be a proper blink, otherwise it will never function. Remember old iLeap? Yeah, that’s what’s happening here.

Heal and Utilities

Heal: It’s ok. It heals for a decent amount and provides vigor…but it’s on a very long cooldown. This would be more reasonable at a 20s or 25s cooldown, but 30s is really a stretch.

Suggestion: Lower the cooldown to 20 seconds to make this a viable heal skill.

Illusionary Ambush: See axe 3.

Mirage Advance: The cast time on this skill makes it feel really clunky. This would be reasonable with a .25s cast time, maaaybe a .5s cast time, but .75 seconds for a shadowstep is really odd. Additionally, not being able to use it when out of range or out of LoS makes it essentially unusable in many situations.

Suggestion: Allow the skill to be used while out of range and out of LoS. Additionally, lower the cast time to .25 or .5s.

Sand Through Glass: This is ok, it’s a 30s stunbreak. It’s not great, the mirror is a bit clunky of a mechanic, and if I’m putting a 30s stunbreak on my bar, it’s going to be blink instead.

Suggestion: Lower the cooldown to 20s to make this competitive with blink.

Crystal Sands: This skill is really underwhelming. The little bolts do very weak damage and have extremely poor coverage. The reward for properly placing it and getting a shotgun at the center is just really poor. Additionally, almost any terrain will totally brick this skill and make the little bolts not work at all.

Suggestion: Increase the number of bolts from 6 to 12. This increases the coverage and boosts the overall utility and reward for proper placement. Additionally, figure out how to fix this skill when it’s used on terrain.

Jaunt: The range on this skill feels really really bad. 400 is so short it’s nearly unusable. If this were a direction based dash, 400 range might be reasonable (but still short), however as a gtaoe skill, this absolutely requires at least 600 or 700 range to feel anything close to ok. The radius, damage, confusion, etc are all fine, the range is what makes this horrid.

Suggestion: Boost the range to 600-700.

Ambush Attacks

Axe: This is ok, but having all the axes be projectiles basically makes it unusable in WvW.

Suggestion: Make the axes unblockable.

Sword: This is good, but buggy. The sword clones don’t proc interrupt traits, so this needs to be fixed.

Scepter: This is insanely clunky. The blink is very short range, and then it forces you to stand still for a full 1.5 seconds. It’s extremely vulnerable and extremely lackluster for how long it takes to execute.

Suggestion: Allow movement while channeling the orbs and increase the amount of conditions they apply.

Staff: Again a clunky projectile. This is totally useless in WvW because of how narrow the hitbox is, how awkward the targeting is…and it’s a projectile.

Suggestion: Make this a wave attack in front of the staff instead of a traveling projectile. This will make it an actually solid area attack instead of what it is now.

Greatsword: This attack is really bad. I’m not sure what to say.

Suggestion: Rethink this one from the ground up please.

Traits

Minor Traits
Nomad’s Endurance:This is fine, but could do with a boost to vigor effectiveness.
Speed of Sand: This really needs to last longer. At least 1.5s is what would make up for not having a mobile dodge.

Adept Traits

Self-Deception: This trait is extremely poor. The clone generation condition is extremely fragile and easily disrupted. Additionally, it doesn’t actually boost deception skills in a notable way. This should either lower the cooldown, add another condition/confusion stack, or both.

Renewing Oasis: This is just generally underwhelming. The condition duration reduction is not very strong unless you invest super heavily into it with food, runes, light aura, etc. On its own it’s quite weak. This would be more worth taking if

Riddle of Sand: This is a good trait.

Master Traits

Reformed Mirage Mirror: This trait is very poor. The mirage mirror mechanic is already clunky, and this puts additional layers of RNG and loss of control in front of it. In order for this to be useful, it would to summon the mirror at your location and have a cd of at least 15s or less.

Mirage Mantle: This is ok, but underwhelming. A base duration of 3s would make this more worthwhile.

Mirrored Axes: This is a solid trait.

Grandmaster Traits

Infinite Horizon: This interesting trait really should be baseline. The ambush skills are very weak, and it looks like they were designed with this trait in mind. Either make this trait baseline or the ambush skills need to be drastically more powerful.

Elusive Mind: This trait is….strong, but balanced in the current crazy amount of power creep.

Dune Cloak: This trait is decent, but a bit underwhelming. A larger radius and a bit more potency, perhaps additional torment, would make this feel better.

Fay.2357:

Overall Feel

The overall feel of Mirage is….okish. 4/10 at best. It has a lot of clunky mechanics, a lot of really bad traits, and overall just doesn’t really feel smooth to play. The mechanics don’t combo well with any other classes and overall seem more like gimmicks than actual usable mechanics.

This summs up how I felt about Mirage myself.

It’s getting annoying that mesmer need to play against their own class mechanic in so many forms.

Chrono put bandaid fixes on some issues. Mirage was the possibility to remedie some of the others or straight up fix some of the issues but instead feels like a step in the wrong direction. Instead of less convoluted, prohibitiv and unfun mechanics we get more.

This is how I feel the design process for Mirage went:

Idea A: Let’s give the mesmer some thief like ambush abilities to up their personal damage and move away from their main damage coming from phantasms.
Amendment A: Great Idea, but let’s have clones do the damage, I’m sure their 0.5 second survival won’t be an issue. Also let’s not let the ambush skill last to long, wouldn’t want to have any type of strategic play be required.

Idea B: Mesmer love being all over the place (no we don’t), let’s give them a new class mechanic where they have to run through crystals in order to use their offensive ability.
Amendment B: Love it, but let’s make sure the crystals first have to spawn and only remain active for 4 seconds. Let’s also f-up their dodge skill to make movement more of a hassle.

Idea C: Guys, we’ve trolled mesmer hard enough. Let’s give them the ability to retarget their clones midfight. It’s been an issue for so long, they’ll love it.
Amendment C: Okay, but put it on the new weapon so they are forced to use the new elite spec and this issue isn’t resolved longterm meaning we can take it away next elite specialisation. Also don’t forget to take away any type of defensive skill for the new weapon, make them use the new dodge mechanic.

Idea D: What about mesmer elites, now without chrono they are left with their 180 second Timewarp and Moa, we’ve given other classes similar yet way more powerful abilities on shorter base cooldowns. Let’s give mesmer some type of movement ability to compensate for some of our earlier design decisions.
Amendment D: Fine, but make it 400 range and keep the damage low. It’s a mesmer elite after all, expectations aren’t to high.

Random Person overhearing the design team: Guys, are you sure this is fun. Has anyone actually playtested the class in this state?
Design team: Playtested? Are you nuts? No one here plays mesmer.

faydaddy invite me to OMFG pls

This sums it up pretty nicely, this spec is just worthless in it’s current form and i don’t know how to even make it better without rethinking half the traits all ambushes.

Don’t worry, they’ll probably retool it into a raid buffer spec instead :P

(edit)
Serious suggestions for a moment:

These are elite specs. They are supposed to have a clear, defining, element. As such I’d focus 95% of the buffs on the ambush skills. Rather leave the rest super weak, if the dodge→ambush feed mechanic slaughters enemies and tops the DPS meters, all is well and the spec feels highly unique on top of it.

As such, really rethink the way these work. At the very least I’d make them significantly stronger and remove the attack from clones (that is, they do the animation but it does nothing, not even apply conditions). Also means we’re less reliant on clones in WvW, where they last all of a single frame at the best of times.

As an example, the GS ambush should probably hit squishy targets for ~25% of their health, and hit the side targets for the exact same damage.

Cyninja.2954:

Fay.2357:

Overall Feel

The overall feel of Mirage is….okish. 4/10 at best. It has a lot of clunky mechanics, a lot of really bad traits, and overall just doesn’t really feel smooth to play. The mechanics don’t combo well with any other classes and overall seem more like gimmicks than actual usable mechanics.

This summs up how I felt about Mirage myself.

It’s getting annoying that mesmer need to play against their own class mechanic in so many forms.

Chrono put bandaid fixes on some issues. Mirage was the possibility to remedie some of the others or straight up fix some of the issues but instead feels like a step in the wrong direction. Instead of less convoluted, prohibitiv and unfun mechanics we get more.

This is how I feel the design process for Mirage went:

Idea A: Let’s give the mesmer some thief like ambush abilities to up their personal damage and move away from their main damage coming from phantasms.
Amendment A: Great Idea, but let’s have clones do the damage, I’m sure their 0.5 second survival won’t be an issue. Also let’s not let the ambush skill last to long, wouldn’t want to have any type of strategic play be required.

Idea B: Mesmer love being all over the place (no we don’t), let’s give them a new class mechanic where they have to run through crystals in order to use their offensive ability.
Amendment B: Love it, but let’s make sure the crystals first have to spawn and only remain active for 4 seconds. Let’s also f-up their dodge skill to make movement more of a hassle.

Idea C: Guys, we’ve trolled mesmer hard enough. Let’s give them the ability to retarget their clones midfight. It’s been an issue for so long, they’ll love it.
Amendment C: Okay, but put it on the new weapon so they are forced to use the new elite spec and this issue isn’t resolved longterm meaning we can take it away next elite specialisation. Also don’t forget to take away any type of defensive skill for the new weapon, make them use the new dodge mechanic.

Idea D: What about mesmer elites, now without chrono they are left with their 180 second Timewarp and Moa, we’ve given other classes similar yet way more powerful abilities on shorter base cooldowns. Let’s give mesmer some type of movement ability to compensate for some of our earlier design decisions.
Amendment D: Fine, but make it 400 range and keep the damage low. It’s a mesmer elite after all, expectations aren’t to high.

Random Person overhearing the design team: Guys, are you sure this is fun. Has anyone actually playtested the class in this state?
Design team: Playtested? Are you nuts? No one here plays mesmer.

Very well said.

Cyninja.2954:

Design team: Playtested? Are you nuts? No one here plays mesmer.

Truer words have never been spoken.

I support pretty much everything you wrote. Hope the devs see this thread.

They’ll find random way to bandaid it…like they give might to iSwordman then realize its such an embarrassment that they make phantasmal force to save their face.

I’m terribly disappointed with Robert Gee this time. Chrono was innovative and new but mirage is simply a mixture of non-cohesive idea throw onto the word “Mirage”. And they dare say mirage is the first elite spec they come up with in stream.

Since there is a 0% chance they will completly scrap this and give us an actual elite spec, I can get behind these ideas.

I honestly think the majority of these elites were rushed through.

After more than 5 years playing mesmer, I’m disappointed, deeply disappointed with anet. Any build you want is better if you don’t use new elite spec. We got worst of both worlds, low dps with glass cannon survivability

Bought expansion on friday and I’m already kittened

Great feedback
You seem quite good at mesmer, if one wanted to play mirage in wvwvw what gear/runes and weapons would you suggest?

Since trailblazer and dire works for crono, same gear could work for mirage? And then keep staff as weapon, and get sword/shield and axe/torch? A kitteneaper way and then it is possible to swap between both specs?
But I feel mirage is much more squishy, so perhaps other runes are needed?
Seems tricky to get any information about what people think about it, so perhaps you can help?=)

I think axe should increased in efficiency and exist as the condi version of sword… in its current iteration it begs the question of “why use a melee range weapon” when scepter exists.

Axe 1 : meh
Axe 2 : give it some sort of damage mitigation?
Axe 3: broken

The utilities didn’t impress me either ; elusive mind is the only standout trait.

pinkglow.3429:

Great feedback
You seem quite good at mesmer, if one wanted to play mirage in wvwvw what gear/runes and weapons would you suggest?

Since trailblazer and dire works for crono, same gear could work for mirage? And then keep staff as weapon, and get sword/shield and axe/torch? A kitteneaper way and then it is possible to swap between both specs?
But I feel mirage is much more squishy, so perhaps other runes are needed?
Seems tricky to get any information about what people think about it, so perhaps you can help?=)

Are you thinking for roaming or for an organized group composition?

Infusion.7149:

The utilities didn’t impress me either ; elusive mind is the only standout trait.

It’s the usual “But but… what is Mesmers become too stroooooong in PvP”-underbalancing we’ve seen for the past 5 years. Didn’t truly expect anything else, I’ll be honest.

Mirage needs a clone death trait.

Ithilwen.1529:

Mirage needs a clone death trait.

Wrong fix IMO. Make Clones flat out invulnerable for Mirages. They seemingly take damage, but their HP bar never drops (numbers show up). All damage dealt to them is 100% wasted.

Fay.2357:

pinkglow.3429:

Great feedback
You seem quite good at mesmer, if one wanted to play mirage in wvwvw what gear/runes and weapons would you suggest?

Since trailblazer and dire works for crono, same gear could work for mirage? And then keep staff as weapon, and get sword/shield and axe/torch? A kitteneaper way and then it is possible to swap between both specs?
But I feel mirage is much more squishy, so perhaps other runes are needed?
Seems tricky to get any information about what people think about it, so perhaps you can help?=)

Are you thinking for roaming or for an organized group composition?

Mostly roaming, but joining the zerg every now and then Hope you can help

Carighan.6758:

Ithilwen.1529:

Mirage needs a clone death trait.

Wrong fix IMO. Make Clones flat out invulnerable for Mirages. They seemingly take damage, but their HP bar never drops (numbers show up). All damage dealt to them is 100% wasted.

Oddly enough, that might actually help. Clones are invulnerable for 15 seconds after creation…

Still I’d prefer to have clone death traits back.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

I’m terribly disappointed with Robert Gee this time. Chrono was innovative and new but mirage is simply a mixture of non-cohesive idea throw onto the word “Mirage”. And they dare say mirage is the first elite spec they come up with in stream.

Pretty easy to be first when the only two defining ideas you have about a spec are the word ‘mirage’ and some abstract concept art about a mirror.

phokus.8934:

I honestly think the majority of these elites were rushed through.

They definitely were. There were 2, maybe 3(?), devs working on all 9 elites. Taking 2 years between HoT and PoF, and 3-4.5 (lets say 4 as a good middle ground) elites per person gives them half a year to not only design but also implement, test and balance the elites. And it shows. There aren’t enough people on the elite spec design team nor on teh balance team (and I hope to god they aren’t the same team. But given our previous balance patches I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the same team).

EnRohbi.2187:

Pretty easy to be first when the only two defining ideas you have about a spec are the word ‘mirage’ and some abstract concept art about a mirror.

Even then, I would have expected something more working with the word “Mirage”:

• Ability to show the enemies negative or positive AE circles which are actually the opposite. As in, they see a healfield, walk in, it strips their boons instead. A “false oasis”, heh. Should have been the heal skill, I suppose :P
• Clones which are invulnerable but seemingly still take damage. As I said above. Wasting hits of AE skills and potentially making enemies waste a lot of damage.
• A skill which hexes a group of targets, making them see all their enemies as full health with random boons and no conditions. They hit normally, everything works as it should, they just cannot see it.
• Stealth an enemy’s friendly teammate. They can interact, but not see one another. Not the spell effects either.
• As an elite, a Delegator Clone. For X seconds, every bad thing hitting you will hit that clone instead. If it doesn’t die, the total damage taken is transferred to you at the end.

And so on. Things which actually play onto the word mirage, presenting fakes and illusions.

@Fay
I was hoping you would prove me wrong…

I re-created my demo Mirage three times, each time trying to give it another go with a fresh mind, but as it is now and for what I can imagine WvW will be after the release, I can’t think of any role viable for it in large scale fights…

I agree with your suggestions to make Mirage at least “playable”, but I’m not sure if it would become “desiderable”, after testing Scourge and from what I’ve seen of Firebrand….

EnRohbi.2187:

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

I’m terribly disappointed with Robert Gee this time. Chrono was innovative and new but mirage is simply a mixture of non-cohesive idea throw onto the word “Mirage”. And they dare say mirage is the first elite spec they come up with in stream.

Pretty easy to be first when the only two defining ideas you have about a spec are the word ‘mirage’ and some abstract concept art about a mirror.

Dev 1: “Oh, this looks cool. Think we can make the new Mesmer spec out of it? You know, Mirage.”
Dev 2: “Oh wow, that does look cool. Let’s hand it over to the artists.”
Artists: “Alright, I finished the spec. It looks awesome.”
Dev 1 and 2: “How does it play?”
Artists: “Oh, I don’t know. But the mirrors look cool!”

Menaka.5092:

@Fay
I was hoping you would prove me wrong…

I re-created my demo Mirage three times, each time trying to give it another go with a fresh mind, but as it is now and for what I can imagine WvW will be after the release, I can’t think of any role viable for it in large scale fights…

I agree with your suggestions to make Mirage at least “playable”, but I’m not sure if it would become “desiderable”, after testing Scourge and from what I’ve seen of Firebrand….

I was hoping too. I was really excited to play it even after talking with you ingame, but the actual play doesn’t lie. In fights where I performed well (read: didn’t have half my damage eaten by projectile hate) I barely squeaked out higher DPS than an apothecary scourge that was also farting out 6k barriers throughout our fights. It was…disappointing to say the least.

Carighan.6758:

As such, really rethink the way these work. At the very least I’d make them significantly stronger and remove the attack from clones (that is, they do the animation but it does nothing, not even apply conditions). Also means we’re less reliant on clones in WvW, where they last all of a single frame at the best of times.

As an example, the GS ambush should probably hit squishy targets for ~25% of their health, and hit the side targets for the exact same damage.

I have to +1 this. Too many ppl are saying make Infinite horizon baseline when I really think it’s the self ambushes that just need to be made stronger and clones can just look pretty and do some minor damage.