Guild Wars 2

I think there’s a lot wrong with Mirage, with lots of potential ways to go about fixing it with varying degrees of redesign. But one thing that stands out to me about the current iteration of the spec is how absurd the gameplay loop surrounding mirage mirrors is. They essentially enable or fortify our dodging, but because of their placement, skill/trait triggers, and instant activation it’s not really possible to use them reactively. As it stands, if I want to use a mirror to trigger a blur, I need to pre-empt the attack I intend to dodge enough to use an unrelated skill, wait for the mirror to spawn, approach the mirror, and make contact with it just as I would want the dodge to proc. In practice, this will only ever happen in extremely controlled environments, like farm status raid bosses (and even then it’s unnecessarily disruptive). In other circumstances, this might be an accidental benefit at best, with the mirage happening to bump into a mirror spawned from some effect and avoiding damage they might have otherwise taken.

For me, it would make so much more sense if mirrors didn’t activate immediately on contact, but instead behaved like a resource, either giving us an extra endurance bar (daredevil is probably the most apt design comparison for mirage, and it’s not a favorable one) or an f5 cloak skill.

What we have now is clumsy, unfocused, and yet it’s the core focus of most of our new utilities and a lot of the traits.

and yes ambush skills need to be better/have a longer activation window, but I think that’s already down to less of a design flaw and more of a numbers adjustment.

I love this idea. I suggested something similar on reddit earlier today. If mirrors could be picked up and stored in an extra bar then activated at a later time through and F5 whenever it would do loads for our survivability and dps potential.

Alternatively just make then restore and endurance bar.

I also had the idea that since Shatters really don’t work with Mirage, maybe F1-F4 should be four times the same “spawn Mirage Mirror”-skill, each with their own cooldown so you can household however you want.

Carighan.6758:

I also had the idea that since Shatters really don’t work with Mirage, maybe F1-F4 should be four times the same “spawn Mirage Mirror”-skill, each with their own cooldown so you can household however you want.

Oouuuu!! I like that idea much more!! Your F1-F4s are Mirage Cloaks! Would probably have to be on a moderate cooldown though and duration of Mirage Cloak would need to atleast be something like 2s (something like when having distortion up – 3s would be too much though. Though some might say OP cuz that be a total of 8s to dodge everything.

Yeah I’d have preferred it to be some resource too. Or jus a new F skill with a count charge sysem that grants us Mirage Cloak. (Maybe with a Mirage Mirror shattering animation to it.)

I was thinking of a way to change shatters as well like whenever you shatter instead of destroying the clones the mesmer & clones get Mirage Cloak/Ambush, but each F skill adds something to the ambush.

F1: More power damage (for sword & greatsword ambushes.)
F2: More condis. (2 stacks of confusion)
F3: dazes on first hit of the ambush.
F4: Gives you & clones Mirage Cloak with a count charge on a low ish cooldown.

The new F skills should have increased cooldown though other than the F4 otherwise mesmer would have way too much Mirage Cloak uptime.

Old shatter traits would still be able to affect our new skills

I would definitely like to see something else done with shatters, yeah. The absence of any new effects here is pretty conspicuous.

This is a fantastic idea.

Don’t even make it such that you have to walk over and pick them up. Frankly, it’s just another “widget” on the battlefield in a game that already has combat that is noisy to begin with.

Just make it such that you can use them as you gain them, perhaps storing up to three at a time. Just hit a button and get the effect. There could even be a (simple!) visual effect on the Mesmer to indicate how many mirrors they have.