Guild Wars 2

I come in peace. It is with great honor to present myself here, as no other profession can give me a challenge like you guys do in PvP. After todays Patch notes, people are saying you got hammered pretty hard.

Is it that bad?

It is if you PvE primarily.

This nerf hardly affected PvP.

In PvE, Mesmers only strength was big dps vs monsters against which you could stack iDuelists, mainly silver/gold monsters, and bronze(veteran) monsters to a lesser degree. Now with this nerf, it takes longer before you have 3 phantasms and it is harder/impossible to keep them up.

Mesmers were already weak in PvE, with extremely low AoE damage (<10% that of Warriors) and phantasms disappearing when their target dies (meaning you have to slowly build up damage against single targets). This nerf was an unneeded, and unasked-for slap in the face of anyone who plays a Mesmer in PvE.

Before anyone comes in with some argument about “use shatter skills and confusion”:
Shatter skills have a relatively long cooldown for their damage, and in high level area’s illusions/clones/phantasms die fast because they don’t have any way too avoid damage. Their damage (over time) is low and unreliable because of this.

Confusion is nice, in theory. However, monsters usually have slow-but-powerful attacks/skills. In practise, this means it is not uncommon for confusion to expire before it did anything, even with the +33% confusion duration trait.

No big impact actually.
Who cares about a 3-5s longer cd’s on the phantasm anyway.

5s cd increase on Chaos Storm, why not. I won’t feel the difference anyway.

This looks to me like a small adjustment and to make all the badies and cry-babies “omfg Mesmer is OP” kitten
-> look, we have finaly hit the Mesmer with the nerf bat.

Nothing to see here, move on.

Except it won’t stop there will it, whiners are never satisfied, and if this is the path ANet seem content to take then I predict another phantasm and/or shatter nerf before the end of October.

The fact that patch has landed with minimal bug fixes, to a quite frankly embarrassingly bug-riddled game. Wasn’t this patch supposed to be the much touted “dungeon rewards adjustment” patch too? Don’t see any of that in there either.

Added to the fact that the patch notes aren’t even accurate (Swordsman recharge with no traits is 20 seconds on live currently, not 18 as the patch notes lists, Ranger shortbow change from patch notes is massively inaccurate, etc) further reinforces the quite frankly slap-dash approach to changes made to the live game this far.

Who cares about a 3-5s longer cd’s on the phantasm anyway.

You do realise the recharge was 9 seconds at release? Then it was 12, now it is 18 (20?).

Even 9>12 is 33% slower, so to build up to your full damage potential it takes 36 seconds instead of 27. Now with the 2nd nerf (50% recharge increase) it takes 54 (60?) seconds. Mesmer was already slow to build up their damage, but this is ridiculous.

Then again, I care little. I’ll be playing on my Warrior, abusing 20k-dmg 100b bursts.

The cooldown of Swordsman and Duelist have always been 15. Never have they been 9 or 12. Those kinds of CD are only achievable by traits, which themselves have been changed a lot since Beta.

I presume you will enjoy your warrior much more than your Mesmer if the only thing you care about is damage. Sad although to see you go. :-(
But if damage and especially dd is your thing you shouldn’t have rolled a Mesmer in the first place.

If you regularly swap your weapons like a good player this change will have little impact. I actually played all night without even realizing it. If you are determined to run around only using your favorite weapon then yeah any kind of nerf is going to hurt.

I don’t think the changes are too bad, the question is were they needed? Mesmers main way of dealing damage is phantasms, do we deal alot of damage = no we don’t. So why nerf our damage output?

I mainly play in wvw and dabble slightly in spvp. The problem for me is that the people who complain about mesmer in spvp are the majority who like to bash in our clones rather than fight the actual mesmer. I rarely hear of a decent player moaning about mesmer’s.

I have been on every class forum and the majority of the community just love to have a moan about other classes and their own class. In my opinion Anet needs to stop listening to these people. In the top SPvP gaming bracket are Mesmers number 1 by a long way, if so maybe I’ll start to see why they were nerfed?

Mesmers are fine in PvP still. My phantasm’s have a 16 sec cd with traits, there’s nothing wrong with that

Passive Aggressive said it… I switch between Staff/GS regularly throughout battles (and traited for Staff skill cooldown reduction), but I haven’t had the chance to play with the changes yet. I don’t see it being a HUGE problem, but Chaos Storm/Warlock are two key skills for PvE, so I’m curious to see how much it really affects play, if at all.

I know that I’m able to take 4-5 Risen in Cursed Shore with relative ease, but that does require me to have Chaos Storm up as often as possible, so that 5 seconds might just be a killer after all.

The nerf was a big deal for PvP but it was mostly warranted. However it hit PvE even harder. I doubt anyone will run a staff now if they care about power level.