Guild Wars 2

I’ve been away a lot lately, exploring the history of Tyria. One of the many things I’ve noticed is the Ritualist.

A GW2 Mesmer is essentially a GW1 Ritualist/Mesmer (Rt/Me) and that has some interesting implications.

The Ritualist spirits ( like our clones and especially phantasms ) are weak “out of the box.” However, the Ritualist has access to a number of skills that directly buff the spirits or exploit them, eg to recover energy or heal.

If we could directly buff our Phantasms or use them for healing, it would add a great deal to the options we have. This is similar to the recently introduced White Mantle Mesmer with there very tough phantasm.

tldr: ANET should consider adding active slot skills that can buff or exploit phantasms. This would be a playstyle similar to the new White Mantle Mesmer.

~edit~ Oh btw, I’m currently in Gold, on a PU vanilla Mesmer.

I’d rather just see the personal attacks on the phantasm skills buffed more, made more useful and made to fit the weapons better. And then ideally make chronophantasma baseline and balance based off of that

Truthfully, neither solution is likely to happen. Phantasm buffs have come up from time to time over the years.

I’m thinking that if the buffs were slot skills, it might not make the balance team so nervous.

Forcing us to dedicate some of our few skill slots to skills that do nothing but buff phantasms would be horrible unless they were completely reworked regardless. And it would also effectively give us fewer skills on the bar, since some of them would have an effect on a summon that could be killed or just disappear at any time if its target happens to die. That’s just not a good solution to the problem.

I don’t agree. The Rt/Me I mentioned can do nuke damage by “shattering” ( [Soul Rupture] ) using multiple slot skills.

Effectively giving fewer skills on the bar is the point of making phantasm enhancing skills. You trade one thing for another.

Importantly: this would not require a Mesmer nerf to implement.

If the new slot skills were strong enough, they’d present a new playstyle of exploiting your phantasms.

After all, ranger can use slot skills to enhance her pet. Realistically, the White Mantle Phantasm is comparable to a ranger pet.