Guild Wars 2

EDIT: Nice ideas, apologies I can’t give further thought to the conversation – have decided to quit GW2 for the time being and if I ever play again I doubt it will be anything more than casual Living Story.

Resilient Illusions – all clones gain 3s aegis and 3s protection on summon. Does not affect phantasms.

Thoughts? Overpowered? Useless? Need tweaking?

Obviously proper placement is the challenge – needs to be high enough up a trait tree to keep it accessible to the builds that can benefit, but not easily accessible to builds that would be come too powerful.

This would negatively impact clone death condition builds, as it goes against what they try to achieve so would be of no benefit. It should also be of no benefit to phantasm builds – because it doesn’t affect phantasms.

Would it be sufficient for shatter builds clone survival in large fights?

Would it help with the ileap -> swap clone by giving it higher life expectancy?

I really don’t know – just throwing this one out there to see what any of you lot think.

Where could it go in trait trees? Illusions > master?

Edit: Given Anet’s views the last time they discussed Mesmer were (whether accurate or inaccurate) about resource maintenance and setup against things like aoe and cleave, I wondered what they could be considering in the background. Not saying I agree with this view at all, but if they’re going to go in that direction then we may as well think about it.

collective hallucination : your illusions stay alive untill they are killed, shattered or are out of combat.

Well, I think we all know that with Anet Mesmer tweaking, their reasoning would probably be that the trait would also mean that you cannot use shatter/leap skills within 3s of summoning the clones.

Which would kitten the Mesmer beyond belief.

Please dont give them ideas, lets focus on fixing before changing.

No worries – just a stab in the dark and easy to throw in the bin.

It’s underpowered.

Base mechanics (no traiting necessary)

Phantasms need invuln on summon for the duration of their first attack cycle.

Clones need to die based on their on death traits. That said, clones under the guise of an f1-f4 skill need invuln until they shatter.

Not a bad idea at all imo, problem would be fitting it into a build. Unless DE is reworked there’s no spots left to fit into a shatter build.

Reaching for the stars, but I’d love to see something very similar to what you said. Some way to more-or-less guarantee that clones reach their targets when commanded to shatter. If it were up to me, they’d get stability and significantly reduced AoE damage when commanded to shatter. Still able to be killed and quite squishy, but they’d have to be focused rather than passively dismissed.

The time to kill a clone should be when it’s auto-attacking, not when it’s on its way to shatter.

Barring that, I’d love to see some more on-death abilities. One in each tree would be cool… For domination- clones interrupt when they die. Dueling they do damage, Chaos they give a random condition, Inspiration they proc a heal, and Illusions they spawn a new fresh clone.

How about major adept trait in Illusion? The adept trait in there is kind of average for shatter build and I swap between precise wrack and compounding power. Adept in dueling also comes into mind but adding defenses to clones don’t exactly suit the crit traitline. To me, 3s aegis/protection on clones aren’t exactly trade-able when compare to deceptive evasion or illusionary invigoration.

Worthless imo. I’d say the retaliation trait should be swapped with a distortion for 3 sec after summon. This is actually what we need, for WvW and PvE AoEs.

I’ve always thought something along the lines of “Illusions have distortion while the mesmer does” – meaning you can distortion shatter, summon 3 new clones, and Mind Wrack while invulnerable, or use the distortion on kill and signet distortion to actively time when burst is going to fall. Also would be kinda fun with the reflect on distortion.

hmm i like the idea, but honestly we need non ai traits.the reason mesmer is not doing well in group fights is because ai is terrible in groupplay. we need a non ai traitline imo

no – we focus on our illusions, it’s the way it is. we have to improve the AI part of the mesemer – like with distortion for illusions.

Something like:
Reduce the phantasm summoning cool down by 1 second everytime a clone/phantasm is killed.