Guild Wars 2

Please Anet, could you review the Phantasm?

Over all those years, we learned that phantasm in PVP, only as 10% chance to survive for making their 2nd hit. Either we shatter them or they are being killed.

Phantasm are no threat, they don’t put any pressure on the enemy. Something is wrong.
I know it could really quickly go out of balance. If you increase their damage.

But I see Dragon Hunter doing every 4s on range 1200, doing more damage than my Phantasms. It hurts. Even more if I know it is my most powerful weapon skill with a heavy cooldown.

Maybe instead of increasing the damage:
Phantasmal haste could be a Basic line. It won’t change the world, but it could help putting some pressure.

I avenger has something like 8s cooldown on his attack, which as a range from 240 radius. Please…. save this phantasm. He doesn’t even benefit from his own buff.

I could not come up with a super idea. But look into it please.

They did review: with current power creep our phantasm has now 5% to land a hit before dying.
/Balance

On a more serious note, I’d like if they could give us PImages baseline
or at least the health part (for what it’s worth), removing PImage altogether while pushing retaliation on Pphantasms on top of everything else… would make it feel more worthwhile.
While giving us something along the line of compounding power but with healing/vit…

I’m pulling at straws here, but by giving us phantasm’s health baseline and pushing the retal on Phantasms, it would give us the change of having another adept trait a bit more selfish than either giving us more speed rez (which, with the coming nerf to chronobunker and removal of rune of mercy, is completely pointless since there’s no way we can survive long enough to have the role of raising allies like we did under focus) or either healing allies when finishing mantra and add something similar to CPower but with vit/healing would benefit us more while not removing all team related traits from the line itself.

June 23rd changes to Phantasm, imo, were in good direction for Phantasm mesmer. The changes to Inspiration line were good. Today, nobody plays Phantasm or rarely.

I remember we had a long debate about Phantasm play style on this mesmer forum. With Chronomancer, they made Shatter obligatory and even more with Chronophantasma. I believe Gee said Phantasm is not something they wanted to support, that it wasn’t what the Mesmer was supposed to do. They have to shatter.

Phantasms just suck now. If you aren’t taking Inspiration line with Phantasms related traits, they then are pretty much insta killed in PvP or WvW, without having a chance to land a hit.

Warlock and Mage can barely target and hit. Mage long cooldown and low damage makes it useless and might as well be treated as a clone.

Then you have all the other mid-range and melee phantasms that die easily : berserker, swordman, disenchanter, avenger, defender, warden, etc.

What’s the point to be vanilla Mesmer ? No point. If something is left to the Mesmer to be worked on, it should be Lockdown and Phantasm play style. Lockdown went out of the window with so many professions that fart stability these days.

Krispera.5087:

I believe Gee said Phantasm is not something they wanted to support, that it wasn’t what the Mesmer was supposed to do. They have to shatter.

IIRC what Robert Gee said was they intended for mesmers to use their shatters no matter what build they ran. They aren’t exactly trying to force you to shatter, but they didn’t intend for you to completely ignore those 4 skills. The phantasm playstyle isn’t technically gone, it’s just allowed to actually shatter now and still keep phants up. But it definitely needs work because:

Warlock and Mage can barely target and hit. Mage long cooldown and low damage makes it useless and might as well be treated as a clone.

Yeah… They need to really fix these issues. Phants that send projectiles are wonky as hell. Some of them should seriously just pulse aoe instead of a bouncing projectile that gets obstructed… Melee phants should be given evades or something.

On the flipside (this is just an anecdote) I once went into pvp with my pve phantasm build (pre-hot) and summoned 3 swordsman on a thief and watched them chase him around. It was hilarious. Without aoe spam the phants stayed alive and they would find him every time he left stealth and drop his health in the blink of an eye. So I think they have plenty of damage in pvp, they just need to live to deliver it somehow…

I would really love it if they would do something like make you chose between either clones or phantasms, but not both. Maybe all summoning skills generate clones by default, but there’s a specific trait that turns them into phantasms instead.

I dunno… the balancing act between shattering clones or keeping phantasms alive always struck me as two extremes clashing, with really crappy half-measure traits trying to bridge the gap.

IMO you should just pick shatter or not? If not, then your skills make phantasms, and your F1-F4 are replaced with something that doesn’t kill your summons.

Xenon.4537:

Yeah… They need to really fix these issues. Phants that send projectiles are wonky as hell. Some of them should seriously just pulse aoe instead of a bouncing projectile that gets obstructed… Melee phants should be given evades or something.

On the flipside (this is just an anecdote) I once went into pvp with my pve phantasm build (pre-hot) and summoned 3 swordsman on a thief and watched them chase him around. It was hilarious. Without aoe spam the phants stayed alive and they would find him every time he left stealth and drop his health in the blink of an eye. So I think they have plenty of damage in pvp, they just need to live to deliver it somehow…

you talk as if you don’t play pvp a lot…. but whatever.
This is the best tactic for a thief to make the phantasm run far from you and teleport near you to burst you, avoiding your shatter.

Phants that send projectiles are wonky as hell. Some of them should seriously just pulse aoe instead of a bouncing projectile that gets obstructed… Melee phants should be given evades or something.

This sentence is the same things some people said that, destroyed “Avenger Phantasm”
Projectile on phantasm are an advantage.
As mesmer you need to be free walking and moving arround
This AOE pulse force you to be in some area and this is really bad.

Every mesmers player can tell, if They now obtains the buffs from Avenger. 240 radius is ridiculously small for class who need to move a lot.
I almost never get something from this Phantasm.
The projectile was a sure buff since the phantasm was summoned near you.

I hate this change, and i hope they noticed that it was a wrong thing.
They could just have change Priority on the projectile, or make it blockable without stopping his way.

Personally I’d rather they get rid of phantasms all together and replace the current phantasm skill with a big damage skill which creates a clone that just echos (with no damage) what you do or just a normal clone.

Then we can have PvE mesmer competitive as a damage dealer and makes accounting for burst and sustained damage a little easier to balance as we don’t have this unknown variable of “but if 2 phantasms were ignored they’d wreck the enemy”.

Would suck to lose something unique like that but mesmer is currently in a terrible place in PvE and buff bot isn’t exactly my preferred play style for PvE.

nobody asked you to play mesmer. If you don’t want phantasm, just play an other class…..
I am not here to get rid of phantasm, but to find/propose a way to improve them a bit.
This mostly for pvp.

Seyiwaji.4082:

nobody asked you to play mesmer. If you don’t want phantasm, just play an other class…..
I am not here to get rid of phantasm, but to find/propose a way to improve them a bit.
This mostly for pvp.

It’s the phantasms that are holding Mesmer back from being a fun class to play instead of a steaming pile of kittens to play in PvE. As for PvP AI will never be good in PvP as no-one likes being killed by AI, not that it will currently kill anyone that isn’t even more simple than it.

Bring up their HP and people will complain they take too much to kill, increase the damage and you have to nerf Mesmer damage to balance it and possibly mesmer burst too. Only option would be increase their utility but hey, we got that remember, pdefender and penchanter, everyone uses them right? Right? Oh….

On each mesmer’s weapon Phantasm are the main damage Dealer. They are telegraphed, you can see them coming, you can dodge them easy.
There is nothing wrong increasing their damage. Sine they will just die short before or after doing their purpose.

But due to Chronophantasma, i wouldn’t increase their damage anymore.
May be:

• Increase their walk speed
• Give them Blur for 1 sec as baseline on summon. (I mean they are dreams, Illusions…phantasm)