Guild Wars 2

Phantasm-summoning skills take up a global cooldown, during which time your character is doing nothing. Pausing your attacks like this really takes away from the flow of combat, and it doesn’t feel fun to spend this time being voluntarily inactive.

Instead of Phantasm abilities just being summons, it would be much more fun to perform the action yourself simultaneously with your phantasm. For example Pistol #4, Phantasmal Duelist, would unload your pistol on your foe as well as creating a Phantasm that performs the same action. Currently, it feels like you barely use your pistol, as only one ability actually lets you shoot it. Who brings a gun and never shoots it? Having you unload on your target just like your phantasm does when you first summon it would be far more fun!

This should be the case for all phantasms – the initial activation should have you complete the action that the phantasm performs when you summon it. This would make it more visually appealing, it would keep the player active, it would shift the power away from the phantasm and more towards the player and you would still retain the phantasm at the end of it, performing an echo of the action that you yourself performed. It would feel far more like an illusion, and far less like a summon.

As long as power resides so heavily with phantasms and away from the Mesmer itself, this class will not be as fun to play as it should be. By giving an active effect to phantasm-creating abilities the Mesmer becomes a more rewarding, interactive class.

Opinions?