Guild Wars 2

After all the kvetching in the other thread, I wanted to find out how things really behave in game. So, I went into the mists to do some very quick and simple tests on each phantasm. Stated CD timings are for double traited weapons (20% from weapon reducer and 20% from Celerity).

Note: Sword/3 is still the only weapon skill that can’t be double-traited for CD-40% on summons. Both Celerity and Blade Training will reduce the CD on Sword/3, but when both are traited, the CD remains 20%.

I suspect either sword/3 will be aligned with other weapons or (more likely) other weapons will be altered to be like sword/3 and maximum CD reduction capped at 20%.

All Phantasms: Pause for 0.5s~1s after summons before initiating an attack. It’s noticeable, but it’s definitely not more than 1s. It feels like about 3/4 of a beat.

Summon location is always randomized on the target within range of the phantasm’s first attack. Other than the Warden, all will pursue targets to maintain maximum range. None will dodge or flee to maintain distance.

Traited phantasms are born with Fury and Retaliation. Signet of Illusions is still delayed 0~10s before application. All three buffs are 10s duration with self-refresh every 10s.

Regen (traited): First regen is immediate on summon, radius ~150. Does not apply to the phantasm itself. Does apply to other phantasms and clones. Except for Duelist/Pistol, all Regens are ~4s on, 4s off. Duelist is 3s on, 0s off (permanent).

Berserker/12s (GS): Damage is 0~3.5k AE line across target.

It seems to have 0-4 hits. It will start the whirl at it’s current location and perform hits as it moves. All hits can miss. I witnessed several passes on the golem that did zero damage and a couple back-to-back zero damage passes. Typical is 2 hits or ~1200 per pass. Total damage per pass is extremely unpredictable (0 hits is uncommon, but easy to observe within a couple of summons).

Warlock/11s (Staff): One hit per cycle, each hit is 1.6k/3.4k.

Bug? One warlock was summoned OOR to the golem and never moved into range and never attacked. I could not replicate this behavior. It’s likely a very rare edge condition (eg. summoned right on top of the line between OOR and IR).

Duelist/12s (Pistol): 2.3k~3.4k total from 8 shots. Regen is 3s on, 0s off (ie. permanent).

Mage/18s (Torch): 250/500 per hit (buggy tool-tip says 900 base) + 3×3s confusion. One 600-range bounce to one ally (players only, no clones or phantasms) for 3s Retaliation.

Warden/15s (Focus): Channels 12(?) AE hits (radius ~250) at target location, 4~6k total. Will not pursue target.

Swordsman/12s (Sword): Jogs to ~400 then leaps to target for 1.6k/3.4k.

Here are my thoughts about the changes.

Staff Warlock damage is higher than I remember, but I haven’t used staff in so long, I can’t tell if they buffed it or not. Other phantasms seem unchanged. It looks like Regen was normalized across all phantasms with Duelist left the same as it’s original behavior (endlessly refreshing).

Berserker has suffered a huge nerf. All passes are now of similar damage to the previous first pass nerfed damage. Total hits has been reduced. Potential for zero hits has been introduced.

I had thought that the first pass nerfed damage was a bug, but Anet’s statement is a bit ambiguous. They could have meant that the first pass was OK and the OTHER passes were bugged. In which case, this behavior is exactly what they wanted the first time.

The pause on summon seems to have been done deliberately. I’m guessing it was done only with PvP in mind, to provide others with another way to completely shutdown mesmer DPS. Obviously, blindness and obstruction issues weren’t enough and PvE issues weren’t considered.

It’s probably not enough time for a player to kill a phantasm, but it’s now incredibly simple to dodge the attack For PvE, melee phantasms won’t be able to damage bosses. They already do damage and are one shot immediately after — usually before you can shatter them. Now I suspect they’ll be one shotted before they do any damage at all.

It looks like they wanted to reduce GS damage to be similar to Staff damage. IMHO, other weapons should have been brought up to match GS. They took the easy way (nerf one rather than balance all) and went too far. IMHO, GS is now unviable as a mesmer weapon; really REALLY glad I haven’t done my GS Legendary as I planned. I feel horrible for any Mesmer that has a GS Legendary.

I think the entire direction of these changes is odd. Shatter-cat is a spike build and they’ve stated they want to reduce the effectiveness and desirability of spike builds. This did exactly the opposite. Same thing with last patch and thief, btw: they left spike alone and clubbed down sustained. Their stated intent is exactly the opposite of what they’re doing.

They’re also ignoring the current balance in favor of quick changes that haven’t been fully thought out as to ramifications, drastically altering game balance, and stifling build variety in general. Dissapointing.

The skills/traits/abilities/builds and really every portion of a profession that’s customizable should be separated between pve and pvp and wvw. I really dislike being repeatedly nerfed on my main’s dungeon capability because scrubs can’t handle summons that look like the player.

Excellent work, but I have to disagree with your conclusion about the GS. Either the attempted fix didn’t work, or the fix hasn’t been implemented yet. I say this for two reasons.

First, the random missing on the berserker is present nowhere else in the game, and the high variance of said missing is inconsistent with having sPvP be balanced. Since the changes to the GS that introduced the miss chance bug were because of sPvP, I highly doubt that it’s intentional.

Second, there are still other phantasms that hit just as hard as the pre-11/15 berserker according to your own testing. If it was intentionally nerfed to reduce mesmer damage output, I have to think warlock and swordsman would have been hit as well. Yes, they are single target rather than aoe, but aoe is much less important in an sPvP format compared to others.

Please keep up the good work though.

thatmaskedman.4508:

Excellent work, but I have to disagree with your conclusion about the GS. Either the attempted fix didn’t work, or the fix hasn’t been implemented yet. I say this for two reasons.

First, the random missing on the berserker is present nowhere else in the game, and the high variance of said missing is inconsistent with having sPvP be balanced. Since the changes to the GS that introduced the miss chance bug were because of sPvP, I highly doubt that it’s intentional.

Second, there are still other phantasms that hit just as hard as the pre-11/15 berserker according to your own testing. If it was intentionally nerfed to reduce mesmer damage output, I have to think warlock and swordsman would have been hit as well. Yes, they are single target rather than aoe, but aoe is much less important in an sPvP format compared to others.

Please keep up the good work though.

AOE aside, you’re forgetting a big reason iZerker is important in PvP is for the cripple. As of the change, whether intended or not, the wait time before you get that cripple applied to an enemy in PvP makes a WORLD of difference. It can allow a player to get out of the iZerker’s range or break line of sight with it and throw a wrench into your kiting plans.

Being able to pop the iZerker with the sole intention of slowing someone down was a big thing for me in PvP. I have not been able to see this for myself since I’m having log-in issues since the patch, but if it’s true the iZerker is going to take an extra second to apply that cripple, it’s a big deal for me. A very big deal. Maybe it’s a “scrub” move or whatever, but I found it vital to both staying away from annoying melee and for chasing down fleeing enemies. I couldn’t care less in PvE, but 1 second can cause a win or loss in any given PvP fight.

I was only talking about the missed attacks/reduced damage issue in my post above, but yes I agree the attack delay is a big deal and cripple is very important. Returning to the miss chance issue again and completely ignoring the damage difference, the HUGE difference between the berserker hitting at least once and getting a cripple off on your target and having the berserker completely whiff a pass and not cripple at all is another reason I don’t think the miss chance is an intentional nerf.

I found the warden’s AI to be improved, and the zerker’s to be worse.

Warden, when spawned, will now run with its target if the target happens to be moving, until said target stops, before unloading its aoe.

the zerker, on the other hand, seems to stagger out drunk, remember where it is about a second or two later, then do its thing, if it’s still alive.

Its actual attack seems slightly more reliable, but still sucks royally compared to pre 11/15.

Hmm. I tried warden on the 25p critters in the mists and it didn’t chase at all. One time, it never got a single hit in, just summoned up, waited, then whirled away at nothing. Do you see warden chasing all the time now or was that a one-time experience like my non-chasing warlock?

BTW, you may be correct about the nerf on GS. It could have been that someone told the guy writing the code, “make all the passes the same”, thinking it would all be made like 2nd/etc pass (the old working passes) and the coder, not knowing any better, made them all like the broken 1st pass. Then, the tester, also not knowing any better, just checked and said, “Yep, they’re all the same.”

Or, uh, it could be that WE are the testers.

Okuza.5210:

None will dodge or flee to maintain distance.

Sometimes warlock and duelist flee from target when it goes melee, but that’s extremely rare occurrence.

IMHO, GS is now unviable as a mesmer weapon; really REALLY glad I haven’t done my GS Legendary as I planned.

And that’s… wrong. Remember, GS is still our only ranged choice that isn’t affected by feedback and delivers damage instantly. So it has it’s uses even without phantasm.

Thanks for the update Jon!

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

First off: thank you for giving an intended date on the fix for beserker.

Second off: your statement that the delay is there to give enemies a time to react to the summon makes 0 sense. An enemy can react to the summon of a phantasm by interrupting you, blinding you, stealthing, stepping our of range, or dodging you – thus denying the summon from being summoned and putting the skill on cooldown.

Do a comparison between the opening attack of a phantasm, and some of the other spike damage skills in the game. Then please show us some concrete reasons as to why the opening attack of a phantasm is considered so powerful that an enemy should have two chances to completely negate the damage – once by denying the summons at all, and second by being able to kill it or dodge it after it’s summoned and before it does any damage.

I’m going to pick on thieves a little – where is my chance to react to a thief backstabbing me out of stealth? It does far more damage than my phantasms, and I have no chance to deny the attack.

Put me down for wishing we had less powerful summons that actually work than “powerful summons” that wait to be killed prior to activating.

If this is working as intended, perhaps it’s time to revisit that “phantasms are sturdier than clones” concept?

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

So it is WAI? As if in PvE any mob would ever avoid an AoE, but no, the oh so mighty phantasm gets killed by mobs in PvE before it can even do one attack. Am I the only one who sees a problem here?

Vendris.4201:

I’m going to pick on thieves a little – where is my chance to react to a thief backstabbing me out of stealth? It does far more damage than my phantasms, and I have no chance to deny the attack.

Well, you do actually have a chance to deny the attack, by using Riposte/Counter or casting Chaos Storm on yourself (which has a good chance of giving you Aegis and Dazing the Thief). You could also use a stealth skill yourself to prevent them from acquiring you as a target, use Distortion, etc.

It is more difficult than countering Phantasms of course, but it isn’t impossible.

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

I don’t agree with this since the summon itself can now be blocked/dodged/fail on blind, etc, but if this is the way you want to go, can phantasms at least be summoned with immunity until their attack starts? That way at least they will have a chance to make an attack, even if it can still be dodged a second time. This would also be a HUGE quality of life change in dungeons and events.

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

I appreciate you telling us something will be worked out and when.

Please tell me I am not understanding what you are saying … “the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2” … are you saying this 2 second pause has been there all along and I didn’t notice in the last 1,200 hours? I am fairly confident in saying that is not true after watching it attack about 1 million Arctodus in my journey for my legendary weapon.

In this current form the phantasm is either killed or rendered useless by the target running away from it. That was not the case before the patch. Now it is basically impossible to use it to tag enemies when other players are present … they are dead before the phantasm even moves assuming it isn’t killed while thinking over the prospect of attacking.

Again, thanks for an update on this game breaking issue.

yep, if we give to the enemy the chance to react to our iberserk, we want to all profession to have 1-2 seconds after press the 4th key skill when we can have a moment to react to the powerful skill (not casting time)..
how write vendris they can stop the skill stopping the launcher, not have double chance to stop the iberserk..:/

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

So now people have a chance to blind or dodge our summon, then if we get it off they have adequate warning if they want to try and dodge it a second time or possibly kill it to take no damage?

So we can have our attacks negated TWICE and you want to make sure people have adequate reaction for the second negation if they miss the first one!?!

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

Ah, so we don’t need phantasms being blocked by blind/Aegis/Dodge then. Or are you saying they all get two chances to dodge/prevent our phantasms and their attacks?

FYI, I think that’s broken.

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

OMG. Same thing happened back then on rangers. Shortbow got nerfed and they first claimed it’s an animation fix. Then the almighty you-know-who later stated that it’s actually intended as it’s not fun to spam the auto attack. So they nerfed the damage. We never heard from the almighty you-know-who again about shortbows. Case closed.

Same thing happens on mesmers now.

It’s seems this delay in the first attack is unnecessary due to the change to avoiding the initial summon. Why do people get two chances to dodge the attack? It’s also completely horrible in pve. Half the time a mob will turn and slap your summon silly. A 16 second cooldown that does no damage is terrible.

I’m in agreement with a reply up above, if we’re going to have to deal with both phantasms being pain to summon with all the denial effects in the game now (see: WvWvW, as soon as anyone in a swarm recognizes there’s a mesmer, you see the whole kitten swarm spam any blind they have and I see so much dodging <_<), our phantasms should be more durable to compensate.

I would honestly say beween 200-300% current health, they’re paper thin at the moment and sneezing too hard will shatter them. Fixing Signet of Illusions’ passive to trigger properly would also be a huge improvement on them.

I just don’t know why they don’t save us all time and just come out and say “Roll a warrior.” I’m surprised that they can push this on us with a straight face.

The funny thing, I wrote this about an hour before Mr. Game Designer in an other thread:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Everyone with half a brain and basic knowledge of the class could avoid the delay till now though.
It was like a work around to a bug. But lately I got a feeling that we have no longer bugs, just features.
It’s like the argument that everyone has a problem with “obstructed” so it is totally ok, that mesmers now have the same problem too. Instead of thinking along the line: Let’s fix this bug for all.

Kitten, I know the drill of MMO companies…

Do I have a chance to:

1) Keep the thief from ever initiating the attack at all, and putting the skill on cooldown, and then
2) After the thief has successfully initiated the attack, do I get a half a second to stare at him and ponder other ways to deny the attack he’s already successfully hit with?

That’s the state of our phantasms.

Embolism.8106:

Vendris.4201:

I’m going to pick on thieves a little – where is my chance to react to a thief backstabbing me out of stealth? It does far more damage than my phantasms, and I have no chance to deny the attack.

Well, you do actually have a chance to deny the attack, by using Riposte/Counter or casting Chaos Storm on yourself (which has a good chance of giving you Aegis and Dazing the Thief). You could also use a stealth skill yourself to prevent them from acquiring you as a target, use Distortion, etc.

It is more difficult than countering Phantasms of course, but it isn’t impossible.

First of all, thanks for answering our concerns.

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

I understand it may be important in PvP but in PvE? I’m not playing pvp a lot so from what I understand you have 3 ways to shut down phantasm and it is a bit too much. As of now, you can blind/block/dodge the summon which result in no phantasm spawning at all (meaning no shatter, no phantasm trait related either and no damage of utility like creeple for example), killing the phantasm before it does anything (aoe or auto attack), dodge the phantasm attack when it is doing it in case you were bad enough not to do the first two solutions and kill it or not afterwards. Other skills from other classes are not punished that much and I don’t find it really fair. I can understant mesmer can be a pain for player not really aware of their mechanic but they can learn them too, to get better at the game, instead of having a class repeatedly nerf to compell to lazy players.

In PvE, do mobs really need a moment to react to the powerful summon? Do they have a moment to react to a HB of a warrior which does so much more damage than the best of our phantasm could possibly dream of?
Most of the time, even if you have aggro on mobs, they can just turn to your phantasm and 1 shoot him. It is even more of a problem for melee phantasm like iBerserker. And I’m not even talking about all the aoe there are in dungeons which can wipe melee/range illusions really fast (yeah they don’t know they have to get out of the red circle) and this delay is just making phantasm useless.

There was a workaround before by traiting for phantasmal fury or Vengeful image and that may be why people didn’t complain about it so much but now it just doesn’t work anymore hence the complain on this forum.

I’m happy we have the boon applied to phantasm fixed but lets be honest here, with the radius of the aoe regen (hint : it’s mediocre) and the way they die so easily, I still wonder why anyone would trait anything to rely a bit more on phantasm in their gameplay, it is just counterproductive to do so now.

I really hope, you’re going to reconsider the way phantasm are working now or at least separate things in PvP and PvE so that we can at least not be utter garbage when we want to use phantasm in PvE.

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

With all due respect Jon, you never played a Mesmer did you?

Because if you did, you would see that your ‘balance changes’ have completely nerfed the class into the ground and broke the core mechanic on what makes a Mesmer a Mesmer.

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

That is just poor balancing. In PvE and WvWvW it is getting killed before it can attack and in all modes it is just giving enemies two chances to stop the attack when all other classes don’t have to jump through those hoops to attack.

If you want the delay to give people a chance to avoid the attack then you can’t give them a chance to avoid the summon, however that works.

Also any news on if you plan on giving Mesmers a decent AoE to throw up on keep walls like all other classes?

Zogyark.4597:

Good stuff, mesmers deserved a nerf anyway.

Yeah, the mesmer is probably the only class that hopes that there will be no more patches at all. Just wondering what they will nerf on 12/14, maybe our clones will start healing the enemy…

Honestly, this constant stream of nerfs to the mesmer has left quite a sour taste in my mouth. I’ve also been having a very hard time selecting a permanent build because of the constant changes.
I think I’m just gonna hang my mesmer up for a while until they fix the class.

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

Hmm, I never noticed the delay until yesterday. They always immediately attacked upon summoning. So is this the way phantasms are going to be forever now?

I hope people can relate to this feeling and I don’t say this lightly because I always loved the way the mesmer plays, but I am done with this class for a while.

I have played the class since launch and I have been annoyed at changes before but this is ridiculous, I can’t use my phantasms in PvE or WvW without them dieing or completely missing their attacks most of the time.

Levetty.1279:

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

That is just poor balancing. In PvE and WvWvW it is getting killed before it can attack and in all modes it is just giving enemies two chances to stop the attack when all other classes don’t have to jump through those hoops to attack.

If you want the delay to give people a chance to avoid the attack then you can’t give them a chance to avoid the summon, however that works.

Also any news on if you plan on giving Mesmers a decent AoE to throw up on keep walls like all other classes?

This. Phantasms are useless in WvW now and in dungeons like FOTM. My phantasms couldn’t even attack in FOTM, because they’d die like a second after being summoned. If the berserker would move and attack, instead of stand there, it wouldn’t die so fast, and I’d actually be contributing to the group.

purpleskies.3274:

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

So now people have a chance to blind or dodge our summon, then if we get it off they have adequate warning if they want to try and dodge it a second time or possibly kill it to take no damage?

So we can have our attacks negated TWICE and you want to make sure people have adequate reaction for the second negation if they miss the first one!?!

I count at least three, dodge the summon, dodge the attack, destroy the threat. Not to mention blind and so on.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Zogyark.4597:

Good stuff, mesmers deserved a nerf anyway.

Yeah, the mesmer is probably the only class that hopes that there will be no more patches at all. Just wondering what they will nerf on 12/14, maybe our clones will start healing the enemy…

Please don’t feed the troll, he obviously just came in here to needle people.

/e: I’m still laughing about the “powerful summon”. I’m really glad this change happened, fighting risen will be even more fun now </irony>
Just to make this clear: I don’t care about competitive PvP, do whatever you think has to be done there. But stop screwing up the rest of the game for everybody else for god’s sake. Simply reverse everything you did to mesmers in the last two months, I prefer a buggy broken class over a broken class considered “fixed”. That way, at least I can hope it’s gonna be fixed one day. I’m really peed off right now.

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

Powerful….

On Berserker gear my duelist/swordsman does about 4-5k crits, or about the worth of a warrior’s lesser damaging attacks with instant response.

I hope if that this is the damage you intend for illusions, that autoattack/Blurred Frenzy damage gets looked at for PvE.

I’m tired of sitting on a class that has a bunch of redundant utilities and little support in dungeons, while my illusions even with the signet up seem to be getting killed by mob autoattack cleaves.

I have no option but a shatter power/prec/crit damage build to do even decent damage, have poor AoE, and provide no boons for my group except Mirrored Blade.

The torch is still unusable, and so is the scepter.

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

While I appreciate the comment letting everyone know that its intended….can you take a minute to look at the impact and the way it “feels” from a person actually playing a Mesmer?

Balance is never easy. Its never pretty, and its usually quite frustrating to achieve if ever. I understand this fact about MMO’s (been playing since EQ1 pre-kunark days).

In this instance having the delay on the attack is the wrong way to go period. If its so powerful an enemy needs a moment to react, nerf the damage. That would of course cause an outcry and make people mad, but having it this way totally wastes the ability, and makes a core mechanic of one entire class worthless.

You only need to go play a Mesmer for 30 minutes, testing it out yourself in PVE or WVW to see it. Seriously, its not something that would require you to do more in depth testing than that.

Other classes in the game have things that do more damage with vastly less restrictions. This is not a fact that can even be debated about. Its just a known fact, and you know the community knows it. Anyone playing 5 minutes of WVW can see bursts far exceeding anything a phantasm can EVER dish out, with just normal standard casting rules in place.

I know the amount of work you must put into balancing things and I respect that, but please take a bit more time to really look into this. If Mesmer stays like this you will find no one playing more than a basic shatter build because phantasms will be useless for anything else….which makes the entire class flavor useless.

Make the damage less if you feel its out of line with every other classes attacks, but make it actually ATTACK when we cast it and manage to not be blinded, dodged or otherwise prevented from even casting the darn thing.

Let’s not overreact here people.

It was already posted in another thread that the delay has been here forever but that a bug caused it to disappear as soon as you specced Phantasmal Fury or Vengeful Images, which everybody did. Now that they fixed how all the boons and traiths worked on our phantoms the delay returned.

Given the fact however that no mesmer had the delay recently they ‘fixed’ the issue of people not being able to react to our phantoms again by allowing people to dodge/blind/… to them. Which results in having this fixed twice.

I’m sure Anet will realize quickly that fixing this twice is overkill and remove one of these methods.

I’d say lesson learned: Never try to balance a class without first fixing all the bugs ^^

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

You SHOULD TRY TO PLAY mesmer in WvWvW standing on the edge of wall summon your “powerful summon” and see how it goes. I hope you will see them killed before attacking.

Sorry for my bad English.

The lesson learnt here is to reroll a heavy armor class, if you want to enjoy playing PvE in GW2.
Or if you play a mesmer, every other class will be an option to reroll for better PvE…

The devs aren’t going to respond to this thread again. I, like many of you, openly opposed the nerfs, knowing more were soon to come. I’ve played this class since the beginning of guild wars 1. I originally thought the reason this (and the engi) were the least played professions was because they both required a less direct set of skills. Now I’m just under the impression that no one plays it because this class is the most annoying to play. Not merely difficult. It’s a real pain when nothing works right. I have since started playing a warrior, and I hate it. But how can you deny perma swiftness, press 2 and beat everything in PvE, and 20k crit kill shots in WvW. Yes, warriors in full berskers can kill almost any profession that doesn’t trait into toughness or vitality in one shot from 1200 range. That is balance for you. Our best ranged phantasm does 6k to pure glass cannons and they nerf them. Warriors can deal 20k from the same distance without any reprocussions. So they beat rangers at range, and have the highest dps burst for mellee in the game. This, my friend, is balance.

Kvitoq.9154:

I’d say lesson learned: Never try to balance a class without first fixing all the bugs ^^

You’re very optimistic to hope that anyone learns anything from this episode

They already “fixed” line of sight, then they “fixed” dodging/blinds/aegis/blocks, and now they “fixed” attack delays. They’re now “features” and given how many “bugs” they have left to fix from as far back as BWE2 I don’t hold much hope they’ll start tweaking “features” for many, MANY months if not years.

it’s a simple matter of how tickets are handled in companies like this. A bug fix is naturally higher priority than tweaking features, until the bugs are gone, features won’t get so much as the time of day

The delay kills our ability to cripple someone when they are running since the illusion sits for a second before attacking. By the time it can attack, the target is already out of range.

As said multiple times, the delay is also killing us in dungeons and WvW as it dies 50% of the time before it attacks. DPS has taken a nose dive with this using GS.

I understand wanting to have abilities in game that can be reacted too but every class has instant attacks that can’t be dodge etc.. Someone already brought up the theif who is the king of killing someone before they even know what happened.

Can I have my gold back so I can change all my armor and weapons to a condition build now? You killed GS.

Vendris.4201:

JonPeters.5630:

Fyi, the delay on first attack has been present since BWE2. It is there for balance reasons to give enemies a moment to react to the powerful summon.

First off: thank you for giving an intended date on the fix for beserker.

Second off: your statement that the delay is there to give enemies a time to react to the summon makes 0 sense. An enemy can react to the summon of a phantasm by interrupting you, blinding you, stealthing, stepping our of range, or dodging you – thus denying the summon from being summoned and putting the skill on cooldown.

Do a comparison between the opening attack of a phantasm, and some of the other spike damage skills in the game. Then please show us some concrete reasons as to why the opening attack of a phantasm is considered so powerful that an enemy should have two chances to completely negate the damage – once by denying the summons at all, and second by being able to kill it or dodge it after it’s summoned and before it does any damage.

I’m going to pick on thieves a little – where is my chance to react to a thief backstabbing me out of stealth? It does far more damage than my phantasms, and I have no chance to deny the attack.

Quoted because I want to voice my concern about this, and I couldn’t have said it better myself.

yeah!the warrior is balanced!:/
i’ll try to use the w but i hate the easy way he can just kill everyone..i like the hard mesmer way, but this nerf is too much..

That’s very well put, Mere Image. There’s no reason not to play warrior over any other class. We should just all roll warrior and let the mesmer die. Hell, everyone should roll warrior and we just play Warrior Vs. Warrior. But I’ve been saying that for a long time. Each patch warrior is untouched or buffed. While we get smacked with the nerf bat.

Maybe it’s time to try out warrior :p – or… any class for that matter I’ve always got bored before getting any alt over 40

WvWvW = warrior vs. warrior vs. warrior

I will be thrilled if the devs actually attempt to fix us. The fact that one is actually responding to our concerns on this thread gives me hope that my class will live on! Thank you. But in the meantime, it’s warrior time! Spam 2 ftw and crush all mobs that stand before you while I laugh at fellow Mesmers watching their illusions turn to dust!