Guild Wars 2

I loved every mesmer change except the change to Mimic. It was a good skill that had a very strong situational use which was essentially the same as Engineer Shield 4 (with a different after-effect).

The new skill is also situational but the situations it is effective in (esp. in WvW & PvP) is much, much narrower & much weaker. Now with the very strong ranger presence Mimic would have been much more widely used. Instead the skill was, effectively, kitten into near-uselessness when you factor in the opportunity cost of having this ability on your bar instead of something more useful.

Mimic is by far now the absolute weakest mesmer skill and one of the most redundant skills I can think of across my warrior, ele, necro, engineer & mesmer.

I don’t understand why instead of fixing the skill, they made some crappy revamp. All they had to do is to make the first projectile not hit the mesmer…

While I don’t care about patches or the state of the game anymore, just playing casually for what it is – but having said that the change to mimic is one of the most ridiculous, nonsensical things I’ve ever seen.

Bubble shield had such a cool animation and it gets replaced by a mediocre boon removal with a pathetic animation by comparison.

Only 2 solutions IMO:
- restore the bubble shield
- replace staff #4 with bubble shield (this might actually encourage me to use staff again)

I concur. Now that it would actually see some use, it is not longer worth using. Too bad it’ll probably never go back to the way it was. I mean, it doesn’t really fill a roll that had to be filled. Mesmers already had boon stealing, boon stripping and the like from several sources, they really didn’t need a second boon stealing utility in the manipulation tree.

Especially with the ranger buff… would have been so much fun to use, but of course we’re not allowed to have fun with it.

Curunen.8729:

While I don’t care about patches or the state of the game anymore, just playing casually for what it is – but having said that the change to mimic is one of the most ridiculous, nonsensical things I’ve ever seen.

Bubble shield had such a cool animation and it gets replaced by a mediocre boon removal with a pathetic animation by comparison.

Only 2 solutions IMO:
- restore the bubble shield
- replace staff #4 with bubble shield (this might actually encourage me to use staff again)

By “bubble shield” do you mean the projectile reflect? And by “mediocre boon removal” are you referring to Mimic? Because it doesn’t even remove the boons. It just copies them from your target to yourself… doesn’t strip from the target.

I would love Staff 4 to be the old Mimic. Chaos Storm is really powerful though, especially in a zerg. Maybe a trait to make Chaos Storm also reflect projectiles?

I totally agree. I did like the old mimic a lot and now I am forced to use Masterful Reflection because of the crappy revamp.

I suspect they did it because of the Ranger new skill. But if so, and I agree this is a naughty thought, why they didn’t just give us a skill similar to engis or warriors which would block any attack for the same duration rather than reflecting them, if they thought it was too powerful?

Promoting build diversity by giving a bad copy of AT? Whoever understand ANet deserves a cookie…

The new idea is in concept not bad. “Mimic the enemy”.

Just, beef it up then. Make me copy:

• Boons (overwriting my own)
• Conditions (overwriting my own, that is if I Mimic someone with 0 conditions while I have plenty, I just cleansed myself).
• Look!
• Other status effects such as food and stun and so on.
• Weapon, assuming it is one we can also use. If I copy a Scepter/Torch Mesmer as a Sword/Sword Mesmer, I get Scepter/Torch skills for the duration of Mimic.
• HP Percentage. If I am at 10% and copy someone at 100%, I get full HP!

Ofc, question is whether it should be an Elite then.

Oh, and when it runs out, some things are restored ofc:

• The amount of HP gained or lost is refunded, so either I get healed or take some damage.
• My conditions and boons are returned with their original remaining duration.
• Any food and other effects gained are lost, while my own are returned.
• Weapons ofc revert.

The idea being to fully mimic a target, as much as possible. For bonus points, make me able to cast this on a friendly target, not only on an enemy!

robotempire.2451:

Curunen.8729:

While I don’t care about patches or the state of the game anymore, just playing casually for what it is – but having said that the change to mimic is one of the most ridiculous, nonsensical things I’ve ever seen.

Bubble shield had such a cool animation and it gets replaced by a mediocre boon removal with a pathetic animation by comparison.

Only 2 solutions IMO:
- restore the bubble shield
- replace staff #4 with bubble shield (this might actually encourage me to use staff again)

By “bubble shield” do you mean the projectile reflect? And by “mediocre boon removal” are you referring to Mimic? Because it doesn’t even remove the boons. It just copies them from your target to yourself… doesn’t strip from the target.

I would love Staff 4 to be the old Mimic. Chaos Storm is really powerful though, especially in a zerg. Maybe a trait to make Chaos Storm also reflect projectiles?

My mistake – I really haven’t read or played much recently and I was so disgusted with the loss of bubble shield that I refused to use mimic at all now.

I still feel it needed a redesign, but I don’t really like the redesign. Instead of novel functionality, it’s something less interesting that is very redundant (and in many cases worse) than something like arcane thievery. There’s just too many other useful utility skills to have a boon copier take up one of those slots.

I wished they made Arcane Thievery slightly better, 5 boons/condis swapped, that’s a unique functionality, and then gave Mimic something different. The previous functionality was redundant with Distortion/Mirror, so rather than put it back the way it was, would rather a new function. So look no further than GW1 for inspiration:

Mimic: Copy the last skill your target used.
Arcane Echo/Echo: Copy one of your own skills.
Arcane Thievery/Larceny: Disable a random skill of target, gain that skill.
Simple Thievery: interrupt a skill, gain that skill.
Symbols of Inspiration: Copy the elite skill of target foe.

Yup, the current mimic is just terrible. I tried it a few times, especially against theives. However it has nearly no impact. A blink, portal or anything else is just worth more. Think about arcane thievery – it’s about the same, but it feels just better. You really feel how you trade 3 condis for 3 boons. Better buff that a bit and change mimic to A REAL SKILL MIMIC!

Xyonon.3987:

Yup, the current mimic is just terrible. I tried it a few times, especially against theives. However it has nearly no impact. A blink, portal or anything else is just worth more. Think about arcane thievery – it’s about the same, but it feels just better. You really feel how you trade 3 condis for 3 boons. Better buff that a bit and change mimic to A REAL SKILL MIMIC!

Yeah. Or, you know, just give us the old Mimic back? Ok it didn’t really mimic in any meaningful way but 4 seconds of reflect is a pretty good skill. It just seems like such a random, massive change.

robotempire.2451:

Xyonon.3987:

Yup, the current mimic is just terrible. I tried it a few times, especially against theives. However it has nearly no impact. A blink, portal or anything else is just worth more. Think about arcane thievery – it’s about the same, but it feels just better. You really feel how you trade 3 condis for 3 boons. Better buff that a bit and change mimic to A REAL SKILL MIMIC!

Yeah. Or, you know, just give us the old Mimic back? Ok it didn’t really mimic in any meaningful way but 4 seconds of reflect is a pretty good skill. It just seems like such a random, massive change.

The thing is, mimic was never supposed to be a “block” skill. The idea behind it was to absorb enemy attacks and then use the attacks against the attackers with the follow up skill echo (which no one seems to ever acknowledge). I think that’s a cool idea, but the implementation just wasn’t there. So people just ended up using it as a block/reflect skill because that’s all it was really good for.

I think they should’ve stuck with the same concept, but just change the implementation. Or maybe they tried to do that behind the scenes, but just found it to be too strong, or still too niche to be worthwhile, or the concept was just not working. So I guess maybe they changed it to something that had a more general usefulness that can work in synergy with things like signet of inspiration.

If I have to allocate one space on my utilities to mimic or arcane thievery, it’ll be the latter. Mesmers generally need whatever they can get for condition clearing, and the ability to deny your enemy boons is often much more valuable than simply copying them, particularly when it comes to things like stability and protection. Having both mimic and arcane thievery means you have to not take various other valuable utilities, so I generally just let mimic sit on the bench.

If they made it copy and share the boons with allies, I think that could make it more useful, but then it would clash too much with signet of inspiration unless they changed the functionality on that.

My suggestion: merge the functionality of phantasms and the previous mimic ability. After absorbing any attack you will have the option to summon a phantasm that uses the full version of the ability. If you get hit by a meteor you can cast a phantasm that casts meteor shower on the same cool down as an ele until it dies. Like wise, if you block the hammer auto on a warrior you will summon a phantasm that chases after its target and spams hammer auto attack. That way the ability could be really good if your adept at keeping it alive but there will remain the counter-play of actually killing it. then again, a phantasm with banish…. on sky hammer? ahahahahahahaha!
Also for the AoE issue. just have it put its specific target right in the middle of the cast.

Hrm, that’s a really interesting ability. Though it sounds like it’d be an implementation nightmare (implement all skills again as Phantasm skills?), but it would be awesome.