Mesmerising Girl
Possible Stealth Nerf
Mental Defense won’t proc more than one iDefender. That basically guts my defensive strategy.
This wasn’t the case before. Looks like an undocumented nerf.
If your defensive strategy revolves around stacking a phantasm that gains in absolutely no way, shape, or form from being stacked, I’ve got bad news for you.
Pyro, I shouldn’t need to remind you that iDefender mitigates damage and is as good a shatter fodder as anything else.
Clones and Phants both work for shatter and most players are dumb enough to keep hitting into blocks.
So, yes, stacking iDefender was actually working fairly well for me.
Mesmerising Girl
Pyro, I shouldn’t need to remind you that iDefender mitigates damage and is as good a shatter fodder as anything else.
Clones and Phants both work for shatter and most players are dumb enough to keep hitting into blocks.
So, yes, stacking iDefender was actually working fairly well for me.
Yeah, but you’re complaining about how it won’t bring out more than 1 iDefender at a time? This is absurd for multiple reasons. Let’s go through them, shall we?
Firstly, if your defender hasn’t died in the 25 (20 traited) seconds since it was last summoned, summoning another one is going to be pure wasted space that could instead be taken up by something more useful, like a damage phantasm or the other utility phantasm: pDisenchanter.
Secondly, spawning 2 defenders does absolutely nothing for you. The buffs don’t stack, so all you’re doing is wasting a fairly long cooldown to summon a phantasm that could just get cleaved down. Essentially, it’s a criminal waste of your resources. If you have 2 defenders up at the same time and they both get hit by strong cleave, they’ll both die and leave you with no mitigation from that source. If you instead save the second one and bring it out after the first was cleaved down, now you’ve extended the duration of your mitigation.
Basically, there’s absolutely no reason to ever want more than 1 pDefender out at any given time. Having the ability to bring another one out immediately is fantastic, but actually bringing 2 out concurrently is absolutely nothing but poor play, and complaining about being unable to do so is…special.
I don’t agree for two basic reasons;
When I have multiple defenders, one dying doesn’t end the damage mitigation.
Extra iDefenders can function as tougher clones. As I say, most players will just keep hitting into a block. This means that before ANET nerfed it, you could proc iDefenders and use them as superior clones.
I was essentially playing a phantasm shatter build.
This is actually a very large nerf in disguise, or at least not noticed.
I think you need to apply a little more imagination. We are Mesmers after all. As a close friend likes to say of she and I, “we think so far out of the box, we don’t even own a box.”
As to poor play, criminal waste of resources and calling me “special”… Well rhetoric and name calling is meaningless.
Mesmerising Girl
(edited by Ithilwen.1529)
When I have multiple defenders, one dying doesn’t end the damage mitigation.
Sure, but defenders are melee range phantasms. If one dies, the other is going to die at the same time unless you’re fighting something that does zero cleave.
Extra iDefenders can function as tougher clones.
Yes, exactly like tougher clones, except on a 25 second cooldown and with a powerful unique effect. Totally worth it to use them as cannon fodder.
As I say, most players will just keep hitting into a block.
I fail to understand how this is relevant.
This means that before ANET nerfed it, you could proc iDefenders and use them as superior clones.
Hm, maybe I’m starting to understand. Are you under the impression that you used to be able to proc multiple defenders in rapid succession? If that’s the case, then you’re extremely mistaken. The trait has always had the 25 second internal cooldown.
Wrong. Until just recently I frequently proc’d 2 or 3 iDefenders and then shattered them as if they were clones. Playing sword/sword and scepter/torch for a total of 4 block/evades. Each of those blocks and evades summoning an iDefender.
I could alternate this with regular clones and heal on shatter.
Now you begin to see just how big a hit this is.
Mesmerising Girl
I get where you are coming from, and if it was deliberately changed, it should be documented in the patch notes, but this sounds more like a bug fix than a nerf to me. And while I’m sure it’s annoying at the moment, I think as someone who seems pretty creative to have come up with that strategy, you’ll come up with something else that works for you.
Wrong. Until just recently I frequently proc’d 2 or 3 iDefenders and then shattered them as if they were clones. Playing sword/sword and scepter/torch for a total of 4 block/evades. Each of those blocks and evades summoning an iDefender.
I could alternate this with regular clones and heal on shatter.
Now you begin to see just how big a hit this is.
If it procced without cooldown (and I’m pretty sure you’re just wrong about this, cause somebody would have noticed it before and mentioned something), then it was obviously an unbelievably overpowered bug and needed to be fixed.
Again though, I’m pretty sure you’re just remembering wrong. I doubt this was that broken.
Actually, I was messing around with the idea of tanky build yesterday fighting the test NPCs. The build had both the pDefender utility and MD. There were times where I would have 2 pDefenders up, and I would swear I didn’t summon either one of them.
I think there might be a bug with the CD if you use the utility. This was just last night, a mere 10 hours ago, so I doubt anything has changed. I didn’t really peg it as such, but now that I’m reading this I’m wondering. I definitely got the feeling on 2 to 3 occasions that there was an extra pDefender. I was so busy with other testing though that I just wrote it off as not paying attention to my CDs, and probably it was just that, but who knows I could see a problem with the CDs interacting with each other. (The utilities’ CD wearing off, might also reset the MD CD?)
Could be onto something though, but as Fay said it would clearly be a bug that Anet has every right of fixing as it’s clearly unintended.