Guild Wars 2

Not gonna rage here about how broken or silly things are or look to start a flame war, I just feel the Mesmer needs an overhaul to truly feel like a Mesmer again. Please note I do not have a degree or experience in game design either, but as a sensible gamer these are my thoughts. With the disclaimer out of the way (btw feel free to reply and add your own suggestions or thoughts) Lets get down to the meat of it..

The Mesmer is great fun but something really feels off about the class. Specifically the need to focus on Shatters and illusions with ever single build. These are impossible to ignore and play without as nearly all of our traits directly or indirectly influence them. The Mesmer can currently play Support, DPS and in rare cases even be a bit meaty and tankish, however all of these play styles are focused on how we use Illusions. This is a Problem in PvE and PvP alike in various aspects and respects.

Current Build:
Mesmer is Highly situational and can spec for very specific types of encounters but is often at a loss if such a circumstance is not met (Much like the original Gw1 Mesmer pre-buff). There is a lack of party buff, aoe, and direct damage on the majority of weapons and across utilities and elites (depending on race). This causes the Mesmer, more often than not, to rely on enemy stupidity and panic to generate indirect damage (Example, Confusion condition).

Future Build:
Mesmer is more well rounded and effective in multiple situations, relying less upon Illusions for damage and self sustenance and is able to rely on other forms of play to cause havoc and mayhem for the enemy. A larger variety of play styles can be adapted and the Mesmer can fill nearly any roll successfully in at least 2 ways (two different styles).

So how do we get to the future Build? here are my thoughts on various aspects of the profession and how they might be tweaked or shifted to make the class more robust and less niche filler (not to say that filling a specific niche is bad but.. anyway).

Illusions.
Clones: Clones should be generated with the same health as the creator and potentially Armor as well. Upon being generated in combat, clones should inherit current health, conditions, and buffs. Clones should retain their complete lack of damage and still remain Attached to a target until death of either party (Player or attached target).
Why: This creates a much more solid decoy that can be ignored also has the potential to reach its target if commanded to charge and shatter. Still easily recognizable to the veteran eye by the lack of movement, skill use, and reaction when beaten like a wet rug.
Potential issues and Solutions: Condition and buff abuse from clones. Players might potentially find a way to draw these buffs or conditions or spread them to the rest of the party, causing 5-20 seconds of pure terror for the opposing side.
Solution: Clones cannot be affected by shouts or skills of this manner and do not count towards any bonuses from such skills.

Phantasms: These should be untied from the Targets death as well as the standard F1-4 shredding commands. These are meant to be physical representations of hexes and thus should stay in the world for a period of time similar to the Ranger and Guardian summon skills. Phantasm’s should, once brought into the world, be tied to a replacement shatter (Example, Illusionary Beserker -> Cast -> Replaced with Shred which applies cripple to all foes nearby its location -> Shred use -> Cool Down begins) Phantasm’s should remain tied to the 3 illusion limit.
Abuse Potential: very small, by keeping Phantasm’s tied to the 3 illusion limit this still only allows for 3 at any given time preventing any small armies from appearing on the map.

Weapons: Mesmer weapons carry very little AoE potential and often bouncing is not enough to catch attention or be viewed as a threat by multiple enemies. Other weapons lack heavily in damage and condition potential and come with no extra incentive to use them in many cases.

Thoughts for the weapons I am most familiar with (Please ad your own below).
Staff:
Skill 1, Removal of Bounce and reformat to splash aoe upon contact. 1 condition randomly applied to target and nearby (10 or less feet) foes. Damage applied only to target.
Skill 4, perhaps an added boon such as retaliation for the player or nearby allies, or condition for nearby foes. very short duration but still adding incentive to use this skill more often. Sever target distance requirement for use.

Sword:
Skill 3, Allow for multiple swaps with clone to allow for greater mobility. (In, out.. you get the idea, and don’t make it dirty your pervs…)

Utilities: As stated above there’s is but one of these skills that will deal direct damage to a foe. This needs to change.. many other classes, in fact I believe all other classes, Carry party buff and support abilities while the Mesmer does not. In general we need to see Damage applied to several more skills, Boons with significant durations for yourself and others that inspire a more substantial and meaty pay off for using skills with longer cool downs (Null Field for Example can easily turn a battle for a few moments but often the stripped conditions and boons are reapplied within moments rendering it a dead skill for 36-45 seconds that was, in such cases, a waste.)

Traits: Following the above changes this would allow for a bit more room to allocate traits to have a more wide spread effect upon multiple builds. Taking focus away from relying solely on Illusions to make a build around and allowing players to use them as a tool for a build and style. Perhaps You are a back line DPS with a GreatSword and the advancing mob is coming in too fast to stay inside one of your skills that you need them to.. You could then call upon your phantasm to cripple them with its shatter (rather than hoping it will spin into them before you or your target dies as your main source of damage and cripple, or accidentally calling it too late only to be forced to shred it for a quick retreat).

I appreciate everyone’s time that actually read through all of that. And perhaps with enough proper educate and intelligent discussion we can get this class to where it needs to be.

TL;DR – There isn’t a short version, go read it. ^

I like the ideas but they won’t come not without a total rework how the Mesmer works.

But first things first. I agree we do lack both AoE and Support. We do have tools like the iBerserker and the iWarden but both are tide to on target and die quite fast. On the other hand our other hand we got some “indrect” AoEs like Feedback and Chaos storm. Both are very strong abilitys and bring great utility to the table it is simplay that we can’t really on them. In WvW it may work but in most other cases players will just walk out of them and cleanse the stuff. Mobs seem to not care about Feedback to much becaus of there slow attack speed. Maybe we get another weapone(s) in the future that covers this but atm that is the stat. However I would also not like to give up one of my current weapons to get more AoE. All weapons we got right now are pretty solide and full do ther job prefectly ( maybe the scepter doesn’t but it s bugged as hell). We simply don’t have a AoE weapon at the moment.

Yes it would be nice if the Illusions would have the same buffs debuffs and HP as we do, but giving them the same Hp would be a bit over the top. Consider the following. All clones can stack excluding the scepter clone can stack condtions on the enemy pretty well. The sword and staff do it naturally and the GS does it pretty well with sharp images. To have a 20k + clone stacking stuff on the enemy ( and buffs on you in the case of the staff) would be to strong. I agree that they need some HP maybe armour buff but I would rather go with something like 50% of your HP 60% if traited. This in combinations with the fact that they would spawn with our Hp would make them very nice in fight without giving them to much tanking power.

I am not sure about this. While I agree that the short life spann of phantasmes is lame in PvE you can’t denie how much pain they bring at the same time. To walk around with 3 iSwordsman and just droping combo fields on them would become way to effectiv and ruin the PvP experience for a lot of people. Phantasme are a hard topic. I don’t really know a “fix”.

Staff:
1# I would set the splash to something like 300. That is extended mellee range. 10 Range would mean the characters would have to stand inside each other ^^
4# this skill is already strong. The problem is not it’s power it is the fact that you can get Chaos armour with other stuff pretty easy.

Sword: No. Mulitpele swaps would be way OP. Even if they would not count as combo finsher just the posibiltiy to change the place mulitple times can kitten with the enemy pretty hard and mack them wast CD just becaus you can blink around like crazy.

As with the weapons. I love our skills and most of them have ther use. But the problem is we have to many that do similare stuff. On weapons and ultity. Veil and Mass Inivsibility are the prim example for this.

Traits are fine imho. Sure you can’t build without your Illusions but an ele can’t build without his attuments aswell. The main problems are the reliability on phantasms and the spread of some build options ( like for the glamour builds). A button that forces and attack of the phantasm would be an option but not a perfect solution. Again I don’t really have and idea. How to fix it for good.

Sry for bad spelling and stuff typing on my smartphone.

Things like this will not happen. ArenaNet is not going to make major changes to the Mesmer’s mechanics. If you don’t like the illusions mechanic then play a different class.

I don’t mean this in a mean way, it just wastes everyone’s time to make threads like this because it’s not really constructive feedback.

Lol Mesmers are quite far from weak, and any fights where we can keep our Phants up I think we probably do more damage than any other class in the game for straight out dps wars. The biggest gripe seems to be with shatters, which I can kind of understand as I found them to be fairly useless without either A – a full set of level 80 gear to get some good stats out of, or B – a way to spam clones, I’m not sure how I’d play Mes without Deceptive Evasion. If you have a post THAT long about how you don’t like Mes, then you are probably just playing the wrong prof. As much as I hate to say this, I think the class is quite deserving of most of the nerfs it’s getting as it is, though that Chaos Storm one was kinda iffy. This is just a class with a really high learning curve.

I agree with most of these points, but it will never happen

Honestly the only thing Anet did that upset me was increasing the reuse of Chaos Storm, it should have been reduced not increased. For a class with almost no AoE to actually increase the use of our 1 true AoE was just silly

Problem with Chaos storm is that it gives awesome deffens power while being good offenssiv. Sure if you only use it on the enemy it a meh AoE at best. If you use it on allys and enemys it becomes one of the stongest AoEs you can have.

Compared to other classes, we definitely fall very short in the fury and swiftness departments, perhaps these can be baked into some weapon skills?

The clone/illusion shatter still is bugged in my book. Several times during fights I see the clone/illusion shatter next to me instead of where the mob/boss is for no damage. Also, the latest CD increases suck.

I don’t really follow. You don’t like illusions/shatter, but then make proposals to change them, not replace them. Even if anet took your advice, mesmers would still be required to work with that mechanic. Just your version.

Just like necros have to build with death shroud in mind. Elementalists have to work with attunements. Etc. illusions are our class mechanic, if you don’t like them, you don’t like mesmers.

Your staff ideas would make me cry. The bounce is what makes the weapon so sweet. You can stand close and soak up buffs, or stay at range and spread more conditions instead. Making it just AoE conditions instead would screw us badly. I wouldn’t complain about the unlimited swapping on swords, but sword doesn’t feel like it needs any kind of buff currently. If anything, scepter can be a bit plain.

But more than anything I’m not following how any of these suggestions would make I play more like an old school Mesmer any more than it does. For that, what’s missing is our conditional hexes. Phantasms were supposed to be physical hexes, but mostly they just do damage. They would be a lot more interesting if they actually did more than that – say they deal damage, but then also punish your opponent for taking certain actions. Duplicate, in a new way, skills like Wastel’s Worry, Wandering Eye, and Panic. That would bring back more of the Mesmer style than changing up the illusion mechanic.