What I personally believe though is that the current implementation is flawed in that it doesn’t consider what illusions themselves offer when calculating the exchange. They aren’t generic and meaningless resources that have little inherent value until spent. Each phantasm is designed to offer something relatively unique, and even most clones differentiate themselves from weapon to weapon. Yet the balance of shatter doesn’t seem to account for any intent of illusion-summoning other than to fuel a slightly bigger destruction effect. You can certainly choose to ignore the ongoing benefits or control/support functions of illusions, and just treat them as generic resources, but that doesn’t mean those benefits don’t exist.
Mind Wrack and Cry of Frustration both offer nothing more than a damage pay-off in exchange for all your illusions, but most (not all) illusions will already be offering you damage simply by staying alive. The decision on whether to exchange or not usually comes down to simple mathematics about what damage can be expected from the illusions if they can stay alive, and what damage the shatter will offer. Whichever is bigger, you might as well take. Admittedly you also weigh up the other defensive benefits you get from having the distraction of your illusions, but this can be simply balanced usually as long as more than one illusion-summoning skill is off recharge. To me, that’s a mechanic that doesn’t really offer anything profession-defining nor terribly tactical or interesting. It certainly offers twitch based rewards – if you shatter at the precise right moment your numbers will be better – but not really what I would personally call interesting decisions.
Diversion and Distortion I would probably consider the best implemented shatters, simply because they offer something that the illusions won’t have already been providing, so the exchange is more interesting and tactical. Unfortunately, for a PvE player like myself, both seem far more useful for PvP and WvW battles where additional skill interruption and a few seconds of invulnerability on a long recharge can better be deployed. Unless traited, neither are really that useful in general play outside of very specific situations, such as for a large boss fight, and even then the benefit is extremely twitch-reliant.
Imagine, if you will, a condition-focused profession whose core mechanic relies upon reaping benefits by removing all your conditions on an enemy. I suspect that it would be very difficult trying to balance the ongoing effects of those conditions with the pay-off for wiping them – in both PvE and PvP – in such a way that players feel that both condition-focused and cure-focused builds are viable, fun and synergise well with other professions. That would seem especially true if the pay-off is only going to be a slightly different (not noticeably larger) number to what the conditions would already have been doing if they were just left to build up on the target. I believe the same logic applies to an illusion-focused profession whose core mechanic relies upon reaping benefits by removing all your illusions on an enemy.
After watching these forums for a while, I’ve come to accept that I’m probably in the minority, and that’s quite okay – I don’t expect a profession to be built around my personal preferences. I do think however that it’s worthwhile having a civil discussion about how the profession could be improved for a relatively noticeable subset of players, particularly if a way could be found that doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of all those who enjoy the utility of the current shatter abilities.
I like Mesmers, I like illusions (particularly clones), and I even like the idea of conjuring very rapid-fire, short-lived illusory images. I just don’t think the shatter abilities are well-tuned for all modes of play, nor do they mesh very well with the traits, abilities and gameplay they could otherwise complement.
Edit: Corrected spelling, oops.
(edited by Roven Leafsong.8917)