Guild Wars 2

As title says, should mantras be changed to have no charge time? Obviously they will need to be adjusted, but I think mantras would see a lot more use if they didn’t need to be charged. Use up the charges -> goes on CD -> CD finish, refreshes 2 or 3 charges. Most feel very lacking, and charging up before/after combat is simply not fun. Especially with underwater combat…

Traits wouldn’t cause any issue with this change either

-Empowering Mantras: Readied mantra’s could be counted as any not on CD
-Restorative Mantras: could be changed to heal everytime you expend a charge, healing adjusted accordingly
-Protected mantras: increase armor by x amount whenever you expend a charge, stacks in duration

Thoughts?

i dont like the fact that the mantra power build makes you waste 4 utilities and you can’t use your mantras, at all. not only you loose dps by using them you also have to wait for cooldowns and cast time. Its counter intuitive. It should be “4% damage for each mantra on cooldown”

No… because once mantras are charged they are already instant cast… which is an incredibly useful ability in game that few utilities share.

And also one that few people take advantage of… you can pop a mantra charge any time… while you are chanelling something else… while you are rezzing… try it out sometime… there are very few moments when you cannot pop your mantra once it is charged.

If they made the charge up time much shorter… they would nerf the ability to instant cast it… and then they WOULD be useless compared to other things.

I like my mantras just the way they are in this regard… some of them need some adjustment in their duration or such… but charge time was JUST reduced by another second. And it was a beautiful thing.

Long double post coming up, tl;dr at bottom

Mantras are fine the way they are, well almost perfect actually. They are some of the best skills in the game which are severely underrated because of their charging times, but they are well worth it. You can charge them out of combat and even if you do blow both charges and have to recharge in combat, the recent buff to their cast time is brilliant. If eles can find the time to stand completely still and channel Meteor Shower or Churning Earth whilst having lower base HP than us, no Distortion and no stealth, I think we have more than enough time to move around while recharging a mantra.

As for their active effects, wow. I don’t understand how people can say the payoff is lackluster. MoDistraction is an instantaneous interrupt (I’m fairly sure the only other instant interrupt in the game is Diversion with either a clone in melee range of your target or Illusionary Persona, but don’t quote me on that) with a 5 second recharge. MoResolve removes 2 conditions instantly on a 2 second cooldown. I cannot stress how important instant casting is here. The ability to strip off poison while channeling your heal skill for a 99.9% chance that you are clean when the heal comes through is a life saver. Immobilise is an incredibly strong condition – some would even argue it is as good as a stun and therefore needs to be removed as quickly as you can remove stuns. Power Cleanse can do exactly that. Let’s not forget MoR removes 4 conditions over the course of 2 seconds making it our best condition removal in terms of quantity per second. MoConcentration is a stun breaker on a 2 second cooldown. If I went to the necro forums and said “Hey guys, how would you like a stun breaker on a two second cooldown?” they would drool so much they could dribble up a river between them. I do feel the stability should be buffed to 3 seconds, making it long enough to use Finish Him, with the cooldown also bumped to 3.

There are, however, 2 mantras which I find lacking. First, MoPain, otherwise known as the utility skill which doesn’t bring utility. It needs a secondary effect so that the skill doesn’t just deal damage. Make it apply vulnerability, give you might, something, anything, just make it do more than “press me to deal damage”. Second, MoRecovery is so hard to balance with the existence of Harmonious Mantras that I would just delete it and replace it with a signet heal. A signet heal would actually make traits such as Blurred Inscriptions really attractive (which is currently made redundant for 3 of the 4 signets we have), though it needs to be carefully balanced with regards to Mender’s Purity and Cleansing Inscriptions.

Now let’s turn our attention to traits.

Harmonious Mantras is fine, if not little overpowered.

Empowering Mantras is fine.

Protected Mantras is fine. If you find yourself playing a build intended to survive long fights, grabbing bonus armour while recharging your mantras with minimal investment into the tree (and you’ll get vigor on crits!) is a wise and perfectly viable investment.

Restorative Mantras… now we’re getting into iffy territory. Here’s my problem: if RM is designed with the same thinking as PM, that is you get a little help when you have to recharge a mnatra in combat, then why is it so deep into the trait tree, and a trait tree with no other mantra related traits no less? RM needs either to be moved to tier 1 or to stay in T2 but proc off the use of the Power X skill, with healing reduced to compensate. Unfortunately, Harmonious Mantras will, as always, cause all sorts of balance issues here, so I’m more in favour of bringing it down to tier 1. It is worth pointing out RM base heals for 2.6k with 0.2HealingPower scaling (according to Wiki), and you need atleast 200 compassion to pick it up currently which makes it heal for 2640 – 20 points higher than the Wiki tooltip value for Power Return. It is a really good heal, but the trait seems too inaccessible for someone who just wants a little extra help with their mantras in combat. On the other hand, the current RM + MoPain spam build is borderline a hard healer in the team, and we don’t want that to become even more easily accessed… An easy fix is to nerf MoPain cooldown once we actually add a secondary functionality.

Mantra Mastery now and this one is hard to judge. I feel if you blow both mantra charges the cooldown is the least of your worries – charging it again is more important. I said several times in previous mantra threads a grandmaster trait should be added that allows them to passively recharge. Now that their cast time has been reduced, I don’t really see the harm in adding it to a tier 2 trait, so why not add a secondary functionality to Mantra Mastery which allows them to passively charge themselves whilst in combat?

Finally, a big problem for mantras right now is transitivity. If you finish a fight with 1 charge of a mantra left, you have to blow it, wait out the cooldown and recharge all before your next fight. That’s stupid. There are a variety of very simple fixes that can be done eg. for every 10 seconds you are out of combat all currently charged mantras have one charge replenished. I really don’t see people dropping out of combat for 10 whole seconds just to get their mantra charge back when they can recast it in 3 seconds, so I don’t really see any reason why this shouldn’t be added in the very next patch to be honest.

TL;DR: MoPain and MoRecovery need buffing. It would probably be easier to balance if MoR was just replaced with a signet heal, whilst also making traits such as Blurred Inscriptions so much more attractive. Mantra Mastery could benefit from a secondary effect. Restorative Mantras needs moving to tier 1 or to proc off the Power X skill. Finally, when out of combat, any currently charged mantra should replenish charges. Aside from these flaws mantras are extraordinarily good and severely underrated skills.

I’d like Harmonious Mantras to be removed so that Mantras (mainly MoRec, MoP and MoC) don’t need to be sub-par when untraited. I’d like MoRec’s healing un-nerfed (~2600 back to 3250), MoP be changed to inflict 3x Confusion for 3s, and MoC’s Stability extended to 4s.

Preferably I’d like Mantras be returned to a single charge, as I liked the idea of a powerful spell that must be prepared in advance. If not, then at least make Mantras regenerate charges outside of combat if they aren’t fully discharged.

IMO it’d be very helpful to change the cast time to 2 seconds: mantra of stability can be used to cast other mantras safely,while the trait that heals when you ready a mantra will be much,much more reliable and helpful.

ButterOfDeath.2873:

IMO it’d be very helpful to change the cast time to 2 seconds: mantra of stability can be used to cast other mantras safely,while the trait that heals when you ready a mantra will be much,much more reliable and helpful.

Many normal skills have cast times close to 2s anyway, if you do that Mantras lose part of their uniqueness (and drawback).

I don’t mind the mantras in fact I like having to work them in my builds because mesmer is all about pre-planning the fight anyway, but I do think some of them need a buff. MoP just seems lackluster to me, could use a sliight buff imo. Mantra of recovery is a joke, but the other mantras are pretty well balanced.

I’ve been messing around with Mantra builds quite a bit and one very annoying thing about mantras is the long recharge MoD, MoResolve, MoC. There are a lot of times after a fight that you want to recharge your mantra between fights when it only has 1 charge left but you can’t since you need to wait for a long recharge time.

My suggestions:
-Reduce recharge on mantras to 10s. You can’t have them with no recharge since it will be too easily spammable, but I don’t feel the recharge on MoRecovery (which is 10s) to be too burdensome. You can adjust the cooldown between charge uses to fix any spammable issues. For example even if a mantra has a cooldown of 10s, if you put 5s cooldown between charge uses it has a minimal “spam” time of 5+10+3.25 = 18.25 sec.

-Change Harmonious Mantras to reduce cast time of mantras by 1s. This will give them ~2 sec cast time making them more usable mid-fight, something Mantras sorely need. This will make this trait not absolutely required to use a mantra but still very worthy of its grandmaster trait status.

-Change Mantra Mastery and Protected Mantras into giving passive effects similar to Empowered Mantras. It creates a much more interesting dynamic of when to expend your mantra charges or not, rather than just some passive effect that doesn’t change the way you play at all.

-Rebalance the mantras as necessary. I feel MoResolve is a bit underpowered for example.

The mantras are fine, The only problem I have with mantras is they reset when you go in water unless you have them equipped underwater when other utilities are far more useful underwater. It’s so irritating in WvW when you come out of water and an enemy is there and you have none of your mantras ready.

Also I would like to see the 3x mantra maybe be changed to 4x (That or a little bit more damage to Mantra of Pain) mainly because against high health/toughness characters I can use all my mantras and weapon skills and not do enough of a dent to them leaving me very exposed for a while. Guardians for example, I won’t be able to have nullfield equipped to get rid of their boons it’s like hitting a brick wall.

Mantra build is great versus thieves though, The only time a thief has beat me so far is if my mantras weren’t ready (cause I came out of water and forgot to recharge…) or if they surprise me out of nowhere, or they run away.

Mesmers really REALLY needs a GOOD speed boost. I can’t keep up with any professions at all. If any of them start running away I can’t keep up with my setup, denying me a fair kill. Maybe make it Blink’s Passive effect to have 25%.

I am not well wrote on mantras but I did notice that the trait that grants toughness while casting only gives 200, which I didnt feel was much of a difference maker.

ChaosStar.3162:

First, MoPain, otherwise known as the utility skill which doesn’t bring utility. It needs a secondary effect so that the skill doesn’t just deal damage.

Back before Orbs were removed from WvW, I had crit for up to 4500 damage with MoPain.

I think MoP is fine as-is.

The trick is that the player has to get into the habit of using it at the same time as using other abilities. E.g. exploiting its instant-cast characteristic.