Guild Wars 2

Ok nevermind incoming alacrity nerfs, there are a few skills for which cooldowns should really be lower if the skills themselves remain the same:

1. Arcane Thievery – 45-seconds makes no sense. Could be brought down to 30s.

2. Cry of Frustration – 25s would be ok if it did 1 stack torment per illusion baseline, but as it currently stands it is too high for the effect, especially when compared with Mind Wrack…

3. iMage – nothing can justify that 30s base cooldown.

4. Signet of Domination – doesn’t encourage much use of the active stun. Could be slightly lower.

5. Chaos Armour – 35s for this soon to be almost negligable aura is ridiculous. Needs drastic reduction or a complete overhaul of staff #4

6. Mirror Images – should be brought down to 40s in line with Decoy.

7. Mantra of Concentration – could be 20s to match Resolve and Distraction, to encourage use.

Some others which I’m not sure about are Illusion of Life and Chaos Storm, but they seem fine as they are.

Anything else missing, or am I mistaken about some of these?

These all make sense to me.

For sure, there’s a difference in player skill between players who can choose which skill to use at which times and players who “budget” their key skills should be rewarded.

But it’s fun to use your skills. So if there are skills that you never take or rarely use because of the cooldowns, I think it makes more sense to trim down those times.

Hell even 25 sec for Arcane Thievery would be very reasonable, it’s always been a pity that all of Mesmer utilities have been such high CD similar to Thieves.

1. Arcane Thievery- With corrupt boons becoming a 15 second cooldown, I see absolutely no reason why the 45 sec cooldown on this is justified. Besides, when is the last time anyone tried to use this skill…?

2. Cry of frustration- Why does this shatter even exist? Its so bad.

It needs one of the following-

A) Better condi application baseline.
B) Halved cooldown.
C) Delete it. Slap the 1 stack of confusion on MW and reduce MW’s cooldown to about 7 seconds.

3) I’d like to see all phantasm skills ‘normalized’ to about 20 sec cooldown. Only exception being the shield (for obvious reasons).

4) I’d like to see SoD’s cooldown lowered even if it means lowering the stun duration.

5) We’re not elementalists; we can’t swap attunements to gain access to 15 other filler skills while we wait on a ridiculous cooldown for JUST an aura. This should have been lowered a long time ago or needs added utility.

6) Would be nice.

7) Mantras= yuck

Have a twitch streamer complain next day t will be fixed…

Our Shatters are terrible on a very basic level.

For one, they’re not context-free. They need pre-existing illusions. I’d rather have illusion-generation on the F1-F4 skills and change the current clone/phantasm skills to consume 1 illusion to produce effect X.

But if we’re talking small changes, then make them:

• Single target burst
• AE burst
• Disable
• Defence

The specifics change with spec/traits. For example the bursts become condi bursts if specced for conditions, and so on.

Carighan.6758:

Our Shatters are terrible on a very basic level.

For one, they’re not context-free. They need pre-existing illusions. I’d rather have illusion-generation on the F1-F4 skills and change the current clone/phantasm skills to consume 1 illusion to produce effect X.

But if we’re talking small changes, then make them:

• Single target burst
• AE burst
• Disable
• Defence

The specifics change with spec/traits. For example the bursts become condi bursts if specced for conditions, and so on.

If we’re going to take this on from a substantial rework perspective (which Mesmer probably needs…), I would leave shatters as our mechanic. Instead, I would remove phantasms from weapon skills and shift all the damage back onto the Mesmer. Phantasm skills would just produce a normal clone instead and the Mesmer would perform the actual attacks.

Blowing up our sustain DPS has never made any sense… It’d be like if Warriors got a +100% damage modifier at 100% adrenaline and their DPS was also balanced around the assumption that they always had 100% adrenaline.

The result-
1) Less Warriors would use their burst skills, especially not in PvE.
2) There would be ‘Max Adrenaline Builds’ and ‘Burst Skill Builds’ on Meta battle

Core Mesmer is so kitten to play because its mechanics do not work together. Anet was too lazy to address this first before creating Mesmer’s elite spec. Anet has used Chronomancer to obfuscate mesmer’s issues, when its really nothing more than a body cast holding poorly conceptualized mechanics together.

As much as I’d love a rework of core mechanics, I’d rather keep this topic to simple cooldown reductions on less used skills which may have a slight chance of being implemented.

Mikkel.8427:

Carighan.6758:

Our Shatters are terrible on a very basic level.

For one, they’re not context-free. They need pre-existing illusions. I’d rather have illusion-generation on the F1-F4 skills and change the current clone/phantasm skills to consume 1 illusion to produce effect X.

But if we’re talking small changes, then make them:

• Single target burst
• AE burst
• Disable
• Defence

The specifics change with spec/traits. For example the bursts become condi bursts if specced for conditions, and so on.

If we’re going to take this on from a substantial rework perspective (which Mesmer probably needs…), I would leave shatters as our mechanic. Instead, I would remove phantasms from weapon skills and shift all the damage back onto the Mesmer. Phantasm skills would just produce a normal clone instead and the Mesmer would perform the actual attacks.

Blowing up our sustain DPS has never made any sense… It’d be like if Warriors got a +100% damage modifier at 100% adrenaline and their DPS was also balanced around the assumption that they always had 100% adrenaline.

The result-
1) Less Warriors would use their burst skills, especially not in PvE.
2) There would be ‘Max Adrenaline Builds’ and ‘Burst Skill Builds’ on Meta battle

Core Mesmer is so kitten to play because its mechanics do not work together. Anet was too lazy to address this first before creating Mesmer’s elite spec. Anet has used Chronomancer to obfuscate mesmer’s issues, when its really nothing more than a body cast holding poorly conceptualized mechanics together.

Warriors used to have a trait that gave increased damage for each level of adrenaline. Obviously, this meant that they all just stacked it up and never used the burst skills. It’s now changed to provide a damage amp for 20 seconds on using a burst skill, which makes much more sense.

Curunen.8729:

2. Cry of Frustration – 25s would be ok if it did 1 stack torment per illusion baseline, but as it currently stands it is too high for the effect, especially when compared with Mind Wrack…

What if it did? It’d still be weaker than the old Maim the Disillusioned build, because you’d only get double Torment on Cry of Frustration rather than any shatter, but it would be one way to make CoF better in general and justify the cooldown.

I’ve never understood the longer cooldown on Cry of Frustration. It is supposed to be the way in which we mostly interact with our shatters when using condition based builds. Yet the cooldown is double that of Mind Wrack which just feels dated.

I object to the Arcane Thievery. Mesmers have the most powerful condi cleanse in the game and they should not be given more.

When you apply several conditions to a mesmer you can only keep those on her for a short amount of time. Then she uses her condi removal: dying! Poof! All the conditions are cleansed. That is not fair. Here you try to apply conditions on her, and she goes and dies on you. “Uncool” bro.

alain.1659:

Mesmers have the most powerful condi cleanse in the game and they should not be given more.

Cool story, bro.

alain.1659:

Then she uses her condi removal: dying! Poof! All the conditions are cleansed. That is not fair. Here you try to apply conditions on her, and she goes and dies on you. “Uncool” bro.

Yeah it’s crazy effective.

Carighan.6758:

alain.1659:

Then she uses her condi removal: dying! Poof! All the conditions are cleansed. That is not fair. Here you try to apply conditions on her, and she goes and dies on you. “Uncool” bro.

Yeah it’s crazy effective.

It’s like they stealth for 20+ secs and come back with full hp…. Definitely needs a nerf

Myrias.8732:

Carighan.6758:

alain.1659:

Then she uses her condi removal: dying! Poof! All the conditions are cleansed. That is not fair. Here you try to apply conditions on her, and she goes and dies on you. “Uncool” bro.

Yeah it’s crazy effective.

It’s like they stealth for 20+ secs and come back with full hp…. Definitely needs a nerf

Pretty sure if we had 20+ sec of Distortion instead we would gladly see less of use of stealth. :-P