Guild Wars 2

Surprised that these survived the cull, and that they are not more interesting than before, even Greatsword Training is now a GM and still only gives +100 power, the cooldown reducing portion could be good but it is promoting just spamming Spatial Surge. Would prefer the flat 20% reduction and have the traits reworked to be more interesting and augmenting an aspect of each weapon.

Duelist Discipline is a nice rework. Warden’s Feedback was always good, and is unchanged. The torch trait is better now it is moved to Illusions, but would be further improved by lowering the baseline cooldowns, 25s for The Prestige and 20s for phantasm, and have the phantasm apply fury instead of retaliation.

Sword is unchanged and it really does need to be changed, what it should do is a boost when both swords are equiped. One thing that dual swords does is 2 (3? your illusions get the fury too?) leap finishers, so giving fury for performing a leap combo. With dual swords it should give a good uptime of fury, and fits the ‘precision’ line.

What I’d like for staff is not to do with Chaos Armour (although a Chaos Armour build would be nice: Replace Prismatic Understanding with Chaos Armour (on allies and mesmer, from blasts in ethereal fields) gives boons every second in addition to those when being hit, and Temporal Enchanter gives 2 sec of Chaos Armour instead of the superspeed), instead if the phantasm could be traited to hit one or two additional targets that would be a nice boost to power builds using staff, benefitting most from reduced cooldowns.

Scepter, besides have the animations cleaned up, and while the additional torment damage is nice, it should really be added to Maim the Disillusioned. Malicious Sorcery should bring back at least one trait that applies conditions on clone death, including replacing clones, weakness/cripple would be good but just blind would be nice as well, which would then synergize with Blinding Befuddlement (why this is a GM trait and mesmers will have even less blinds than before?). Clone death should be exclusive to scepter clones, it gives the weapon some much needed defense if it was cripple/blind/weakness.

Greatsword is a tricky one to get a good trait idea. What it does is lots of little hits against multiple targets, while reducing the cooldown (does Spatial Surge reduce the CD by 2% per hit or skill use?) I don’t like the playstyle it promotes. One idea for baseline GS is that instead of the more damage the further away the target is, the damage is increase by how many targets the beam passes through. In addition the trait should give the mesmer a counter on the buff bar, every time a target is hit it increments the counter, when it reaches 15 it spawns a clone beside the mesmer. This would reward maximising the number of targets that Spatial Surge/Mind Stab with each use, and mean less reliance on DE.

One interesting note about GS trait is that the cooldown reduction now only works when you’re actively using the weapon and won’t apply when you switch to your other set. This applies in part to Staff as well (altough we have some ways to get chaos armor when not wielding a Staff)

Actually, you can summon a GS clone and still get the cooldown reduction after switching to another weapon set. Which is not hugely useful, but it’s something.

Menaka.5092:

One interesting note about GS trait is that the cooldown reduction now only works when you’re actively using the weapon and won’t apply when you switch to your other set.

Good point. I see that as a negative though, and an argument why flat 20% reduction can be better, it promotes weapon swapping and not staying with a weapon (/staying in stealth) set to maximise the benefit of a weapon trait.

Although the GS counter suggestion would have that same problem unless the counter stayed when swapping weapons but would only increment with GS skills or even remove the GS requirement and have it affect all weapons but it would benefit GS more with the multiple hits of Spatial Surge/other AoE GS skills build the counter more rapidly.

tobascodagama.2961:

Actually, you can summon a GS clone and still get the cooldown reduction after switching to another weapon set. Which is not hugely useful, but it’s something.

Good catch, didn’t think of that! It’ll be hard to keep track of cooldowns.