Guild Wars 2

From all perspectives, I would like to suggest a few minor tweaks that could be helpful for the Mesmer class. These suggestions are after playing with the recent changes and knowing what I was able to do before and after them.

Scepter Improvements

• Ether Clone should have Ether Bolt as its auto attack.
• Confusing Images’ damage needs to be reduced if the above change goes into effect. (5% to 10% reduction in damage.)

Sword Improvements (Main Hand)

• Illusionary Leap’s range should be increased from 600 to 1200. Swap should be left at 600 range. (Currently the buggiest skill we have.)

Focus Improvements

• Temporal Curtain should stack with other swiftness buffs but, not itself.

Torch Improvements

• The Prestige’s radius should be increased to 300.

Pistol Improvements

• Mesmer’s should get the ability to use a Main Hand pistol. Whenever we summon our Phantasmal Duelist it wields dual pistols, why shouldn’t we be able to as well?

Staff Improvements

• Winds of Chaos
  Vulnerability should be removed.
  *Swiftness(5s)* should be added.
• Phase Retreat is still placing people within objects, underworld, and on occasion above where they shouldn’t be, e.g., in ceilings.

Illusions Improvements

• Clones:
  Should deal an amount of damage proportionate (5%-7.5%) of the Mesmer’s overall attack.
  Health should be proportionate (25%) to the Mesmer’s overall health.
  Should have toughness proportionate (50%) to the Mesmer’s overall toughness.

• Phantasms:
  Traits that affect these illusions should be squashed and they will fall in line.

Shatter Skills Improvements

• Mind Wrack’s tool tip should read the amount of damage increase from the trait, Illusionary Persona, if is activated.
• Cry of Frustration’s tool tip should read the amount of damage increase from each shattered illusion.
• Diversion should stack in duration (up to 2 seconds) whenever you shatter two or more illusions. (Reducing the duration of stacking by half per shatter hit.)

Utility Skills Improvements

• General:
  Give us an additional shatter skill to destroy the glamour abilities inflicting damage in an area of effect.
• Portal:
  Portal should be removed after a certain amount of people have went through.
• Veil:
  Stealth duration should be increase to 6 second.
• Phantasmal Disenchanter:
  Should deal damage to foes when a boon is stripped.
  Should heal allies when a condition is cured.
• Mimic:
  Should absorb all projectile attacks while active.
  Should deal area of effect damage proportionate to the amount of damage absorbed.
• Illusion of Life:
  Casting time should be reduce to 1/4 second. (Takes way too long to cast during intense battles.)
• Signet of Inspiration:
  During combat while in passive state should give a random boon every 8 seconds.
  Recharge of activation should be reduced to 40 seconds.
• Signet of Illusions:
  Passive should increase health and damage from illusions by 50%.
  Recharge of activation should be reduced to 60 seconds. (Recharge is not in line with the benefit it gives. Currently you can activate shatter skills more often than this will be up making it a useless signet.)

These are just a few minor tweaks to things I would like to see to help make a few skills worthwhile to use. Currently there are a lot of traits bugged and I will get into that at a later time but, wanted to see what everyone else thought of these suggestions.

1 – if their vision of phantasms is to treat them the same as attacks, the phantasm’s associated utilities need to be made character-summonable rather than tied to an illusion which may not appear. (for instance, the warden should have a secondary which becomes available AFTER casting it, whether it fails or not, to put a feedback bubble on a random party member, a ground-targeted area, or foe equivalent to the size of the blade storm the phantasm cast!)

1.5 – When they do appear, phantasms should be ephemeral (lasting only one attack) but also untargetable (so the foe does not have two or 3 chances to foil it, only one like everyone else).

2 – our resource generation should still be coupled to the summoning of illusions, but shatters should not depend upon those illusions being active (you summon an illusion your “dot” bar fills, the dot doesn’t go away if the clone dies, your shatter will be an explosion radiating from your current target). This will make our shatters more dependable while allowing Anet team to better balance our damage, and allow us viability in large zergs and dungeons with lots of AOE.

3 – re-balance our single-target damage, in light of the newly single-attacking phantasms from change one, so more comes from the mesmer themselves.

4 – FIX LINE OF SIGHT IN GENERAL! It punishes mesmers more than any other profession.

5 – give more synergy and consistency to our traits from each line. Right now they seem to be all over the place, and very much isolated and a-la carte.

6 – (optional) make confusion a force to be reckoned with, but rarer, like an offensive version of your retaliation, or the “curse” ability gw1 vets mention.

These would be HUGE QOL changes without countering what seems to be the dev’s vision for the mesmer profession._

Plasma, I completely agree with #4 and #5 although #1-#3 are a little out there and #6 would mean that the scepter becomes useless because you would have to remove the stack of 5 from it, as well as the Torch #5 skill would lose confusion.

Overall, I believe that there wouldn’t be a radical change to the effects from your post. I do think its an interesting concept about summoning illusions and having the bubbles fill and stay filled even if the illusions die…the only problem I could see is it being bugged allowing only 3 bubbles to be filled and no more illusions to spawn or having unlimited number of illusions spawning. Nice concepts though.

GamerToukotsu.4219:

Plasma, I completely agree with #4 and #5 although #1-#3 are a little out there and #6 would mean that the scepter becomes useless because you would have to remove the stack of 5 from it, as well as the Torch #5 skill would lose confusion.

Overall, I believe that there wouldn’t be a radical change to the effects from your post. I do think its an interesting concept about summoning illusions and having the bubbles fill and stay filled even if the illusions die…the only problem I could see is it being bugged allowing only 3 bubbles to be filled and no more illusions to spawn or having unlimited number of illusions spawning. Nice concepts though.

No No.. you would still be capped at 3 illusions just as before (shattering would cause any active illusions to die immediately, and summoning a fourth would cause one to die to make it equal to 3), and they could also still be lost when your current target dies or you drop combat.

The phantasm change would cause them to fit better with the devs’ apparent “vision” of phantasms as one-time attacks — while also cutting off any vestiges of “phantasm army” builds that are basically n00b traps in spvp. The movement of their secondary benefits (projectile blocks/reflects, regen, etc) to secondary spells in a “chain” after casting would assure we still have our defense and utilities while being chain blinded, even though we would rightfully be unable to connect offensive spells.

The shatter aoe change would provide more consistency to aoe damage as encounters scale in size.

The better consistency in the ability to AOE and the limit of phantasm attacks to 1 would provide better metrics for balancing, solve a lot of our DWE “mob-tagging” problems, and clear the way for a bit more damage to be relocated to the mesmer without losing the ability to “illusion-tank” in PVE or the flavor and feel of the profession.

It’s not as far out there as you think. It just removes a lot of RNG and frustration from the playstyle without a radical change in how the profession operates, while providing more consistent performance upon which to balance us rather than mesmers being balanced on the assumption that “all the stars always align”.

Increase the AoE on GS #3 to about twice that is now.

Phantasms should act like Guardian’s spirit weapons, invulnerable, but don’t last very long. Or, increase their hp and make them live through more than one mob. Make them more like hexes instead of DPS and give more DPS to the mesmer itself.

Give condition damage to scepter, and give the clones conditions as well. Right now the scepter is classified as a condition weapon, but the only condition on it is confusion from #3.

Change the interrupt traits so that they are either more useful, or just replace them.

Make warden ground targetable, I can’t count how many time it spawned in a useless angle.

When clones go in for a shatter, they should run faster, teleport, shatter as a projectile, or at least continue running to the mob and shatter in the spot even if the mob dies.

Iffy about this one, but remove two shatters and replace the missing Fkeys with one skill that summons clones, and the other that summons phantasms. The effect of the two skills change depending on what weapons you wield. Then mesmers can have a more diverse skill bar.

Make mantras less trait dependent.

Make Portal have a max use of 5, return the old cooldown.

I’ll think of more later.

In addition to my other suggestions, mantras should recharge in the background (with full recharge time equivalent to their cooldown plus cast time)

This would make them more attractive to use as they would allow you to do more effective things in long fights than stand there “chargin’ up yur lazer”.

Esorono.1039:

Give condition damage to scepter, and give the clones conditions as well. Right now the scepter is classified as a condition weapon, but the only condition on it is confusion from #3.

Change the interrupt traits so that they are either more useful, or just replace them.

Make warden ground targetable, I can’t count how many time it spawned in a useless angle.

When clones go in for a shatter, they should run faster, teleport, shatter as a projectile, or at least continue running to the mob and shatter in the spot even if the mob dies.

Make mantras less trait dependent.

Make Portal have a max use of 5, return the old cooldown.

Some of these I completely agree with and others I completely disagree with, I’ll put in bold the ones I agree with and in italic the ones I disagree with.

Starting from the top going down.

Adding additional condition damage to the scepter I completely agree with under the base principal as that’s how that particular weapon acts. It acts as a condition single hand weapon much like the staff.

Alternative Suggestion

• Replace Scepter #1 with Ether Winds leading into Ether Clone.
• Ether Winds:
  Burning (1s)
  Chilled (1s)
  Weakness (2s)
  Swiftness (5s)
  Vigor (2s)
  Damage: XXX

• Ether Clone should cast Ether Winds, as Staff #2 casts Winds of Chaos.

I disagree completely about changing the interrupt traits. I personally believe that the trait tree should be redone to create better synergy between the entire line. Mesmer’s contains a large portion of interrupt skills and everything that says Stun or Daze causes interrupt. I just believe its all about trait placements and that is why no one is choosing the interrupt traits—well besides me.

The Phantasmal Warden should be a ground target, it would make this ability insanely useful. However that being said, it does move whenever its not in range of a person. So it would have to be permanently rooted into the ground for this change to be possible.

Illusion shattering is one of the Mesmer’s key abilities, illusions should always shatter whether the target dies or not. If an illusion is running after a target and that target dies, it should shatter over its corpse.

Mantra’s should definitely be increased in power but, to what extent I do not know because personally they are too weak for my taste. Wasting 50+ traits to get them up to par with other abilities seems like a waste of potential for my character. While I have seen other threads with posters stating how they have made a healing Mesmer with Mantra’s etc, I’d really like to hear from them about this issue.

Completely agree with Portal and a max number of usages.