Guild Wars 2

In the Profession Balance Forum I am involved in a passionate discussion about the nature of Mesmers in GW2. Although I disagreed with many opinions there I agree on the point, that going more in direction of GW1 would make for a better, more awesome and more original Mesmer feeling. It still has to be balanced though. So please view the following suggestions as a first idea, that, of course, has to be adapted in order to make it balanced:

New Traits:

• Domination: Ignorance (Inspiration: GW1 Ignorance)
  Interrupting a skill causes signets to go on a 10 seconds cool down.

• Dueling: Mind Wrack (Inspiration: GW1 Mind Wrack)
  15% chance on critical hits to cause Weakness. 15% increased critical chance against foes with less than 50% Endurance.

• Chaos: Energy Burn (Inspiration: GW1 Energy Burn and GW1 Chaos Storm)
  Chaos Storm causes 20% Endurance loss. Weakness duration from Chaos storm is increased 100%

• Inspiration: Drain Enchantment (Inspiration: GW1 Drain Enchantment)
  Steal 20% Endurance and gain Vigor for 5 seconds upon boon ripping.

• Illusion: Illusion of Haste (Inspiration: GW1 Illusion of Haste)
  Whenever you are crippled, you gain Illusion of Haste for 20s instead, increasing moving speed by 15%. When Illusion of Haste ends, you are crippled for 10s. Movement Speed out of combat increased by 25%.

New Utilities:

• Blackout (Inspiration: GW1 Blackout)
  Manipulation
  Cool Down: 30 Seconds
  Cast Time: instantly
  Range: 130
  For 5 seconds, all of target foe’s skills are disabled. Your skills are disabled for 5 seconds plus 3 Seconds for each of your own active illusions.

• Backfire (Inspiration: GW1 Backfire)
  Glamour
  Cool Down: 60 Seconds
  Cast Time: 1/4 Second
  Range: 1200
  Foes in target area deal 1000 Damage to themselves when using a utility skill.

• Shatter Delusions (Inspiration: GW1 Shatter Delusions)
  Signet
  Cool Down: 60 Seconds
  Cast Time: 1 Second
  Range: 600
  Passive: Shattered Illusions will remove a condition from target foe. Each time a condition is removed that way, it deals 500 damage.
  Active: Remove all conditions from target foe. If a condition was removed, that foe and all adjacent foes take 500 damage for each condition removed.

• Mantra of Signets (Inspiration: GW1 Mantra of Signets)
  Mantra
  Cool Down: 45
  Cast Time: 2 3/4 Seconds
  Meditate, charging a spell that will give you +300 Toughness for each equipped Signet. Activating will heal you for 500 HP for each equipped Signet.
  (someone was very confused writing this utility down :P)

New Traits:

• Domination: Ignorance
  Seems a little bit occainsal and to aim against HS warriors. But I think if you play Interrupt Mesmer, there are always better choices in domination, like Halting Strike and Shattered Concentration.

• Dueling: Mind Wrack
  Seems like an interesting trait for increasing your burst.

• Chaos: Energy Burn
  Might be a little bit odd. So you either sacrifice Some endurance by dodging the CS, or you stay into it and lose Endurance anyway?

• Inspiration: Drain Enchantment
  Interesting, but why is it in Inspiration?

• Illusion: Illusion of Haste
  Totally would take this.

New Utilities:

• Blackout
  If you have a well coordinated team, this looks like Moa with instant cast and 30s CD. Might be a little bit to strong.

• Backfire
  Mesmer definitfly needs more AoE. Might be interesting.

• Shatter Delusions
  Interesting, somehow reminds me of terror. But I’ not a fan of terror :/. But this might lead to an insane burst. Just imagine standard shatter Build, with staff.

• Mantra of Signets
  “Meditate, charging a spell that will give you +300 Toughness for each equipped Signet. Activating will heal you for 500 HP for each equipped Signet.”
  Hum? So you charge a speel which gives you toughness, but the spell will instead heal you?

Ignorance:
I thought the same. It’s very occasional. But I somehow wanted to include smth to block signets.^^

Energy Burn:
hm… you are right… didn’t think that through properly^^

Drain Enchantment:
Because in GW1 is was also in inspiration

Shatter Delusions:
I was thinking here to support disenchant shatter mesmers in Zerg fights.

Mantra of signets:
I might have confused matras with signets a bit here…

The numbers, as mentioned, might need some alteration through testing of course.

This is really nice, to be honest I miss the Mesmer play style from GW1
GW2 wasn’t inspired MUCH the use of GW1 professions nice skills
It’s mainly/mostly weapon skills dependent.

Back in GW1 a Mesmer is a shutdown & is a shutdown for a reason. in GW2 the concept of shutdown is relatively average of 6 seconds & that’s all

This doesn’t mean Mesmer in GW2 is done wrong, but it could have had more of the beautiful GW1 Mesmer. rather than a “MAINLY” dependent on the weapon in your hand

Nice post, Hope ANet listens and adjust things accordingly to GW1

To add further more, I hope they add Ritualist/Dervish & Monk

I think I read once, that those professions won’t be added, but instead they’ll add eventually a system, where you can have smth like a 2nd profession. Reason for that was that many professions already cover the mechanics of the old GW1 professions and therefore would be very redundant. However, with the secondary profession system one could then choose from smth like monk or ritualist. However, I read that a long time ago. I believe it was on the official website, but I forgot where and when that announcement was made. I could also be very wrong and my memory tricked me.

About GW1 and GW2 Mesmer. The issue is simply, that you don’t require energy any more to cast your skills. But GW1 Mesmer was very good at draining your energy and that was one way to shut players down. That option doesn’t exist in GW2 any more and one can only play with cool downs, giving the one on the receiving end less ways to manage a shut down Mesmer.

Could you imagine the crying if mesmer could do half the things they used to be able to do in gw1? If the players of this community can’t handle thieves, or handle mesmers confusion back before if was nerfed then they certainly can’t handle skills like Blackout/Backfire/Clumsiness.

In short, the pvp players of guild wars 2 are terrible and wouldn’t last a second in gw1 pvp.

Possibly. But the fights in GW1 weren’t as fast as GW2 fights. And the battle was easier to overview. These days in GW2 sometimes fights just become a huge mess, that rarely happened in GW1.

Unfortunately, as Clavicula alluded to, we are most likely never going to see elements of GW1 Mesmer due to the way in which the combat system works in this game (especially in terms of how most of our skills are tied to weapons). There’s some hope that we can see new types of utility skills that bring back more of a semblance of our first incarnation but the limited nature of 3 skills isn’t really going to do much.

Anyway, now to address the original post:

Ignorance, though great in theory, would probably be way to situational especially because not all players use signets.

Mind Wrack is already used as one of our shatter skills, so maybe a rename would be in order. As well, this concept would only work in PVP since, AFAIK, PVE enemies don’t have endurance.

Energy Burn would probably work better as a skill. Maybe something like a skill that burns away some of their endurance while dealing direct damage similarly to how it burned energy and caused direct damage in GW1.

Drain Enchantment would probably need an internal cooldown to avoid OPness, but other than that I think it would work.

Illusion of Haste is kinda weird since you’d basically be affected by it indefinitely the moment crippled hits you for the first time. Other than that a trait to boost our speed is a necessity at this point.

Love the idea of Backfire, though maybe it could apply to all skills but with lower damage per hit to avoid potential overpoweredness. Your suggestion would, again, prob be useless in PVE since enemies don’t have utilities (though not 100% sure on that).

Maybe rename Shatter Delusiosn to Signet of Delusions to avoid inconsistencies with naming across Signet skills. Other than that, neat idea, though it could possibly conflict with condition builds of team mates (maybe change so that it only affects conditions you apply?)

I have a few ideas for new skills but I won’t derail your ideas so I’ll keep them to myself for the time being.