Guild Wars 2

gw2 is everything I have in life. I’m dead and empty inside without it.

XRay.1920:

gw2 is everything I have in life. I’m dead and empty inside without it.

Haha see it’s not so hard to make a joke is it?
Well I guess Shatter will do 2x dmg to you from now on. :P

XRay.1920:

gw2 is everything I have in life. I’m dead and empty inside without it.

I feel ya man. Venturing outside would have totally overcome me if I didnt need to man up and find money for gems

but some things, they’re just worth fighting for.

showatt.9413:

XRay.1920:

gw2 is everything I have in life. I’m dead and empty inside without it.

Haha see it’s not so hard to make a joke is it?
Well I guess Shatter will do 2x dmg to you from now on. :P

no, I have distortion.

ErraticFaith.9142:

XRay.1920:

gw2 is everything I have in life. I’m dead and empty inside without it.

I feel ya man. Venturing outside would have totally overcome me if I didnt need to man up and find money for gems

but some things, they’re just worth fighting for.

real gw2 men trade gold for gems.

I actually had a gold once. I think someone made me spend it on a golem. Running 38 copper in wvw ever since :/

showatt.9413:

So what do you think we should nerf next now that Phantasm is done with?

Moa.
I heard it was used the other day, probably set off the “A Thief was killed”-alarm in side the ANet HQ. :P

Jokes aside, I have a ton of traits and abilities I’d personally want to see nerfed. Ofc in turn, I want the currently really underpowered traits and abilities buffed in the same patch because I feel we are being “held back” by a handful of such abilities and traits.

As in: We don’t get buffs because we’re already strong with those. Ofc, this forces everyone to use those abilities and traits.

As an example. Decoy. Or Blink. Or hell, give me a PvE-usable Portal please, but for that to be interesting I’d need a 20-30s CD with a 20s duration on it. Imagine that in WvW, OTOH.
(hint: needs split tooltips :P )

Carighan.6758:

I heard it was used the other day

I concur. Its this sort of radical usage of abilities that needs to stop if we are going to be safe. Propose we resort to simply using auto-attack from now on.

Patches are seriously something you shouldn’t be looking forward as a mesmer.

serialkicker.5274:

Patches are seriously something you shouldn’t be looking forward as a mesmer.

The saddest bit is I was SO excited when I read the blog post about increasing build diversity.

“Finally!” I thought. A lot of interesting build options! It looks like they’ve heard us loud and clear and are going to give ALL classes some variety.

Since then all info about the patch seems to indicate they never read their own blog post, because it looks like 99% of us are going to be going 30 into Illusions forever.

Unbelievably disappointing.

Still hoping it’s all an elaborate troll and the real patch notes are going to contain amazing build diversity options… but not holding out much hope.

But to be fair Hyung, that trait is one of the reasons our traits are so limited (the other is Deceptive Evasion).

Moving it to 25 might highlight the issue, although the trait feels more placed as a high-level trait.

If it’s such a big issue though, remove + merge baseline. Functionally the trait is no better at 5, it’s still too strong compared to our baseline power. Hrm… maybe reduce all Clone/Phantasm CDs by 10%, and make the trait (still at 25 points) a -10% one.

Carighan.6758:

But to be fair Hyung, that trait is one of the reasons our traits are so limited (the other is Deceptive Evasion).

Moving it to 25 might highlight the issue, although the trait feels more placed as a high-level trait.

If it’s such a big issue though, remove + merge baseline. Functionally the trait is no better at 5, it’s still too strong compared to our baseline power. Hrm… maybe reduce all Clone/Phantasm CDs by 10%, and make the trait (still at 25 points) a -10% one.

I’ve heard you say this a few times already!

And yes you’re right, the cooldowns on our illusions are too long, which is why this trait was virtually a requirement for all our builds.

If cooldowns WERE being reduced this would be less disappointing (although still not helpful for build diversity, their alleged stated goal) but there’s no way they’ll reduce cooldowns along with this change as it’d make shatter mesmer even more powerful.

Anyway, the point of my post wasn’t to discuss whether or not we’re under/overpowered before or after this change. It was just to state my utter disappointment at the fact that this goes entirely against their state aim of diversity, which had previously had me excited.

Oh, and I’ve heard this argument a lot that it “feels like a high level trait”… which doesn’t make sense, these things don’t exist in a vacuum. If the cooldown on all our illusion summoning skills was 2 minutes (go with me here) then you couldn’t say this was a high level trait… it would be an outright requirement and as such should be low in the tree.

The cooldowns we have now are much closer to making this trait a requirement than a nice-to-have, which is why so many mesmers took it in their builds – I think we all thought “ArenaNet must expect us to take this trait, that’s why our cooldowns are so long”.

Given our class mechanic destroys the things we produce we need to have a way to produce them rapidly!

In few words: so far Mes has been balanced including that trait in the baseline.

Like phantams few months ago were balanced basing on thei perfomance when traited for istant attack: bug got fixed, the balance based on that went nuts.

Same here.

My mesmer was built around Blade Training, Chaotic Dampening, Warden’s Feedback and of course, Illusionists Celerity – i.e., IC + traits for my three weapons. These changes are a straight nerf to that build, for no obvious gain. I’d have been ok – just – if IC were made a Master trait, and not a Grandmaster minor. (0/10/20/20/20)

If they would fix Illusionary Elasticity I could move to 0/0/20/20/30. Otherwise it might be time to shelve the mes and main necro again for a while :- (

Hm, it’s only a matter of hours until we find out what is officially confirmed. Though I am taken interest in the Shatter Conditions trait the most. We’ll see soon enough and modifying our builds.

Hyung.6140:

If the cooldown on all our illusion summoning skills was 2 minutes (go with me here) then you couldn’t say this was a high level trait… it would be an outright requirement and as such should be low in the tree.

Exactly not.
If it’s a “requirement”, it needs to be merged. Traits need to be optional things, or there’s automatically no diversity.
Not that this works for any class in any MMO, but one can try to get closer to the optimum at least. :P

Sooo in sPvP I used a 0/20/30/20/0 build… Pretty much unkillable…. Anet thinks they have won… they have won nothing.

Carighan.6758:

Hyung.6140:

If the cooldown on all our illusion summoning skills was 2 minutes (go with me here) then you couldn’t say this was a high level trait… it would be an outright requirement and as such should be low in the tree.

Exactly not.
If it’s a “requirement”, it needs to be merged. Traits need to be optional things, or there’s automatically no diversity.
Not that this works for any class in any MMO, but one can try to get closer to the optimum at least. :P

I think we actually agree here. My point is that if it’s a given that the skills are going to be underpowered in the first place and you need a trait to make them useful, that trait needs to be low in the tree if your goal is build diversity.

We both agree that the skills shouldn’t be underpowered in the first place.

I’m just saying Anet can’t have their cake and eat it – underpowered skills with a trait that makes them worthwhile buried deep in a tree does NOT mesh with ‘build diversity’.

I’m NOT claiming that requiring this trait in the first place is good design.

But we’ve all pretty much adapted to needing those 5 points in Illusions to not feel like we can’t get enough illusions out on non-shatter builds.

I think “underpowered skills with a powerful trait” could as well be our class motto.

I also think that it’s close to the main issue the Mesmer-class has right now: Our builds are powerful, but we are powerful for the wrong reasons.
Think about baseline Mantra of Pain, no traits. Useful? Yes/No?
Or baseline Phantasmal Defender, no other signet or trait. Useful?

I’d really love to nerf some traits or outright change them (too many traits affecting the same few things, really), but in turn increase base power substantially. Would make lowbie Mesmer less painful to play, too.

IC change … lets not go there.

On another cheerful note, they seem to like our interruption skills.
How viable are those for high end PvE where almost every boss has if not interrupt immunity then at least you have to burn through a lot of CC to actually have a chance to use one?

Anyone know what time the official notes are being released?

Korusef.3714:

How viable are those for high end PvE where almost every boss has if not interrupt immunity then at least you have to burn through a lot of CC to actually have a chance to use one?

If you use an interrupt skill on a boss which cannot actually be interrupted (~90%+ of them, even if Defiant is off), then you still get credited for an interrupt.

I.e.: This is awesome.
You can actually get 3 full interrupts with F3. Very easy to see for yourself on the Archdiviner in the Colossus Fractal: When he channels to spawn the AE circles, shoot a ton of Interrupts at him. All get credited (you see the Interrupted-text, too), but he never stops channelling.

Whether this makes a build centred around the traits useful? Don’t know. For maximum PvE potential you’d need to take 10/30/30/0/0 or something like that. Sad the buff to halting strike didn’t come through, or that could have been good. I’ll give it a spin with my current 20/20/30/0/0 interrupt-build and report back.

Belenwyn.8674:

Illusion

The Minor Adept trait “Illusionists Celerity” has been made the Minor Grandmaster trait and the other Minor traits have been pushed down.

If this happens… well, lets just say it wont end well for whoever proposed this change.
unless, ofcourse if we get alot of other traits to make more builds viable, which i hope!

Alissah.9281:

Belenwyn.8674:

Illusion

The Minor Adept trait “Illusionists Celerity” has been made the Minor Grandmaster trait and the other Minor traits have been pushed down.

If this happens… well, lets just say it wont end well for whoever proposed this change.
unless, ofcourse if we get alot of other traits to make more builds viable, which i hope!

Or:
http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/36158250.jpg

Carighan.6758:

I’d really love to nerf some traits or outright change them (too many traits affecting the same few things, really), but in turn increase base power substantially. Would make lowbie Mesmer less painful to play, too.

Unfortunately you can’t do both at the same time (balancing-wise). And you can’t “passively” increase the skills first, too. So the only way while not overpowering the mesmer is to nerf them to ants and then very, very slowly make them to humans again.

Yes I know Nretep. In an ideal world I’d do Nerfs + Buffs at the same time, but it’s rarely an ideal world (I am a developer, though I don’t work on MMOs :P ).

Nretep.2564:

Carighan.6758:

I’d really love to nerf some traits or outright change them (too many traits affecting the same few things, really), but in turn increase base power substantially. Would make lowbie Mesmer less painful to play, too.

Unfortunately you can’t do both at the same time (balancing-wise). And you can’t “passively” increase the skills first, too. So the only way while not overpowering the mesmer is to nerf them to ants and then very, very slowly make them to humans again.

I don’t think this is true. You may be being sarcastic and I totally missed it.

I would think that during a rebalancing they would nerf what they think is OP and buff other things enough so that the player base would say, “hmmm… I lost this but that looks interesting…”

A straight up nerf with tepid buffs is not going to meet the stated goal of build diversity.

But we shall see in a few hours.

The IC nerf is missing from this version of the patch notes: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/25th-June-Patch-Notes/first

TooBz.3065:

I would think that during a rebalancing they would nerf what they think is OP and buff other things enough so that the player base would say, “hmmm… I lost this but that looks interest…”

They are sort-of doing that by also substantially increasing Phantasm life expectancy.

Still, it can’t truly be done. You need to do one thing at a time as a dev, and doing this buff/nerf is really difficult to fully test and balance.

I think those are just the first leaked notes, there was a subsequent leak that included the IC nerf.

Carighan.6758:

TooBz.3065:

I would think that during a rebalancing they would nerf what they think is OP and buff other things enough so that the player base would say, “hmmm… I lost this but that looks interest…”

They are sort-of doing that by also substantially increasing Phantasm life expectancy.

Still, it can’t truly be done. You need to do one thing at a time as a dev, and doing this buff/nerf is really difficult to fully test and balance.

The problem is that each nerf makes the game less fun and interesting for the nerfed. For example, I really enjoyed Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, but they nerfed biotic power and buffed weapons until it didn’t make sense to run a biotic class. (At least when I quit). Each time they made the change the game was a little less fun to play.

Now some of this is due to familiarity and learning the skills sets / tactics, but in October / November WvW felt like armies of demigods clashing. Now it feels like armies of kids with foam padded sticks.

That can’t be good.

IC nerf will have a HUGE impact on a lot of builds. Hopefully the first leaked patch-notes are the truth ones, or they gonna also change the CDs of all illusion-related skills.
But we’ll see within the next 1-2 hours how all the metas gonna change (or not).

Well, it’s happened: IC now costs 20 points more, and Blurred Frenzy takes retaliation damage. We’ve gained some additional ‘on interrupt’ skills it’ll take us a while to work out what to do with. Overall, a sad day for mesmers.

Prismatic Understanding is pretty cool now at least.

My build that cost 55 points and left me 15 to play with, now costs 75. Thanks ANet!