Guild Wars 2

Besides lowering the cooldown on the skills, two things I think would help the weapon are:

1) Make the phantasm work like Iliadri’s visions, i.e. they are created and move towards the target before blowing up. They give confusion (5 stacks) to 5 targets caught in the blast radius (240?). It also does direct damage, and scales better with power, so it is more useable in power or condition damage builds. A 20 second recharge would be about right.

2) The phantasm should have the blast finisher instead of ‘the prestige’, because doing the combo in a damaging AoE removes the stealth e.g. Chaos Storm, which I’d have thought was an obvious combo, plus it comes more in line with other phantasms having a combo finisher. The delayed triggering of the combo with ‘the prestige’ isn’t that intuitive or reliable, with the phantasm being the blast finisher you could summon the phantasm on top of the mob if you were standing beside them.

As long as Cleansing Conflagration offers decent condition removal and The Prestige still stealth on a good cd, i’m ok with nearly everything.

If the iMage did an AoE attack, and cleansing conflagration allowed one condition to be removed from up to 5 targets, that would be a nice addition to the class, I think mesmers could do with an AoE cleanse on a weapon skill, albeit traited in this case. At the moment the best you can expect is one condition being removed by the phantasm.

Probably the original idea of having the phantasm move towards the target and explode is not the best implementation, but I think its attack should be AoE and a blast to bring it in line with other phantasms. If like iSwordsman, when you cast the phantasm in a field you get the combo, but also when the phantasm does it’s attack the combo also applies to them, centered on them.

Also like iSwordsman, I think that iMage should stay at a distance, it’s attack would be it disappearing in a puff of smoke, and reappearing 3 secs later at the target and doing it’s attack (AoE damage, confusion, blast), before leaping away from the enemy again.

I am liking the stealth attack idea. Maybe rename it iJoker/iJester and have it breath fire or maybe drop a bomb then jump away with a little hysterical laugh. ^^ But I really do love my traited condition removal on bounces from the iMage is it is a toss up if I want to see it changed that much.