Okay, so the title and the source are a joke – but I do have, what I feel, are two good suggestions for the Shatter mechanic and Mantras. This post was originally a gag written from ANet’s supposed viewpoint, but as you can see in the first couple of responses – that apparently didn’t go over well. I guess if I want to try and pretend to be ANet I need to learn to be succinct (like that will ever happen).
Anyhow, here are my QoL suggestions for these two aspects of the class:
Shatter Suggestions
Mesmer Shatters are highly unreliable. I find that in some parts of the game I can easily manage my Shatters and use them to their full, or at least partial, effectiveness. However, in other areas of the game my Illusions have a snow ball’s chance in hell of surviving long enough for me to summon 3, let alone get them all to the target safely. While my suggestion is far from a perfect solution, I do think that it would go a long way towards adding some much needed reliability to the mechanic.
This idea is sort of based off of how Mind Wrack currently works – the damage per Illusion goes down as you Shatter more Illusions, but the toal damage goes up. Therefore, I suggest that Shatter effects scale in a diminishing returns fashion. Using CoF as an example, rather than having each Illusion inflict a single stack of Confusion have the CoF effect inflict two stacks of Confusion the first time a target is hit by it. If they are hit by a second or third Illusion, have them take a diminished effect of only 1 stack of Confusion. Similarly, Mind Wrack might deal 600 damage from the first Illusion that hits a target, but the second and third would only deal 200. Note that this is regardless of which Illusion hits the target. The first illusion to hit them does the full (in diminished) effect and any additional hits are diminished. If you Mind Wracked three separate targets with different Illusions and with no overlap then each would take 600 damage. Distortion would work much the same, granting 2s duration for the first Illusion but only adding 0.5s for each additional Illusion Shattered.
In this way, you front-load much of the mechanic’s effects and make single Illusion shatters much more viable while not making 3 Illusion shatters more potent. It allows ANet to more freely design encounters with periods of massive AoE without completely negating our profession.
Mantra Suggestions
Mantras are a fun idea, but I – personally – find them tedious. Manually recharging a skill is not fun, no matter how unique a skill-type it is. Having a utility skill that you sometimes feel forced to use the last charge of so that you can manually recharge it to full just isn’t ideal.
My suggestion is to remove the manual charge from Mantras and instead have them gain charges at set intervals. Essentially, they’re a skill that can recharge itself twice, allowing you to pace your uses or else blow them all quickly. It allows for Empowered Mantra based builds to actually use their Mantras or for someone to throw a Mantra into their build for it’s effect without needing to babysit the skill. I understand that some people may be diehards for manually dazing themselves to recharge their skills, but I think this way would open up a lot more feasible build options for players.
(edited by Dastion.3106)
