Guild Wars 2

Hoping the balance patch addresses some of this but some of our skills need change. Most of our utils are mostly unused and some are used all the time (blink, decoy, portal etc). While something like portal is pretty hard to compete with, the other two spots should be an actual decision to make rather than choosing blink, decoy or signet of illusions. A few examples that need change:

Arcane Thievery- even with reduced cooldown, this skill is clunky and misses almost 75% of the time. (Suggestion: make it aoe, taking one boon from enemies around you, three when used on single enemy)

Mantra of Pain- the point of mantras is that the long casttime is supposed to justify the cast. Mantra of Pain is the prime example of that being completely false. Increase the damage done by mantra of pain by a rather large amount and maybe it’ll be justified using it.

Signet of Domination- this signet provides increased condition damage except most of our dps from conditions come from bleed which in all honesty isn’t all that good. Torment and confusion are not good in pve. I suggest changing it to increased power passive, and reducing its CD.

Well of Calamity- this skill is supposed to deal “massive damage” except it doesn’t. It doesn’t provide that huge damage spike that it claims it does. (Suggestion- increase its damage or have it inflict vulnerability as well.)

Weapon skills like Illusionary riposte, spacial surge, Chaos Armor, and Winds of Chaos (to name a few) all need changes. What are some suggestions you guys have?

Well at this point we may as well wait until the patch goes live tomorrow to see what was already changed.

That said, I don’t think portal is a necessity in any game mode outside of organized, team PvP. People in soloqueue usually don’t use your portal, and in PvE its rarely useful outside of JQ, in WvW its only useful if your job is to move the zerg quickly-ish.

I like the SoD idea. We already have a signet that helps our conditions (SoM), so why do we have two? Plus the signet trait is in the power damage line, but this signet is useless for power builds.

I disagree about MoP. That mantra just always felt faceroll to me. You charge it, and then spam it. Skillz! But I don’t know how it could be changed not to be faceroll while maintaining the burst aspect of it and not making it useless. Anet needs to be careful on how to buff Mesmer burst because it’s already crazy high when you can manage to pull of a burst. Buffing WoC and MoP is risky.

I’d love to see other utilities made competitive with Decoy, Blink, and other good utilities. I made a post earlier about how we could make blink not seem so required while keeping it competitive. (People are salty right now because they thought I was suggesting a nerf, so I’m just gonna let it die.)

I really want illusionary’s leap reverted to being able to reliable switch places with a clone, even if the clone died before the duration ends, like it used to be. It was such an amazing skill for melee, and imo it was the biggest nerf to main hand sword. The clone died just as fast as it does now, but at least then the skill was still useful.

I would put the Power Block trait in the dueling Tree. I’d probably switch with the phantasmal fury trait. Since domination is about damage, and that tree already has a trait that buffs phantasm damage by 15%, giving the phantasms fury has more synergy. And then i can grab Power Block more easily and can use in my interrupt build.

And in the dueling tree, I would change Clones bleed on crit to inflict 1 sec of cripple on crit. Because cripple would be FAR more useful in my melee build, and bleeds are pretty weak in general. Melee mesmers needs a consistent source of cripple in my opinion.

That’s all i would change.

Hrm, being at work I’ll write most actual ideas later, but what I’d like to change:

• The entire Mantra category, functionally. I’d probably just rip them out in their current form, rip Signets out too, and re-implement the signets with a slow re-charge cast alike to Mantras. Merge the two skill types, kinda.
• Illusion of Life, I’d like to expand this into a whole category of illusion skills giving huge temporary benefits for significant downsides afterwards.
• Gravity Well, it just doesn’t fit well. We already have a CC elite and the other wells are supposed to mess with time somewhat, which ofc clashes with Time Warp. Maybe time to fold two skills here, accelerating friends and freezing enemies in time.

I think mantras were initially designed to be charged BETWEEN fights. For example, mantra of pain is really meant as a burst, not a sustained damage.

Else, I’d like sword off-hand to be reworked to have more utilities (see my phantasm rework) like mobility and personal damage, staff and focus to have more support, torch to get the CC it lacks, etc…

Reading through all your suggestions and still hoping that after 4 years I’ll finally be able to play my Mesmer using Staff as a main damage oriented weapon.

While some of you have mentioned Staff in this thread, you still name it as an utility weapon or secondary one at least, but then if we go through each ability of the Staff set of skills we’ll soon see that in terms of viability compared to Druids, Revenants or even Engineers, Mesmer supportive utilities on Staff fall short.

Staff brings boons and CC in terms of utility, but if you notice their base duration or their procs being randomized (for boons) and the long cooldown on C.Storm, there’s nothing really there to support with.

I appreciate the recent changes for the Power scaling, that ArenaNet did, for the Illusionary Warlock but it is still not enough to be viable as a main weapon. Especially if we take into consideration the still slow Chaos Winds projectile – the first impact is my nemesis and I usually start it in melee range then use Phase Retreat to have the clone placed closer to the target for faster impacts. Still even with all my planning and careful setup, it is just not enough, it is not competitive with other weapons or professions and we end up playing what performs best…so another weapon.
As for Condition damage output for Staff, I won’t even bother to comment on that, until they remove the randomized proc on Chaos Winds and until the projectile speed again is not tuned in accordance. What good is a condition damage effect on your skills (Chaos Winds) if it is not even able to stack up to not say high stacks tier, but at least medium tier? And the time to reach the stacks is ridiculous.
If I need a good Condition damage output character I’ll player my traps ranger. No gripes with impacts and projectile speed or the randomized condition, but instant slaps of stacks.
I hope that the next balance patch will open up more options in terms of play-styles and surely less limitations that favor nobody, but force us all to play the same way.

Fosio.8217:

Reading through all your suggestions and still hoping that after 4 years I’ll finally be able to play my Mesmer using Staff as a main damage oriented weapon.

While some of you have mentioned Staff in this thread, you still name it as an utility weapon or secondary one at least, but then if we go through each ability of the Staff set of skills we’ll soon see that in terms of viability compared to Druids, Revenants or even Engineers, Mesmer supportive utilities on Staff fall short.

Staff brings boons and CC in terms of utility, but if you notice their base duration or their procs being randomized (for boons) and the long cooldown on C.Storm, there’s nothing really there to support with.

I appreciate the recent changes for the Power scaling, that ArenaNet did, for the Illusionary Warlock but it is still not enough to be viable as a main weapon. Especially if we take into consideration the still slow Chaos Winds projectile – the first impact is my nemesis and I usually start it in melee range then use Phase Retreat to have the clone placed closer to the target for faster impacts. Still even with all my planning and careful setup, it is just not enough, it is not competitive with other weapons or professions and we end up playing what performs best…so another weapon.
As for Condition damage output for Staff, I won’t even bother to comment on that, until they remove the randomized proc on Chaos Winds and until the projectile speed again is not tuned in accordance. What good is a condition damage effect on your skills (Chaos Winds) if it is not even able to stack up to not say high stacks tier, but at least medium tier? And the time to reach the stacks is ridiculous.
If I need a good Condition damage output character I’ll player my traps ranger. No gripes with impacts and projectile speed or the randomized condition, but instant slaps of stacks.
I hope that the next balance patch will open up more options in terms of play-styles and surely less limitations that favor nobody, but force us all to play the same way.

I agree with you – staff is kind of meh in all departments right now.

Doesn’t provide enough support (only chaos storm), doesn’t provide enough control (again only chaos storm), doesn’t provide enough damage (AA is weak and brainless with clones and iWarlock misses most of the time), doesn’t provide enough sustain (even when traited with chaotic damping you still melt from incoming damage due to HoT powercreep. Chaos armour is unbelievably kitten. Beyond aegis in chaos storm there isn’t really any defence other than kiting), and doesn’t even provide much mobility outside of abusing z axis on terrain in pvp maps (phase retreat is weak in wvw open field defensively given the little extra distance gained won’t save you. Only really in surprise reverse PR for burst/attack is it good).

So yeah I don’t get what staff is supposed to be anymore. It’s not even a “jack of all trades” being meh at every aspect.

Curunen.8729:

I agree with you – staff is kind of meh in all departments right now.

Doesn’t provide enough support (only chaos storm), doesn’t provide enough control (again only chaos storm), doesn’t provide enough damage (AA is weak and brainless with clones and iWarlock misses most of the time), doesn’t provide enough sustain (even when traited with chaotic damping you still melt from incoming damage due to HoT powercreep. Chaos armour is unbelievably kitten. Beyond aegis in chaos storm there isn’t really any defence other than kiting), and doesn’t even provide much mobility outside of abusing z axis on terrain in pvp maps (phase retreat is weak in wvw open field defensively given the little extra distance gained won’t save you. Only really in surprise reverse PR for burst/attack is it good).

So yeah I don’t get what staff is supposed to be anymore. It’s not even a “jack of all trades” being meh at every aspect.

Phase retreat is most useful for stunbreaks, not for actual defensive play. Also, if you participate in the legendary bandit executioner events, phase retreat will get you through the bubble, allowing you to either escape or join the fight practically at will.

@OT I’ve been thinking about changing scepter away from torment and confusion to dealing confusion/bleeding damage instead. This could greatly help our PvE condi in shorter fights by allowing at least 1 of the 2 condis that scepter applies to always deal its full damage, while also lowering the cheese/cancer nature of the PU condi build in WvW by removing torment from. Which in turn could allow for easier balancing of mesmer damage in WvW in the future. Although I quite enjoy applying torment with scepter in PvP so still trying to figure out if I would like this change to the weapon or not.

For arcane thievery, I have already posted this in another thread that I can’t find, but I think the following change would make it more useful, more fun, and more in line with what mesmer is supposed to be. Change arcane thievery to an AoE field, inside the field, none of the condis on you/your allies affect you, and none of the boons on your enemies affect them. Duration should probably be 4 – 5 second, which is less than 20% uptime even when its traited for reduced CD. This change would make the skill always useful as an alternative to condi cleanse for short duration condis (or when you get condibombed), as well as introduce some of the mesmer behavior from GW1 as a form of a hex, in that it disables enemy boons while inside the field. It would be incredibly useful skill, and powerful. I would be open to making it so that you just ignore 3 condis on your, and the enemy loses the effects of 3 of their boons instead of all condis/boons (as that might be too OP).

For Torch. Change The Pledge to just a 20% reduction on CD for torch skills. Possibly change PU to be a 33% increase in stealth duration instead of 50% (again, to further reduce the cheese/cancer nature of current PU roamer builds in WvW, which will make it easier to balance mesmers around having higher damage).

Other misc changes I would like to see

• Increase Phantasmal Warlock’s base damage by 50%, reduce extra damage per unique condi on the foe to 5%. Make the projectile a floating one (ie it doesn’t follow the ground, allowing it to work with elevation changes)

• Increase speed of Staff auto

• Have phantasms (and just phantasms) act as proper summons, not tied to targets. They only go away when you shatter them or they are killed, they shouldn’t despawn after their target is dead.

Carighan.6758:

• Gravity Well, it just doesn’t fit well. We already have a CC elite and the other wells are supposed to mess with time somewhat, which ofc clashes with Time Warp. Maybe time to fold two skills here, accelerating friends and freezing enemies in time.

Really disagree with you here. This skill can totally disrupt clumped enemies in PvP or WvW especially if combined with our interrupt traits (Mistrust, Powerblock or CI). That stacks of might/confusion I’ve gotten out of this in just one pulse is hilarious. Besides, “freezing people in time” sounds like yet another CC elite.

I’ve been out of the game the last month or so but maybe I’ll come back with a few suggestions.

Illusion of Life. Period! I’ve never used that skill in my entire career as Mesmer. There is just no use for it and the incredibly long cooldown is off-putting.