Guild Wars 2

Ever since the confusion-nerf patch the group play mesmer in WvW has been extremely underpowered compared to other caster classes (ele/necro). I’m talking about group play as in guild groups of 20-25.

Pre-patch (confusion) a guild group would easily have 3 mesmers on their team, sometimes even up to 5. After the patch the mesmer’s damage was halved, combined with the internal cooldown on confusion and now an internal cooldown on chaos armor most guild groups only run 1 mesmer, just for the one reason, veil.

Mesmer isn’t a class anymore, it’s a utility bar:
- Veil (nerfed from 4s to 2s)
- Portal (nerfed to 20 players)
- Timewarp (nerfed to 50% quickness)
- Null field (buffed to 40s cd)
- Feedback (useless vs organized groups as most run 75% melee)

I have loads of armor sets, trinkets and I have tried almost every build possible but nothing seems to do what another class can do without any issues.

Mesmer builds (these are examples, ofc there are missing):

- Confusion

With the internal cooldown on apply confusion when blinding a foe makes it impossible to stack enough confusion to deal any damage, on top of that the damage has been nerfed by 50%.

Confusion hits for 65 + (0.075 * Condition Damage), which in reality would be around 150 damage per hit, if lucky someone would have 2 or maybe 3 stacks on him, so that would be 300 or 450 damage.

Confusion is the main burst of a mesmer, but the damage is negligible. Compared to a necromancer’s burst the mesmer burst is a joke, and not even a good one.

The biggest problem with the confusion was small scale, it was easy to stack 10+ confusion on a single target and therefore it was really strong, right now for small scale it’s fairly balanced, especially for duels. However in group combat it’s extremely underpowered.

- Phantasm

If confusion is not your burst damage, then your phantasms are, it’s on every weapon the skill that does the most damage and it can do alot of damage. For duels and small skill this build is even overpowered, for group combat however, it doesn’t work.

The healthpool of the phantasms and clones is too small, they will die because of random aoe on the ground before they even start attacking.

- Shatter

Same problem with the phantasm build, it’s strong in duels, but useless in groups. You are very lucky if you have 2 clones to be shattered, as they will die in less than a second after creation. Most shatter mesmers in groups will shatter the clone that they created right away, but this damage compared to having 3 clones up is nothing.

- Interrupt

I was very excited when I heard about the buffs for the interrupt builds, The idea is awesome, but then again.. Just as useless as any other build for group combat.

Being reliant on interrupts for your burst/might/immobilize makes the build random, when fighting 20 vs 20, or even more you won’t be able to spot any animations, it’s just too hard to see and the pace of the game is too fast.

This means the interrupt build relies on random interrupts, which is fine, but then again.. Most interrupts a mesmer has are single target.

The only aoe interrupts a mesmer has are:
- Diversion ( if traited 30 points into illusions AND requires a clone)
- Chaos storm (daze is random)
- Greatsword #5 (600 range)
- Focus #4 (1sec cd on pull)

Please, I’m asking you, give the group play mesmer some love

I understand it’s hard to buff the group play mesmer as it will impact the small scale mesmer which is already strong enough, but it’s needed.

Some improvents I’d love to see for the group play mesmer:

- Clones and phantasm’s healthpool and armor scale with the amount of enemies you are facing. Facing a group of 20 players, the clones and phantasm’s health & armor would multiply by 20. This would help shatter and phantasm mesmers.

- Chaotic interruption -> all hard crowd control done by you instead of interrupt, trait remains grandmaster.

- Chaos storm applies daze on creation (100% chance) and pulses conditions every second after.

- More aoe attacks like chaos storm, less RNG based.

- Null field -> remove aoe cap on this skill. There has to be a counter to melee trains.

- Prismatic understanding applies on all allies that you stealthed. This would apply to veil and mass invisibility. Trait would remain grandmaster.

- Gap closers for mesmers (RTL for ele, leaps for warriors/guardians). Something that can close a gap, or would save your life. I agree that there is blink, but I would love to see it on a weapon skill.

- Fix phase retreat, the skill should teleport you backwards, but sometimes it teleports you forward, when trying to get out of a killzone this can be rather deadly. (Fix the randomness)

- Healing signet, passive: remove conditions, active: heals. Or any other condition removal we can count on.

- More out of combat swiftness, I had to switch out to centaur runes just to be able to keep up with the rest of my guild.. Give us a swiftness signet, or any other utility that would give us some more swiftness.

Thank you for reading and I hope that you guys can see that the group play mesmer could use some love

I absolutely love my mesmer, the idea of the class is awesome and it has a lot of potential. I have played for 2k hours on my mesmer and I wouldn’t want to re-roll so I hope the mesmer could get it’s deserved buff.

yeah i agree with u on that one.

i am lucky to be in a very coordinated guild with a lot of mesmers and they encourage me a lot. i sometimes dont even feel like logging in because it makes me mad to just think about the confusion nerf and all the stuff u mentioned. EVERY other class has access to reliable conditions, ours are rng based or nerfed to the ground of the grounds.

all the latest patches have brought us down to a 1v1 build as anet kept balancing for their esport mania, while conviniently overlooking wvw balance and to be quite honest in spvp we got hit pretty hard too and have a hard time to keep up with the other classes.

i am a little scared about the next patch as i fear it will be either more nerfs and so called bugfixes, nerfs with buffs of useless traits and skills, nerfs and useless rng based buffs or only bug fixes and rng based addons…..ugh anet hates us and now they give portals to other classes too

MartyPartys.9187:

Please, I’m asking you, give the group play mesmer some love

I understand it’s hard to buff the group play mesmer as it will impact the small scale mesmer which is already strong enough, but it’s needed.

Some improvents I’d love to see for the group play mesmer:

- Clones and phantasm’s healthpool and armor scale with the amount of enemies you are facing. Facing a group of 20 players, the clones and phantasm’s health & armor would multiply by 20. This would help shatter and phantasm mesmers.

- Chaotic interruption -> daze instead of interrupt, trait remains grandmaster.

- Chaos storm applies daze on creation (100% chance) and pulses every second after.

- More aoe attacks like chaos storm, less RNG based.

- Null field -> remove aoe cap on this skill. There has to be a counter to melee trains.

- Prismatic understanding applies on all allies that you stealthed. This would apply to veil and mass invisibility. Trait would remain grandmaster.

- Gap closers for mesmers (RTL for ele, leaps for warriors/guardians). Something that can close a gap, or would save your life. I agree that there is blink, but I would love to see it on a weapon skill.

- Fix phase retreat, the skill should teleport you backwards, but sometimes it teleports you forward, when trying to get out of a killzone this can be rather deadly. (Fix the randomness)

- Healing signet, passive: remove conditions, active: heals. Or any other condition removal we can count on.

- More out of combat swiftness, I had to switch out to centaur runes just to be able to keep up with the rest of my guild.. Give us a swiftness signet, or any other utility that would give us some more swiftness.

Thank you for reading and I hope that you guys can see that the group play mesmer could use some love

I absolutely love my mesmer, the idea of the class is awesome and it has a lot of potential. I have played for 2k hours on my mesmer and I wouldn’t want to re-roll so I hope the mesmer could get it’s deserved buff.

If clones and Phantoms are to be buffed, it should be based on the Mesmer, not on the number of people you are fighting. That sort of change in my opinion would be stupid and make them VERY overpowered.

No, its better that it interrupts i think rather then a daze. That is down to my opinion.

That wont happen, it would be like 5minutes before you would have people on forums complaining. Sure they could move out of it but unfortunately they wont see it like that.

We have a few. iZerker, Chaos Storm, Feedback, iWarden ALL deal AoE damage thats a decent amount we dont want to become an AoE class.

A decent change. However – We need more PERSONAL stuff, to many of our skills are just to group orientated we dont want them to be increased.

I havent experienced that. I have however experienced that if you are needing space due to an oncoming zerg if your target isnt in range (or goes out of range as you use it) the retreat moves you a VERY small distance.

This i agree with, we dont have much that removals conditions without AT that doesnt require traits for it work. Maybe have it a bit more Mesmer orientated, maybe have it so that conditions get sent to clones and the active effect is a Heal + Clone summoned that takes X number of conditions runs towards target and explodes gives the conditions to all targets in Range (could be small say 120-200?)

Again i agree, without Focus we have NOTHING that doesnt revolve around RNG that gives a VERY small Swiftness duration.

I understand and agree with the RnG portions of the OP, whether group play or otherwise. There is way too much of that in mesmer utilities and traits. Specific to your group play focus, you make some good points about confusion, shatter and phantasm specs, and I do think the mesmer is still highly regarded as the best dueling class.

For group support, mesmer is absolutely not “just a utility bar”, at least not in my WvW experiences. First, mesmer AoE interrupts can be devastating in group play. There are plenty of sources – actually the list you provided is a generous pool to choose from, spread across diverse weapons which allow a decent number of sources. The “randomness” procs well enough for them to be useful. The Diversion comment “and requires a clone” made me chuckle because seriously, one single clone (we have endless access to) can cause so much disruption (Imbued Diversion with Chaotic Interruption or Confounding Suggestions for example). One clone to potentially AoE stun or immobilize, chill/cripple/blind on no cool down?? That’s huge. Yes, you have to trait to get this, but you have to trait into something for interrupts, right? You can still build a nice, damaging dealing and even condition focused build around interrupts (I and others I know have).

On the subject of interrupts, can you clarify what you’d like Chaotic Interruption to change to? Are you saying it should proc on daze and not interrupt? If that’s the case, that would be a nerf as we have much more capabilities to interrupt than daze … daze of course being one of the primary interrupt sources but then you have pushes/pulls, etc. Also, you forgot Sword #4 counter blade as an AoE interrupt source.

You don’t mention the incredible group support functions the mesmer brings. There’s so much we can bring to the table. Utility, boons, healing, stealth as you mentioned (yes veil should be changed back). Really there is a lot there. So many people like to make the argument that “mesmers don’t do support as well as other classes”. While that may be true in some cases, I don’t believe other classes do it THAT much better to totally snub what mesmer can do in these areas. If your party make-up wants to spec into damage/condition or whatever and need a support presence, mesmer can more than step up to the task to great effect in this area.

- Clones and phantasm’s healthpool and armor scale with the amount of enemies you are facing. Facing a group of 20 players, the clones and phantasm’s health & armor would multiply by 20. This would help shatter and phantasm mesmers.

+Dunno if even possible, also boss mob phantasms lol no plz.

- Chaotic interruption → daze instead of interrupt, trait remains grandmaster.

+Would make it much less viable I think, it’d mainly work on diversion, I like it on interrupt. And it would just make it sure fire hit, so traited diversion(aoe) you will proc on 15 people? A bit much IMO. Would be a great tool, but you’d have to nerf Chaotic interrupt for it to not be OP, and I like it proccing on my wave and into the void, gives it more use than on 1 skill alone.

- Chaos storm applies daze on creation (100% chance) and pulses every second after.
Something like 1s daze on creation would be nice for a group fight, pulses every second after = instant lockdown vs anything not running stability = OP

- More aoe attacks like chaos storm, less RNG based.
Some more AoE would be nice, wouldn’t know where to put it though?

- Null field → remove aoe cap on this skill. There has to be a counter to melee trains.
+I wouldn’t say remove, increase it to 10 just maaybe but :/

- Prismatic understanding applies on all allies that you stealthed. This would apply to veil and mass invisibility. Trait would remain grandmaster.
+I like it

- Gap closers for mesmers (RTL for ele, leaps for warriors/guardians). Something that can close a gap, or would save your life. I agree that there is blink, but I would love to see it on a weapon skill.
+ I don’t really feel like I need more of that, it would just become too much for small scale fights. It’d be fine if illusionary leap worked more often, or maybe was ground targetted? Ground targetted would also help make up for this out of combat mobility people are so sad about.

- Fix phase retreat, the skill should teleport you backwards, but sometimes it teleports you forward, when trying to get out of a killzone this can be rather deadly. (Fix the randomness)
+ I think it has to do with you having targetted something? It teleports backwards from your target regardless of orientation.

- Healing signet, passive: remove conditions, active: heals. Or any other condition removal we can count on.’
+I’m running condi removal on mantra and using the healing mantra(possibly with 3x cast), or for group the condi removal on shatters/null field. Now that I’m used to running with the healing mantra it’s not too bad. Besides mesmers are already kinda harder to catch, so condi will always be a counter.
I think it’s more the current state of necro that bothers us?

- More out of combat swiftness, I had to switch out to centaur runes just to be able to keep up with the rest of my guild.. Give us a swiftness signet, or any other utility that would give us some more swiftness.
+Running with focus and traited blink works. Air runes(great with healing mantra) if you like em. I think it kinda fits with the mesmer, we got teleports and are harder to catch in close combat, but not so good at getting away.
If you run with a group they should have enough fields to keep pretty much perma swift?

Though I do agree with some group love aside from just being there for the ulities.
Just most of your suggestions seem a bit extreme from my side.

In my opinion, two changes could be enough:
1) change Mind stab into a strong aoe. I dont care about CD, just needs to be good.
2) replace confusion&glamour traits with something else.

I did not read all your post but… phase retreat? You clearly dont know how it works. If you want to use it as gap opener you need to target something behind you. It never failed for what i wanted to do.
The only thing that sucks about it is that you can stuck.

edit: Just finished to read. As you know we’ll have more traits/skills in the future so we only have to hope that they will be good and group oriented.
In my opinion, if Anet give us another viable glamour build (and this is easily done with good traits) then we can be happy.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

If clones and Phantoms are to be buffed, it should be based on the Mesmer, not on the number of people you are fighting. That sort of change in my opinion would be stupid and make them VERY overpowered.

In my opinion they wouldn’t be overpowered, the damage would remain the same, it’s jus the health and armor that would scale. This would make them a bit harder to kill instead of them dying in random aoe. This way the mesmer can actually confuse the enemy force by having them chase a clone down.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

No, its better that it interrupts i think rather then a daze. That is down to my opinion.

Sorry, my mistake, i meant all hard cc instead of interrupts.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

We have a few. iZerker, Chaos Storm, Feedback, iWarden ALL deal AoE damage thats a decent amount we dont want to become an AoE class.

Zerker and warden die before they will start attacking, this could be solved with what I suggested about buffing their health and armor. Chaos storm is a nice skill, but that’s the only one. Feedback doesn’t do anything if fighting organized groups as that is all melee / aoe based. The chance anyone actually auto-attacking for the projectile is very small.

skcamow.3527:

You don’t mention the incredible group support functions the mesmer brings. There’s so much we can bring to the table. Utility, boons, healing, stealth as you mentioned (yes veil should be changed back). Really there is a lot there. So many people like to make the argument that “mesmers don’t do support as well as other classes”.

Although the mesmer has access to all boons in the game, but moslty on RNG basis. You will get the boons for a short durations, while for example a guardian can put out more boons (not RNG based) which has a longer duration. In comparisation what the mesmer can do is a joke. I’m not saying the mesmer should have the same boon mechanism as a guardian, what I’m trying to say is that it’s not needed for the mesmer to apply the boons. The same goes for healing, you won’t have a mesmer for healing, that’s why you have an ele.

The current meta is about guardians, warriors, elementalists, necromancers and 1 mesmer (and sometimes a thief). The only reason the mesmer is picked is because of the veil, yes it can do much more, but the other classes can do it better.

Thedarkdot.2793:

- Chaos storm applies daze on creation (100% chance) and pulses every second after.
Something like 1s daze on creation would be nice for a group fight, pulses every second after = instant lockdown vs anything not running stability = OP

Sorry I meant daze on creation and pulse conditions after. Pulsing daze would be OP indeed.

Thedarkdot.2793:

- Fix phase retreat, the skill should teleport you backwards, but sometimes it teleports you forward, when trying to get out of a killzone this can be rather deadly. (Fix the randomness)
I think it has to do with you having targetted something? It teleports backwards from your target regardless of orientation.

That might have been it, that the target just went behind me, if noone else experienced this then it probably was my mistake.

Thedarkdot.2793:

+Running with focus and traited blink works. Air runes(great with healing mantra) if you like em. I think it kinda fits with the mesmer, we got teleports and are harder to catch in close combat, but not so good at getting away.
If you run with a group they should have enough fields to keep pretty much perma swift?

I agree that the group I run with already has perma swiftness, but that’s again a point that other classes do bring and the mesmer doesn’t, we’re reliant. Once you fall behind you won’t be able to catch up. For what you say about your runes and skills it sounds like you made the build around having swiftness, just what I had to do with centaur. It’s not a problem, because it will give you perma swiftness, it’s just that you have to give up on other stuff.

Thedarkdot.2793:

And it would just make it sure fire hit, so traited diversion(aoe) you will proc on 15 people? A bit much IMO.

For what I’ve tested the trait dazes 5 people, no matter how many clones you have up. I have tested this very fast so I might be wrong, I’ll check this later. But even if it was 15, how would this be OP compared to the ele’s static field which has no aoe limit?

MartyPartys.9187:

Clones and phantasm’s healthpool and armor scale with the amount of enemies you are facing. Facing a group of 20 players, the clones and phantasm’s health & armor would multiply by 20. This would help shatter and phantasm mesmers.

Make them scale on a percentage of mesmer’s effective health (armor/hp), with a cap on 75% of mesmer’s EH for phantasms and 50-60% for clones against 20 people.

MartyPartys.9187:

Chaotic interruption -> all hard crowd control done by you instead of interrupt, trait remains grandmaster.

Seems a bit OP, but I concur that interrupts are so random that is hard to base your playstyle on them.

MartyPartys.9187:

Chaos storm applies daze on creation (100% chance) and pulses conditions every second after.

This sounds very nice!

MartyPartys.9187:

More aoe attacks like chaos storm, less RNG based.

Maybe a decent phantasm for torch? Would love a kamikaze phantasm exploding in a fire

MartyPartys.9187:

Null field -> remove aoe cap on this skill. There has to be a counter to melee trains.

Make it prioritize buffs, so it strips stability, aegis and protection over the rest…

MartyPartys.9187:

Prismatic understanding applies on all allies that you stealthed. This would apply to veil and mass invisibility. Trait would remain grandmaster.

This one, too, seems a really nice suggestion.

MartyPartys.9187:

Gap closers for mesmers (RTL for ele, leaps for warriors/guardians). Something that can close a gap, or would save your life. I agree that there is blink, but I would love to see it on a weapon skill.

Just fix Illusionary Leap. Make it a proper leap so the clone doesn’t get stuck on some tiny tiny rock on the battlefield :°

MartyPartys.9187:

Fix phase retreat, the skill should teleport you backwards, but sometimes it teleports you forward, when trying to get out of a killzone this can be rather deadly. (Fix the randomness)

Probably autotargeting issues, works fine for me

MartyPartys.9187:

Healing signet, passive: remove conditions, active: heals. Or any other condition removal we can count on.

Try the mantra? :P

MartyPartys.9187:

More out of combat swiftness, I had to switch out to centaur runes just to be able to keep up with the rest of my guild.. Give us a swiftness signet, or any other utility that would give us some more swiftness.

Doesn’t really apply to group play (you should rely on your group for that), but it would be nice for roaming…