Guild Wars 2

Wouldn’t it be cool if they made scepter a good condition weapon for mesmer, right now, scepter feels wishy-washy to me, what if they made it so that scepter auto-attack chain inflicted like 2 seconds of confusion? would it be too good? or with some tweaks here and there could be viable? since confusion took a big hit in one of the recent patches, and in pve mobs don’t use activated skills that often, making confusion subpar on pve as well. What are your thoughts?

Given the confusion nerf, I think having a modest amount of confusion on the autoattack would be a good improvement. Also, as many have said before me for the past months, a lower warm-up animation on Confusion Images would be nice. Additionally, while the Torment is great for 1v1 and 1v2 fights where you have pretty good control over who is going to hit you next, in anything larger (or when pets/minions/illusions) are involved, it is extremely easy to have Torment stick to the wrong target. While skill can alleviate this problem to an extent, latency can often interfere with the split-second response time needed to land the block against the desired target when fighting multiple opponents. Finally, I would like to see the autoattack chain sped up, at least for clones, so that they can make better use of Sharper Images.

1) useful clones.
2) torment applies at all ranges.
3) completely change the animation of confusing images.
In my opinion, those are the three steps to make scepter an amazing weapon. For the moment, torment is the only reason i use it (a very strong one tho).

How to apply conditions.

I’m using a lot of scepter here. Note how I’m never left wanting for conditions on my target.

Not a good idea, simply because the mesmer does not have enough MH options for either sword or scepter to be wholly power or condition focused. Sword favors power, but at least it offers enough utility to be useful in a condi spec as a secondary option. Scepter barely supplements either condi or power spec, but just barely as a secondary option for niche, defensive power builds.

Making it focus more on condition damage would probably lead to further nerfs for power specs. Until we get a 3rd MH option, our 2 MH options should be viable for both condition and power builds since we have 2 weapons sets, and 4 great OH options. When that MH pistol comes around , sure, then we can devote scepter to condition damage.

EDIT:
What scepter really needs is to disconnect the attack rate from the animation so it fulfills the role its usually taken for: MH ranged attacks without losing its potency at farther range. Cutting back the windup for CI and adding weakness to the auto-chain wouldn’t hurt either.

My suggestions to improve scepter:
Skill #1: 2nd attack has 20% chance to be combo finisher: projectile
Skill #2: increase range to 1200
Skill #3: remove the purple beam.

The block on scepter is good on 1v1 but hard to manage versus multiple targets. Even pets and clones can get blocked.

The block should continue to be 2 sec but should block multiple attacks during all 2 sec and put torment on those players that attack.

Now that would be fun.

I’d rather see the clone completely removed from the 3rd auto attack and replaced with a stack of confusion or something a little more useful, right now those crappy clones just over write anything decent you’ve already got out.
I also thought #3 would be nice in more of a cone shape spread that can hit 3-5 people in front of you like the guardian staff attack does, maybe toned down to 3 stacks of confusion and a shorter cooldown just to give us a little more AOE capability. Seeing as how Confusion has been pretty much nerfed into the ground I dont think it would be too OP to be able to hit 3-5 people with 3 stacks of confusion every say 7-9 seconds?
I’d very much like to see Mesmer being able to attack multiple targets without having to run Sword all the time.

Make auto-attack stage 1 apply a random condition (similar to staff auto-attack). This will allow the clones to apply a random condition.

This is significant with three clones out — a change has to protect for this scenario. The reason it’s “random” is so you can balance the skill. Again with three clones that a lot of condition love. If you toss in some garbage conditions then you won’t create something overpowered.

Solves a few problems by adding more conditions to the weapon and making the clones useful for something other than “on clone death” trait fodder.