Guild Wars 2

What us everyone’s thoughts about this utility skill with a long cast time. It is definitely one of the least popular phantasm skills with its cast time, 25 second cooldown and lackluster effect.

This skill is very niche as it is and although its ability to tank half the damage dealt to you and 4 allies is promising in a bunker style build I think it could do with an improvement.

I think as well asabsorbing damage to allies it should taunt your target every 7-8 seconds instead of dealing 91 base damage every 5 seconds. I feel like taunting a target would really help fulfill the role this phantasm was created for rather than just be a waste of a utility slot like it currently is.

Alternatively, rather than absorbing damage it could just be given a higher health pool similar to an engineers turret in addition to taunting. It would be similar to an engineers thumper turret in that respect.

In this way, the phantasmal defender could be an answer to the problem of phantasms aggroing targets too much and getting destroyed before they can reach their damage potential.

Thoughts?

Well with the Chronophantasm elite, you would get an additional one if you shatter the first before it dies. This could turn out to be pretty neat. Along with F5, you could potentially get 4 iDefenders in a row up to soak up a fairly ludicrous amount of damage.

Of course it’s damage is abysmal, and thus it’s always a bit of a trade-off, but in an MtD shatter build for example it could give you a lot of sustain in smaller-scale fights. The cast-time is the biggest limiting factor, but we have access to a lot of Quickness now that would help alleviate this.

According to the wiki, there is a bug whereby having more than 1 phantasmal defender out at a time negates its damage absorbing effects. So unless the bug is fixed, this idea would not work.

Edit
My apologies, I misread your response. But even still, I find that there would be more valuable utility skills. The question is do you currently use pd?

Furthermore I find it hard to justify speccing into chronomancy on a mtd shatter build since there are much more useful traits in other traitlines for the mtd playstyle.

“Lackluster effect” is something I disagree on. Yes, it’s usually too clunky to use but given a 50% damage redirection it will basically add it’s HP to yours for single-target purposes.

If it were more usable, it’d be pretty kitten good IMO.

Currently PD is definitely hard to justify. You can create builds that are nearly impossible to defeat 1v1 thanks to PD, but they are niche, suffer from lacking damage output, and are absolutely useless in GvG settings.

However, post patch it might have synergies that we are underestimating??

As for MtD with Chrono, the synergies are amazing and hard to pass up IMO! Dueling, Illusions, and Chronomancy will be really strong. Only MtD can benefit greatly from having so many Clones available. Also as compared to current MtD builds you will gain AoE Blindness, Quickness on shatter (or Chronophantasms), built in 25% movement speed and CC-redux (and thus better armor runes!), super-speed illusions, and Clones on shatter.

That enables some seriously crazy amounts of Torment to be stacked pretty much non-stop, along with Confusion, Blindness, and Bleeds, etc. None of that even mentions Alacrity or F5, which presumably will also apply Torment from MtD.

This will allow Chronomancer to put out more AoE Torment more quickly than any other spec combination.

In short:
- Clone on shatter has great synergy with MtD & 5 shatter skills
- Super-speed illusions on shatter is awesome for any shatter build
- Alacrity is great for MtD builds to get the lowest possible CD on shatters
- Quickness on shatter also has great synergies, as does Chronophantasm or even Lost Time. All 3 GMs jive well with MtD in different ways.
- F5 will allow for even more amazing combos, allow us to double up on our best shatter (CoF), provide more redirect and active play combos, etc.
- Passive 25% speed is pure awesome, and allows you to use better armor runes then Travelers (a must in WvW, but also very often used in arena PvP)

The whole Chronomancy line just oozes with awesome as far as MtD shatter is concerned!

That is not to say there won’t be many other competitive MtD builds that do not include Chronomancy!

Carighan.6758:

“Lackluster effect” is something I disagree on. Yes, it’s usually too clunky to use but given a 50% damage redirection it will basically add it’s HP to yours for single-target purposes.

If it were more usable, it’d be pretty kitten good IMO.

Yup and with MtD & Chrono line, you could basically hit F4 any time to gain Invuln & Quickness, then summon PD and, as you put it, add the PHs health to your own. You would also have a 20s CD on it, and that would get lowered by Alacrity.

This is what I meant, there may be synergies that we haven’t really explored yet. Our ability to gain Quickness at will from either traited shatters or shield, could potentially make the PD much more interesting…if still niche for small-scale combat. (It’s HPd simply don’t scale at all for group fights. It’s HPs are a mere drop in the bucket in bigger fights.)

They should just change it to pulse a ~3s PBAoE Protection (5 targets) every time it attacks in melee, but then it should also have at least double the current HPs.

PD usually doesn’t last long due to extra damage in AoE and cleaving, and that happens to be a norm in popular PvP builds or many dungeon bosses. So unless PD gets some serious buff up in HP or actually inflict taunt, it’ll remain underused even with chrono.

Exactly I dont disagree with anything said so far except to say that wouldnt the viability of pd be improved by removing its damage component and replacing it with taunt.

What if iDefender was permanently blurred so it actually only took damage if the protected people were hit? Would be a rather interesting change and avoid the issue of it just popping by some random area effect.

I will say that putting any sort of hard CC (which taunt is) onto a phantasm is an incredibly risky move. It opens up the potential for having someone locked down purely by AI, allowing you to just whale on them by stacking multiple phantasms and such. I’d strongly recommend against ever putting hard cc onto a phantasm.

It basically provides two possibilities. The first is that the cc is so weak that it’s completely useless. The second is that it’s strong enough to be useful….and so could be stacked and made overpowered. It would monstrously difficult to balance appropriately.

What Fay said. See: Necro elite thingy, before it was nerfed.

Xaylin.1860:

What if iDefender was permanently blurred so it actually only took damage if the protected people were hit? Would be a rather interesting change and avoid the issue of it just popping by some random area effect.

I like the idea, but i would suggest “always blocking” with its shield if its not attacking instead of “blur” (also fits the theme of the phantasm).

Taunt makes sense to me, it would mean that opponents couldn’t ignore the phantasm and would have to destroy it or be forced to stop attacking the mesmer for a short time, which the current skill design does not. Even 1s of taunt would be effective, 2s would be strong. If the phantasm was stationary and only closed the distance (range: 600) to the target when it was about to use it’s taunt it would be more obvious, and have a cast time so it could be outranged, so it would be counterable.

Fay.2357:

I will say that putting any sort of hard CC (which taunt is) onto a phantasm is an incredibly risky move. It opens up the potential for having someone locked down purely by AI, allowing you to just whale on them by stacking multiple phantasms and such. I’d strongly recommend against ever putting hard cc onto a phantasm.

It basically provides two possibilities. The first is that the cc is so weak that it’s completely useless. The second is that it’s strong enough to be useful….and so could be stacked and made overpowered. It would monstrously difficult to balance appropriately.

You are right in saying an aa taunt every 5s would be op, especially with all of our interrupt traits but I cant help but look at engineer rocket and thumper turrets. They have an aa, but have an overcharge feature that allows them to hard cc multiple enemies on a 20 sec cool down.

So perhaps for the phantasmal defender 7-8sec taunt might be too powerful, but what about an attack chain similar to turrets whereby we can ‘overcharge’ the defender causing it to taunt foes in a 600 radius.

I really think some form of taunt on a mesmer skill could help draw attention away from us and our phantasms. Our best skill for that imo is our tank phantasm, it just fits so well in my mind.

keenlam.4753:

Xaylin.1860:

What if iDefender was permanently blurred so it actually only took damage if the protected people were hit? Would be a rather interesting change and avoid the issue of it just popping by some random area effect.

I like the idea, but i would suggest “always blocking” with its shield if its not attacking instead of “blur” (also fits the theme of the phantasm).

Thematically, maybe. Mechanically, I’d always go for Distortion or Blurr. Because there are skills and traits which interact with Block (less so after the rework but some will remain ingame). The idea behind my suggestion is that the Phantasm can’t be touched at all unless shattered so it always provides a meat shield to you and your allies.

Phantasm doesn’t need a taunt, it needs to not have to suicide run into melee, get an easily evaded melee attack in just for it to trigger its effect. What it needs is for it to be given that fancy new mesmer shield range attack animations and become a ranged phantasm. This way it will A. give its buff in a reasonable and timely fashion and B. cause it not to get killed instantly by aoe and cleaves.