Guild Wars 2

After reading about the shatter’s flaws, and people coming up with a clones vs phantasms and trying to make suggestions and changes that made both roles…viable.

So here is my thought.

Clones: They do not damage anyways and look exactly like us. Not only would it be nice if they improved their AI so that they moved like we did, swapped weapons if we did, and was generally more distracting than they are. If we recieve a boon, so do they mirror it (even if it provides them no bonus). Anyways, while that will make a clone build powerful, using it for our shatters is what makes the class work. The shatters would remain the same (if not maybe improved in potency to compete with other burst builds).

Instead of stuns, confusion and distortion (or maybe keep them as they are) or change them so that they deal damage seperatly, like shattering 3 clones deals 30s poison on someone, or deals 3stacks of vulnerability per clone…or something along those lines.

Now, how to ‘convert’ this to phantasms.

Ramp up phantasm health. When casted, they attack whatever target you attack, and deal damage (while they live) according to whatever F1-F4 you have keyed up.

If you have F1 depressed, they will do their regular damage.

When F1 is depressed, F1 goes on CD for 60secs, and the other CDs go on Cd for 15secs. So you can switch what phantasms are doing, but not mow down the F1-F4 keys and have your phantasms unload a heck of damage/conditions stuffs all at once.

It is important to note that you cannot have both phantasms and clones up at once for this type of suggestion. You either have phantasms, or clones, and each would have its strengths and weaknesses.

Thoughts?

(mind you, its only a suggestion)

No….just….no.

While I think our F1-F4 might be able to use some rework, this is simply too much. It would not only make it infinitely more complicated than it is now, but it would potentially kitten us. With the long cooldowns on Phantasms, we would be forced to slowly stack up Phantasms while having 0 clones out. If we summon a Phantasm and they die, then we would be either forced to wait for the cooldown, or to go into “clone mode” (as an aside, how do we switch between these two forms? And what would happen when we use a clone ability while in “Phantasm mode,” since they oftentimes have additional effects?). It just seems incredibly nuanced, complicated, and not really effective.

I feel you have good intentions, but I really don’t see how this can be implemented effectively.

@AV

I get where you are going with phantasm casts and all, but I have plenty of ideas, but as you can guess, I am not completely articulate.

The whole method who need changing, and yes, to a larger degree, phantasms would need their CD’s tweaked again.

This was more in a response to a phantasm build or a clone(shatter) build, and how it can remain seperate, and still work off the F1-F4 mechanic.

After all, the warriors F1 button changes depending on their main hand. A Ranger’s depending on what pet is active (the F2 anyways) and while the bar would change depending on whether you have phantasms or clones out, it wouldn’t change beyond that. (basically a phantasm bar and a clone bar).

It wouldn’t need a huge reworking of our class, but a huge tweak and ‘phantasm’ sets of skills vs clone sets of skills.

I am with you that there are concerns, but I was more or less wondering about the F1-F4 and making a phantasm build over a clone build. And that phantasms could be made to do other things rather than spam damage.

The uniqueness of each Phantasm is what they do other than “spam damage” Different phantasms apply damage differently, or they have additional effects. Berserker applies cripple. Warlock increases damage based on conditions applied. Swordsman delivers one large blow. Duelist delivers a bunch of smaller blows (good for bleed stacking). Mage grants retaliation and delivers confusion (when working right).

I understand you are trying to make it so that if we go Phantasm our shatters won’t be useless, but aside from giving us something other than shatters, I am not really sure this is the appropriate way of going about doing it. Shatter builds utilize phantasms too (albeit in a different way than phantasm builds do), so it would essentially further “lock” these two builds as two distinct builds, rather than allow players to mix and match. Depending on the situation, I shatter some, and sometimes I stack 3 phantasms. More often than not I have 1 or 2 phantasms and rotating clones that I “kill” via additional clone creation (by dodging or using a clone ability) to apply a few debuffs to my target. I would not be able to do this with your setup.

You feel that phantasm builds lock us out of our shatters. To a degree, you’re right; You don’t want to shatter 3 phantasms. But in this vein, you would lock shatter builds out of their phantasms. It just seems as a way to completely separate the builds rather than allow Mesmers to mix and match depending on the situation (I shatter my phantasms when finishing off a mob that is almost dead).

EDIT: TL;DR, I can see where the shatters might need a bit of a rework, as they basically require you to trait to use them effectively, which is a problem most other classes don’t have, but I think having two bars in this sense is probably not a good way to go about it.

You want them to make us less flexible? No.