simple buffs

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Posted by: Stand The Wall.6987

Stand The Wall.6987

yup yup another buff/nerf thread. here goes.

domination
blurred inscriptions – 1sec to 2sec
furious interruption – remove a condi when you interrupt a foe, single hits can remove more then one condi
imagined burden – might 5sec to 8
dueling
harmonious mantras – remove toughness and extra cast, mantras now cast themselves
chaos
metaphysical rejuvenation – 10sec to 5sec
bountiful disillusionment – radius 240 to 360
inspiration
restorative mantras – radius 240 to 600
persisting images – increased health 20% to 50%
protected phantasms – distort 1sec to 2, prot 2 sec to 4
temporal enchanter – 2sec to 3
illusions
the pledge – condi remove 1 to 2, cd reduction 1.5 to 2
phantasmal haste – 20% to 50%
ineptitude – replace confuse with 3sec slow
chronomancer
lost time – remove icd

sword
mind spike – damage w/boon 0.9 to 1, w/out boon 1.32 to 2
offhand
illusionary riposte – block all attacks for 1 sec creating a clone if attacked, can create a clone and use counter blade
phantasmal swordsman – 20sec to 15sec
focus
phantasmal warden – can move and attack
pistol
phantasmal duelist – half as many attacks twice as much damage
staff
chaos storm – 0.33 to 1, always dazes on 1st pulse

mirror – 5k heal
ether feast – 4k heal, heal per illusion 1k, cast time 3/4

mantras
of resolve – radius from 240 to 600
of concentration – radius from 240 to 600, doesn’t break stun, stab 3 stacks 5sec
well of precog – pulses aegis and stab, restores 100 endurance
arcane thievery – 35sec to 20sec
illusion of life – 15sec to 30sec life duration
mimic – 75sec to 60sec
phantasmal disenchanter – health increased 300%, no bounce preference, radius 240 to 360
time warp – 180sec to 120sec
moa – 180sec to 120sec, can no longer cast in stealth, is unaffected by quickness, passive 20% to 50%
grav well – 90sec to 60sec
mass invis – instant cast

Team Deathmatch for PvP – Raise the AoE cap for WvW – More unique events for PvE

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Posted by: Makai.3429

Makai.3429

Mind Spike: Average the boon/non-boon damage out as the new base damage and deal additional AoE damage when a boon is stripped.

Proud disabled gamer. Not everyone has the capacity to git gud.

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Posted by: OriOri.8724

OriOri.8724

That’s quite a list….

I don’t understand your logic behind buffing mirror and nerfing ether feast. That’s a huge nerf to the healing power of ether feast, even at 3 illusions out you would heal less than you currently do, albeit only a few hundred. But with only 1 or 2 illusions out you would be healing for ~1,000 less health than currently. As for mirror, its already quite a strong heal per second when traited through the chaos line. If it were to be buffed I would decrease the cast time to 1sec and also increase HP contribution to 1 (66% increase in HP contribution).

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Posted by: Stand The Wall.6987

Stand The Wall.6987

Mind Spike: Average the boon/non-boon damage out as the new base damage and deal additional AoE damage when a boon is stripped.

sounds good.

I don’t understand your logic behind buffing mirror and nerfing ether feast.

whoops lol. kinda sped thru that part. what you said makes sense.

Team Deathmatch for PvP – Raise the AoE cap for WvW – More unique events for PvE

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Posted by: Fay.2357

Fay.2357

I feel like these are by and large just a bunch of random changes with absolutely zero vision or thought behind them. Maybe this would make more sense if you discussed your overall goals with these changes and the rationale for each particular one.

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Posted by: Stand The Wall.6987

Stand The Wall.6987

snipples

well yeah they are random.
what do you expect I do, go thru every change and have a sit down q&a session? I just felt like throwing around some ideas, I’m not here to justify my stance or some such nonsense. lol, get reel brah. :P

Team Deathmatch for PvP – Raise the AoE cap for WvW – More unique events for PvE

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Posted by: OriOri.8724

OriOri.8724

snipples

well yeah they are random.
what do you expect I do, go thru every change and have a sit down q&a session? I just felt like throwing around some ideas, I’m not here to justify my stance or some such nonsense. lol, get reel brah. :P

No, but we do expect you to put some thought into each proposed change and how it meshes with all of your other proposed changes. Changing things just for the sake of changing them is how you get horrible balance.

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Posted by: Fay.2357

Fay.2357

snipples

well yeah they are random.
what do you expect I do, go thru every change and have a sit down q&a session? I just felt like throwing around some ideas, I’m not here to justify my stance or some such nonsense. lol, get reel brah. :P

No, but we do expect you to put some thought into each proposed change and how it meshes with all of your other proposed changes. Changing things just for the sake of changing them is how you get horrible balance.

Yep. I don’t expect you to have a Q&A session for each change. I do expect you to have each change thought out with reasoning as to why it’s being made and how it will impact balance as a whole. Without that, this is even less useful than chucking random darts at a board and making random changes to the skills you hit.

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Posted by: Malice.8439

Malice.8439

snipples

I just felt like throwing around some ideas, I’m not here to justify my stance or some such nonsense. lol, get reel brah. :P

So why are we supposed to pay attention to you?

All warfare is based on deception.
- Sun Tzu, Art of War

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

To sum up these changes you ask for:

Buff the least fun stuff to fight against like stealth camping with the pledge.
Buff numbers on stuff no-one ever uses because they mechanically make no sense or are mechanically not useful.
Make changes to things that make using the skills faceroll like blurred inscription change.

The only things I think have any merit in this post are arcane thievery cool down reduction, well of precognition change and signet of humility being 120s cool down.

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Posted by: Fay.2357

Fay.2357

The only things I think have any merit in this post are arcane thievery cool down reduction, well of precognition change and signet of humility being 120s cool down.

A broken clock is still right twice a day.

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Posted by: Stand The Wall.6987

Stand The Wall.6987

well if theyre bad theyre bad, that’s alright.
just felt like sharing ideas, not getting into some argument over whats best for Mesmer. I’m sure you guys have that covered.

Team Deathmatch for PvP – Raise the AoE cap for WvW – More unique events for PvE

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Posted by: Fay.2357

Fay.2357

well if theyre bad theyre bad, that’s alright.
just felt like sharing ideas, not getting into some argument over whats best for Mesmer. I’m sure you guys have that covered.

Honestly, I’d be embarrassed to call something like that “my ideas”, but to each their own I suppose.

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Posted by: Windwalker.7421

Windwalker.7421

The very first change had me thinking “oh boy…”

“blurred inscriptions – 1sec to 2sec”

I’ve been playing around with BI builds a bit lately and at first thought that would almost seem reasonable, but then when you do the math it really is anything but. You can easily fit 4 sigils in a build and still have Blink or another utility of your choosing. That would mean 8 seconds of Distortion, not counting F4.

The river of tears that would ensue would be truly monumental. ;-)

What BI does need is to clear 2 Conditions instead of 1. This would provide a viable amount of cleansing without the need for Inspiration, opening up Domination builds that don’t need Inspiration.

I do kinda agree that many of the other suggestions are not really trying to solve a problem or open up more build variety (horizontal balancing), but merely tweak something that probably would end up being just as useless as always…or worse, become instant FotM overnight such as 2s Distortion on BI. ;-)

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Posted by: Stand The Wall.6987

Stand The Wall.6987

lol that’s petty.

snipples

so what about this:
blurred inscriptions – 2sec distort, 2 condi cleanse, 10sec icd -20% signet cd, moved to gm
imagined burden – moved to master, might gain removed

that way because its moved to gm the user would have to choose between the 2 other good gm traits. I doubt anyone would roll with 4 signets lol, especially not in pvp. 2 max, the heal and the shatter recharge one + moa, but moa is on a pretty long cd so the distort isn’t going to be that op. all of the signets I mentioned have long cast times too.

Team Deathmatch for PvP – Raise the AoE cap for WvW – More unique events for PvE

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Posted by: OriOri.8724

OriOri.8724

The 2 second distortion is the problem, adding more stuff to the trait and also moving it to GM tier won’t make that any more balanced.

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Posted by: Carighan.6758

Carighan.6758

I always feel like replying in these threads that these changes aim to fix symptoms instead of actually working on the causes.

However, at the same time, the causes of balance problems in this game are so very very deep-seated in the class setups and combat system that fixing them just won’t happen without a GW3.

I would say they could be worked on, at least many of them, but it’d require the devs to actually do class-changes. And I don’t mean the teensy tiny things they do in their much-self-commended “balance patches”, which frankly are the size of hotfix rebalances in other MMOs. I mean actual balance patches.

Where entire skills might get thrown out, traits moved around and stat combinations replaced, with some regularity. Because that’s how other MMO dev teams find their balance, they swing wildly to get a sense of what the current aspects of each class do, which actually provide meaningful additions to the class, and then toss out the rest to fill the gaps with more meaningful things.

The GW2 devs?

They seem to sit there twiddling their thumbs, or rather I suspect there’s just no one paid to do class balance. So it’s something the other devs do as a filler.

The strength of heart to face oneself has been made manifest. The persona Carighan has appeared.

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Posted by: Windwalker.7421

Windwalker.7421

They used to do that pretty well too IMO, but then they clearly went into maintenance mode, and that whole E-sports crap gave them an excuse to ratchet down the patch cycles even further.

Especially now that they have the “tech” to tweak numbers on abilities where it only affects sPvP, they should be putting out patches at least once a month…even during the season. (You’re only tweaking, not hatcheting!) With the sheer amount of underused/useless traits, abilities, weapons, utilities, etc. they have no excuse not to tweak numbers in an attempt to make some of them a little more competitive in sPvP at least.

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

They used to do that pretty well too IMO, but then they clearly went into maintenance mode, and that whole E-sports crap gave them an excuse to ratchet down the patch cycles even further.

Especially now that they have the “tech” to tweak numbers on abilities where it only affects sPvP, they should be putting out patches at least once a month…even during the season. (You’re only tweaking, not hatcheting!) With the sheer amount of underused/useless traits, abilities, weapons, utilities, etc. they have no excuse not to tweak numbers in an attempt to make some of them a little more competitive in sPvP at least.

That would help but not doesn’t fix deep seated issues with the class.

Classes with poor stab should instead get a decent assortment of stunbreaks, it won’t protect you from CC like stab will but patient and careful use of them will be almost as good.

Classes with low cleansing ability should have high health to offset that extra damage you take by not being able to cleanse as often or have decent regen abilities.

Classes with poor access to blocks, blinds, invulnerability etc should have higher health regeneration (DS regen in case of necro) to offset the damage they will usually take.

This game is suffering from a lack of principles like that and the elite specs that do cover up a classes weaknesses have little to no trade off.

Then we get to the mechanics that just don’t work or scale terribly like pets and stealth.

It’s not a rant at you Windwalker as you are on the forums a lot, just saying the game cannot be salvaged by numbers tweaking and needs mechanical changes (albeit smaller ones with gradual tuning) also.

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Posted by: Carighan.6758

Carighan.6758

Classes with poor stab should instead get a decent assortment of stunbreaks, it won’t protect you from CC like stab will but patient and careful use of them will be almost as good.

True, and it needs bigger solutions. Needs an underlying design which defines “themes”. So that say, you have an aspect of class design, “Defense against crowd control”.

You deem it powerful and necessary enough that everyone should have access to it.

Next you then need to find a handful of “themes” for this. Say you have very sturdy classes which would fit having a pre-emptive way to shrug off CC entirely (Stability). Others are reactive, wiggling out of CC after it has already hit them (stunbreaks). Yet others are controllers, they will actively throw your own CC back at you or become stronger as you CC them, because you’re playing into their strengths. Someone else might have a strongly specialized version of the pre-emptive defense, creating a zone which shrugs off CC but obviously shackling themselves to an area as a result.

Once you have these, assign them to classes, then balance each individual implementation.

Net result: everyone can do it, everyone has different areas where they’ll be the best due to the slight variations in the implementation, everyone has their own theme to the same underlying design aspect.

The strength of heart to face oneself has been made manifest. The persona Carighan has appeared.

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Posted by: Windwalker.7421

Windwalker.7421

Oh I agree with both of you, and no offense taken.

I’m merely saying that in the absence of bigger bolder changes, which I agree would be great and could potentially breathe new life into the game, the fact that they said they can now make sPvP-only tweaks should at the very least be used frequently to make some attempt to bring some of the really poor/underperforming traits, utilities, elites, etc. up a bit.

You don’t have to make them all equal, and you don’t have to take huge risks in upsetting the meta, but look the at bottom 25% of abilities of any class, and surely you can find lots of small numbers to tweak up a bit. You will almost certainly improve build diversity a bit, as there are plenty of crazies like myself who love playing different builds if we were thrown a bone once in awhile here and there to try out new stuff.

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Posted by: Stand The Wall.6987

Stand The Wall.6987

snipples

the game was built around counters, so what you propose I consider to be a bit too drastic. I do believe in giving each class a couple more tools though, and buffing underused/weak traits and such seems like a decent way to go about it.

Team Deathmatch for PvP – Raise the AoE cap for WvW – More unique events for PvE

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Posted by: apharma.3741

apharma.3741

snipples

the game was built around counters, so what you propose I consider to be a bit too drastic. I do believe in giving each class a couple more tools though, and buffing underused/weak traits and such seems like a decent way to go about it.

It’s not about counter or not counter, it’s as Carighan described where classes need a distinct style and feel to how they play and approach universal aspects. It’s easy to describe with CC as it’s a very noticeable effect of losing control of your character but extends to other aspects too like conditions, active defense a and sustain.

Buffing traits and numbers won’t help if it doesn’t work at a conceptual level. It’s like phantasm builds in WvW, they don’t work because at its core they don’t live long enough to do the damage you need them to do.

You wouldn’t care about what dose of blood pressure tablets the doctor gave you if you’re supposed to be on an inhaler for asthma instead.