Guild Wars 2

In my opinion the pvp in this game is completly broke. It´s crap.
Anet has to do alot of restricions to stop the spam of heal, dmg, dodges, everything.
That´t the core issue if you ask me.

But there is another one. If I look at the talent-trees of each class, like half of the traits are just filling material and I think this rly sucks and does take alot of build-diversity away here.
To just take the most embarrasing exaple. It´s the 50% Fall dmg reducen every class has.
If you ask me Anet need to get a brainstorm table together and do something against it.
And not just some weak passiv or 10% buff/debuffs. It has to be something what is rly mechanicly changing. Ofc something what doesn´t take animation work or at least not much.

You need to have some traits, even in the same talent, what are rly competing with each other and not just one trait everyone is taking because it obviously is the best one.

I mained mesmer once and often have alot of time left, so I started to get some ideas together. I think they are rly good and don´t need alot of whole new animaton work.

I think there are alot of things you can do with the other classes too, to get some rly unique changes done.
Here are the trait ideas: They are not categorized in mastery, some are stronger, are weaker: They are only prototypes, so don´t tell me anything is op, Anet can do what they want with it(obviously).

Domination:

I Stuns and dazes of you are now ignoring stability.

I Changes your Portal ability. Setting your portal exeunt forces enemys in X-radius to the portal exeunt to use the portal.(They can´t port back)(Or variation)

Dueling:

I You are now able too choose a off-hand weapon on the on-hand weaponspot at one weaponset. Your weapon-swap cooldown is decreased.

I Gives you the ability to immediately change posision with your last/latest/one of your clones.(Gives you the ability to immediately port to the position of your last/latest/one of your clones. The clone is shattered by that.)

I Changes every Phantasma ability. You are using the phantasma ability now activly on your own but do not summon a phantasma anymore.

Chaos:

I Your auto-dmg is percentually spit up too all existing clones.(no clone->normal autoattack dmg, 1 clone->you 50% autoattack dmg and the clone 50%, and so on)

I Adds one/two/extra bounces to your staff autoattack.

I Changes your staff illusion abilitys. 2. ability does now change your position with the enemy focused(but doesn´t creat a illusion anymore). Your phantasma does port the hit enemy now to itself on every successful attack, but the attack doesn´t bounce anymore.(The phantasma does now change position with the hit enemy on every successful attack, but the attack doesnt bounce anmore.)

I Changes your Feedback/Timewarp/both ability. Feedback/Timewarp/both does now hold your staff autoattack inside and grands it limitless bounce inside.

Inspiration:

I Every illusion does reflect projectills permanently.(Every illusion has permanently “Mirror”.) (Every illusion has a small radius projectil reflectiong bubble.).

I Every illusion shattered grands near allys invisibility for X/1,0/0,5/0,25 sec.

Illusion:

I Illusions can now see invisible enemys and attack them(, but do not reveal them with their attacks).

I Illusions can now be cast despide no viable path/through object.(How it was once untill it got patched out. Will be especitally nice in WvW and I rly don´t think it is OP. It just adds some uniqe harrasing ability to the mesmer.)

Chronomancer:

What current traits are you proposing are removed from each line?

Anet has to do alot of restricions to stop the spam of heal, dmg, dodges, everything.
That´t the core issue if you ask me.

Do you think it’s better to have healers to supply to the survivability? The game is all about a fast paced gameplay where each is responsible of it’s own survivability and help others in a roundabout way.

All of the trait you propose break the rules of the game… I don’t see how it can improve PvP in any way. It’s like taking a dice on a boarding game and say : if I make a 3 I’ll go 7 cases ahead because I want to be ahead of everyone else.

The core spec of all profession undeniably need some tweaks but not the kind of tweaks that you suggest.

Dadnir.5038:

Do you think it’s better to have healers to supply to the survivability? The game is all about a fast paced gameplay where each is responsible of it’s own survivability and help others in a roundabout way.

Umm… you say that, and so does ANet marketing, yet we have PS Warriors, Quickness/Alacrity from us Mesmers, 10 minutes enrage timers on bosses, huge HP sponges as world bosses with fully survivably and rehealable attacks, and all-do-DPS-first-gameplay for all the other specs.

Much as marketing can paint it a shiney color, this is one of GW2’s biggest problems: really underwhelming class and combat design.

It sounds nice, but in effect it just means everyone plays somewhat same-y and all your skills are individually bland and in turn spammed out like there’s no tomorrow.

Ya, maybe you can propose some of these traits for another elite. However, for replacing, you didn’t list what traits in particular you want taken down. I personally find most of the traits useful in some shape or form. For example, even though that fall trait isn’t useful to you or isn’t useful in pvp, there are some people who use it to portal people in the twisted castle in Stronghold of the Faithful. The only big trait gripe I have is “Master of Manipulation”, and that is because the “mirror” effect gained from it is pretty much detrimental or not beneficial with half of the six manipulation skills in the game: mirror, blink, and mass invisibility.

Eh, I think a fair amount of our traits could be improved honestly. Yes, most of them are useful in some scenario, but there are still traits that are almost always taken, or traits that are almost never taken (or taken for the wrong reasons), traits that are outdated, or just traits that don’t make sense.

Take imagined burden. It’s not strong enough to stack any meaningful might (unless for some reason you want to keep out 3 GS clones, and somehow none of them die), and the cripple is just an odd choice on our ranged power weapon, it would fit better on a melee weapon. The CD reduction is nice, but not strong enough to compete with Mental Anguish, especially after the buff to it in PvE.

Or consider desperate decoy, a passive stealth application. That just needs to be removed honestly, its nothing but spam.

Or master of manipulation, which is always taken for the CD reduction, and not because you need, or even want, mirror on your manipulation skills.

Mirror of Anguish is nice, but with a 60 second cooldown, its useless, especially with all the spam in the game now.

Chaotic transference doesn’t really feel like a trait to me, more like a rune effect honestly. And I don’t like toughness to condition damage when the chaos line is already very defensive in nature. Maybe it should go the other way, condition damage to toughness? That’s more in line with the defensive nature of the line, since it gives you more defense, instead of being an offensive trait.

Chaotic persistence is nice, definitely, but at the same time why is mesmer stuck with such a random condition on our trait for boon duration? Of the 6 classes that have boon duration traits, 4 of them have 0 conditions on receiving their boon duration, guardian only has to be wielding staff, and yet mesmer is stuck needing to have at least 3 boons on them to still have the lowest boon duration from its trait. Its just outdated as kitten honestly. Should be something like 10% boon duration base, another 2% for each boon on us, to a max of 20%. Still gimmicky, still kittenty, but at least we aren’t shafted by it anymore.

Or compounding power. Its a really nice trait, it really is. But its also so counter-productive. We get more power, only to lose it all when we shatter. So doesn’t really help our personal damage out unless we don’t shatter. Why not change it to be a stronger effect (say +75 condition damage, +4% power damage) for 15-20 seconds for each illusion that we shattered when we use a shatter? Still a max of 3 stacks, but we no longer have to sacrifice our personal damage increase to use our class mechanic. And this should still affect MW, since the effect would be applied when you use the shatter, so it will be on you by the time illusions shatter on the target, so no nerf here.

There are more, these are just some of the worst offenders imo. There are plenty of traits we have that could stand to be reworked.

I’d go even further Ori, I think most traits could be removed.

Because, depending on your specific loadout selected (say, “condi damage” or “quickness raid buffer”), you have mandatory traits (reason for removal, fold baseline) or useless traits (reason for removal, no point to it) in the usually-mandatory lines you pick.

I’d hence do the following:

• No more selection of major traits at all.
• You pick 3 out of 6 (soon 7) trait lines. Each is associated with a “role” of your class, you pick which 3 you want to be good at. Say Illusion is all about shatter, Domination about direct damage, Chronomancer about Quickness/Alacrity/Slow (“time manipulation”), etc.
• Each traitline has a certain number of “effects”. These do not just have to be pre-selected traits, and there’s no uniform structure at all.
• Some might give you additional weapon types and skills. Others might not.
• Some might have 9 different effects listed. Others only 2. Depends on the traitline and how strong those effects are.
• Some might even take abilities away! (mostly an elite spec thing IMO)
• Yet others might still have some selectable things in the traitline, but those should be at most a handful in the entire game, because it should be something specifically about that traitline which causes it.

The design goal would be to make traits more of an actual spec choice, not a mere passive result of it. Right now I decide what I want to be, and I have to then make that choice 6 times. Weapons, Armor, Runes, Sigils, Traits, Skills. But I make the same choice, in 6 pieces. It should be one choice ideally, or at least less.