Guild Wars 2

I made the original thread here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Blink-troubles/first#post4069524

But i thought i’d repot it in this thread too since i would consider this bugs…

All the Mesmer teleportation skills don’t work most of the time and feel severely broken.

Blink doesn’t work at all for me. It may work on a 100% flat terrain, but if there’s a bump on the road from where you are to where you want to teleport it usually teleports you to where you’re standing, or not the full distance. It doesn’t work on inclines like stairs or ascending terrain at all. The skill only seems to work on 100% flat terrain, and that’s not always.

It never works thorugh obstacles like fences in the world and across gaps but i guess that’s how it should be (which is weird, considering it’s a teleport). Maybe it’s a feature to prevent exploits or something, but still i thought i’d mention it, and i think it should be able to work like that, but that’s besides the point.

Phase retreat works most of the time, but more often than not it acts the same as Blink. If there’s a bump in the path of the teleport, it won’t go all the way and sometimes it doesn’t work at all and you teleport to where you were originally standing.

Ilussionary leap‘s distance seems to be shortened lately, and even if i use it well within the maximim distance, the clone never appears, but the skill still goes to cooldown (without eve activating the second part of the skill – Swap). Either that, or it acts like the other teleport skills, stops at any bump in the terrain, and doesn’t work on stairs and inclining terrain.

Feigned surge oddly works OK, but that’s an aquatic skill and it’s probably becasuse there’s no terrain there so the engine doesn’t register anything as a different leveled terrain.

Deception should create a clone and conceal you while you’re teleported away from the mess. It doesn’t do that. It often puts you right where you were, or even worse, toward the enemy you targeted. It acts very erratic.

And off topic (not a teleportation skill) Illusionary Warden (focus phantasm) sometimes doesn’t show up yet the skill goes on cooldown.

I realize the rules state i should report 1 skill or something, but those are all just 1 type of skill (a teleport skill) with the same issue, so i listed them all and explained the issue as well as i could.

Those skills were tested on almost every map, and the pattern is the same. They’re severely broken.

Mesmers’ signature skills don’t work and since mesmers are very fragile in combat, not being able to rely on our mobility in the battlefield is a big downside.

I hope someone gets those issues the attention they deserve and fix them as soon as it’s possible. I know Anet is very busy, but Mesmers coolest and most important skills are at this point unusable and unreliable. I hope someone can fix them.

Thank you for reading! And if someone wants to post something, there’s a link at the top of this post to a separate thread concerning this issue!

These are not actually specific to mesmers – AFAIK all shadowstep skills follow the same pattern with the problem buried deep inside the game engine.

However I agree that unlike other classes (maybe except for thieves, but not sure), mesmers suffer from teleport (and pathing, like iLeap) bugs a lot more as those “deceptive” skills are part of our mechanics.

Something has changed recently, causing more of these issues, and others. It appears to be related to how the game checks for lag, and I’ll explain how I’ve come to that conclusion.

First, any skill that ‘teleports’ has the same shadowstep mechanic, blink/lightning flash/phased retreat/shadowstep/etc (henceforth all of them will be called shadowsteps, not because I prefer thief or something, but because shadowsteps were a mechanic of gw1 as well that of course required a clear path and ‘teleports’ were a different mechanic that ignored paths.)

Feigned surge works fine because the first part of the skill takes you forward and the second is the shadowstep to where you started. Since the path you just took was straight it has no issue returning you.

What I am seeing happen all the time, is a shadowstep skill on what is a clear path, will put you where you want, and then immediately ‘rubberband’ you to where you started, as if you lagged. I believe this occurs most often when you are moving. You shadowstep, and appear where you should. In the meantime, the ‘lag’ detection sees that you are not where it expected since it did not take into account the shadowstep, and forcibly puts you back. I have blinked and shadowstepped out of danger, only to reappear in the middle of trouble, and of course, die.

Something needs to be done about this ‘lag’ detection issue, and here is what ultimately made me realize it was this, as I can easily recreate it. Go to a cliff, say, Labyrinthine Cliffs, preferrably one with land below you that if you hit, you’d of course die, or la if you don’t want a waypoint cost. Stand at the edge of your chosen cliff. Click on the nearest waypoint once to bring up the prompt. Now, walk off the edge of the cliff and quickly hit the Yes prompt. If you do it right, you will appear at the waypoint, and then immediately continue your original fall. Except, you may not die where you should have. I fell from the cliff at the second waypoint in Labyrinthine Cliffs and quickly hit the waypoint, only to end up on the ground, alive. I do not know if I lost the waypoint cost but probably did. I was able to easily duplicate this in Lion’s Arch unintentionally while trying to do… something more fun while on mes >.>

The issue with them failing on stairs and other terrain is a different one related to pathing. It does not fully take into account everywhere that you can walk to, and that is related to what is said in the post above. It isn’t an easy fix. With practice you can figure out what is safe and what isn’t, but the above has made that more iffy.

Edit: The issue with illusionary leap is also lag related, for the phantasm itself. You believe you are in range, say ~550, but the server sees you as just outside of it, like 695 range (yes making up numbers but it’s to illustrate the point). The reason the clone/phantasm skills go on cooldown when out of range/obstructed/no target was a ‘fix/balance/nerf’ I believe. I take an extra step toward my target, activate sword 3, then immediately step backwards so I can keep an eye on the clone and the target while not putting myself in danger before I activate swap, since sometimes the clone stops halfway and does a few awkward bunny hops to the target.

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

[edited to make it short]

That’s an interesting observation! But what you’re describing doesn’t really happen to me.

Take Ilusionary Leap for example. I can see the clone stop just next to me, or halfway to where it’s supposed to go. i can swap with it and end up where it was, but it’s not near the mob i sent it to obviously… I dont get “lagged back”…

But the lag part may be connected to the recent update to megaservers maybe?

Today i did some boss blitz at Crown Pavilion. We were on a slope leading to the boss arena, and none (NONE) of the teleportation skills worked. iLeap actually put the clone behind me!

I think the problem is much more than just lag. And i don’t lag much in this game.

Maybe they should redesign those skills to bypass the pathing part since they are teleports. Maybe not for iLeap, because that does require a path for the clone to follow, but for blink and phase retreat, not to mention downed clone, the path should have no effect on the skill.

And again, they used to work great before.
I don’t know about other mesmers, but i rely on them heavily, and i would like to be able to use them without fear they would bug out.

Yeah Illusionary leap does that sometimes, but usually moving a little closer helps it, but also kind of defeats the point to it. The clone stopping halfway is annoying, but if you wait a few seconds, it may move closer. The lag issue isn’t you lagging though it’s the server’s ‘lag detection’ for lack of something else to call it. I normally haven’t had an issue with it activating, but I do remember having the clone appear next to me and do nothing.

They won’t change them from pathing because then they would be overpowered, and allow you to go places you shouldn’t be able to, especially wvw/pvp.

Yeah I remember reading that they were working on the network improvements, and recently, like the past couple weeks, it’s been changed apparently. The reason I believe, was to lower bandwidth usage, but it instead is having serious side effects.

Same, on mes I rely so much on sword 3 and blink. I haven’t really used staff much in a year so couldn’t say much on that, and on thief shadowstep has failed when I needed it the most.

Well if i can’t use it at maximum distance that i’m supposed to be using it (Illusionary leap), then what’s the point? It’s the skill that quickly gets me to where i need to be, and as you said, whats the point if i have to move closer. :/

Yeah, changing the pathing could potentially lead to exploits, but blink has a maximum range too, i’ts not like you can get everywhere with it. :P But i do understand why they made it like that.

Well, some network improvements turned out to be. How is limiting bandwidth usage and making it lower an improvement? Maybe for them (if we’re talking about their end of the bandwidth usage), but it’s not working for us at all…

Right now i avoid all teleport skills. I’m sick of dying from them and having to stop to look where i ended up. :/ The only one i use is Illusionary leap since if that one fails, no big harm done. Others, not so much…

Come on ArenaNet! Please fix this and make it better!

Bandwidth usage for them won’t really save much even if they made a change that would cut usage by GB, as the cost is so low now (for them, unfortunately we are gouged).

I am hoping that they will see this or any other posts similar and make the ‘connect’ so the speak, and perhaps fix the issue. It would probably just take a very minor change to effectively eliminate the issues we are seeing (for the most part). I wouldn’t care so much if it happened maybe 1 time out of 1,000. I wouldn’t complain too much if it was 1 out of 100. But this 1:2 or at best 1:~10 is killing us.

Exactly. If this happened rarely i wouldn’t care, but it’s really interfering with mesmer gameplay.

Same with elementalist Lightning Flash, doesn’t work on bridges, gets you stuck in the landscape.

Xillllix.3485:

Same with elementalist Lightning Flash, doesn’t work on bridges, gets you stuck in the landscape.

Phase Retreat and Blink used to get me stuck in the landscape.
Blink got me stuck in the geometry (like turrets), and Phase retreat got me inside the landscape, out of the map.

Thankfully they fixed that, but at least then, when you weren’t in the caverns or somewhere with a lot of stuff, they worked perfectly. Now you just can’t rely on them.

Sad to see other classes have this problem too, but as mentioned before, all “shadowstep like” skills are bugged… I guess we’ll just have to wait for a fix.

During part of the beta, sword three was an actual leap that allowed you to swap with the clone that stayed in your previous position, and it was amazing.
I would assume it was changed to protect against mass terrain exploits with portal if the experimental teleportation gun didn’t already open that option to literally every other class. So I can’t really figure out why it’s not just a simple leap with another signature Mesmer ‘oh kitten!’ button as the chain skill.
Is it because it’d be too easy to swap into an encounter, use sword 2, and swap out? If word 2 still granted distortion, sure. But blur doesn’t actually protect the Mesmer much with how many AoE options there are. The only significant protection it’d allow would occur in PvE, and only momentarily.
Or it could be because it’d afford the Mesmer too much short-range mobility. We can certainly leap around a lot. But that is a misnomer – because though we have 3 leap finishers, all of which we can equip at once, we have no skills that cause us to actually leap. On top of that, without prohibitive allowances for upgrades or otherwise worthless trait points, we have no speed boosts with substantial up time.
In melee we fight much like thieves, using trickery and deception to stay alive. But when our tricks trick even us – illusionary leap is truly an illusion and often never takes place, deception deceives us with a false promise of refuge, blink does literally what it says by causing us to just blink in place – and our skills and traits lead us to think we have a fair shot on the battlefield, how is the Mesmer supposed to stand out as ArenaNet’s signature class?