Guild Wars 2

^^^Bifrost+The Dreamer=RAINBOWS AND UNICORNS….SO.MUCH.WIN.

You do realize that the unicorn is all about “The D” when it comes to symbols, right? Forget all the rainbow nonsense and think about this: The unicorn is a horse (phrase “hung like a horse”) with a horn (a phallic symbol that’s always hard and primed for impaling). So if anyone should be offended by the unicorn it should be a non-heterosexual female…just sayin’

I said it before when people were all hype about the swiftness boon that a flat 25% movement speed increase would be better overall since it cannot be removed or corrupted and boon duration would be an issue. With the current 50% uptime on swiftness for the signet passive you would need about 50% boon duration to increase your swiftness uptime to 75% which would approximately match the 25% flat rate. In its current form the signet only boosts movement speed by about 16-17% because of the downtime.

for staff trait perhaps [a flat 20% +1% per second of chaos armor], [a flat 15% cd rate +2% for each second of chaos armor], or [a flat 10% +3% for each second of chaos armor]. “something we’re trying out” maybe you should have some form of this trait for testing before dropping it in a patch. That might save you a bit of grief.

There isn’t a single dungeon (aside from maybe high-level fractals) where being a tanky mesmer is a better option than being a zerk/sin. If you feel the need to be tanky, then either you are doing something wrong or there is something wrong with your composition (i.e. you’re with a bunch of people who don’t know how to dodge/deal damage/support the party while still dealing respectable damage.) Also if you insist on being tanky, it is almost always better to run a zerk build (the ones with the most/best damage modifiers) with a few tanky armor pieces (e.g. swapping out zerk gloves/boots for knight’s). At any rate, I seriously hope this was simply a troll post…

If you think dodges and vigor are too plentiful, play a necromancer for a little while…

My asuran (Duke Legerdemain)and human (Duke Phantasmagoria) mesmers.

You do realize that there isn’t a single PASSIVE aoe damage skill/trait in the game, right? At some point in time the player needed to cast something to provide that aoe. I don’t think you know what “passive” means…

What Ross said…but I think the signet would function better as a flat 25% buff like other similar signet passives as well the extra boon (possibly excluding swiftness, but I would hope not—you always run fast, and sometimes you run really fast).

There is still speculation because giving us a mainhand pistol is not giving us a new weapon, it’s making an offhand weapon now a mainhand option. The shield would technically be the only new weapon. I doubt this is the kind of logic anet will be employing though.

Honestly, I wish ANet would either make IP a default characteristic of the class and replace it with another GM or move deceptive evasion to a lower portion of the dueling tree (or to the illusions tree perhaps). I imagine that would create a noticeable increase in “build diversity” for mesmers even if our trait lines are still pretty crappy overall. One can only dream….

It is not likely to be fixed as this is the same issue that comes with only the real mesmer having certain boons at times or signet/mantra icons and also the icon overhead in downed state which also points out the real mesmer. ANet prefers to ignore that mechanic.

The only thing that could make the current version even remotely useful is if it were to steal all the boons (complete boon strip).

My main mez is human. I created a second mez (asura) a while back and leveled him with the XP birthday scroll and tomes. I wanted to carry my GS on my shoulder like a boss (since I generally hate the GS and rarely ever use it on my human) and have that awesome dodge animation. Plus, I like the asuran “attitude” in the game in general.

The problem with many of the mesmer’s traits and skills is the amount of RNG applied. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always had a problem with the way a thief’s steal skill works on mesmers: They steal from a mesmer and are guaranteed EVERY BOON in the game for a time once they consume plasma as opposed to gaining X amount of random boons (which would fall more in line with how mesmers gain boons for themselves). That’s ANet logic for you…

Blair.3796:

I think it’s worth noting that what appear to be premades are not always premades. Sometimes they’re a duo and a trio. Sometimes they’re pugs who teamed up for the day just cuz.

I play the game because I enjoy it. I don’t force myself to play any part of the game that I don’t want to that day. Sometimes I map, sometimes I level alts, sometimes I run dungeons, sometimes I pvp, so on and so forth.

Don’t force yourself to play in a way you don’t want, and don’t force yourself to play for longer than you want. You’ll be happier.

Best advice. +9001

I enjoy the mesmer class despite all the bugs and jacked-up traits and such.

Portal is best used in organized team play where you can utilize it to quickly assault or return to defend a point/prevent a decap (most often with the assistance of a teammate). It can effectively allow you to participate in 2 fights simultaneously if your burst capability is good enough for the blitz attack. It can also be used as a way to escape and save your kitten should you get focused and/or are in immediate danger of being killed due to lack of defensive cooldowns available. Place the portal in a safe spot prior to engaging a point and if you feel like you’re in over your head you can use it to retreat and focus your efforts elsewhere (or if a teammate is nearby they can swap out with you—kinda like in a tag-team match—on the point to keep it contested). The latter kind of play requires a good bit of coordination that is highly unlikely in an unorganized team setting/pug unless the players are of moderately high skill level with great map awareness. If you have access to voice communication, that significantly increases the effectiveness of portal’s capabilities.

Most matches (from my experience) end up being “who has the most range/AoE capability?”, which is why I often swap to my engineer on courtyard for grenades obviously, or my guardian for bunking/team support if that role is already filled. Even then I will sometimes just stay on the engineer and just spam nades in tandem. It’s shameful how effective that mindless spamming is on that map. The only time I ever actually vote for that map is when it comes up with spirit watch and skyhammer (both of which I actually hate more than courtyard). I still believe that the map voting system should be changed to require a map to receive at least 3 votes to be considered in the roll. If a map receives 8/10 votes, there is no reason why the teams should even be forced to play on one of the two maps that possibly received only one vote.

If I’m using focus more often I prefer pack runes (or traveler if you want a little redundancy, 33% during swift, 25% during downtime). I typically prefer to run around most areas with dual-swords and staff, so I use the forward phase retreat trick for a minor blink every few seconds or so. Once you get used to doing it, travel without a speed buff isn’t as annoying. It’s a shame our mobility is so low without “needing” something in our equipment to improve it. (You could also acquire a guardian or warrior friend to give you “permaswift”)

IGN: Duke Phantasmagoria/Duke Legerdemain (yes, I have 2 mesmers!)
Server: Crystal Desert
Role: IDC
Playstyle: Varies, mostly spvp
Playtime: Varies due to work and interest in the game.

This looks like a very good idea. It would be somewhat similar to commands one could give to Heroes in the GW1 expansions. I think a color for each teammate would be somewhat useful as well (so you can know who is pinging without their having to type it out), and also allow only 1 ping from each player over a period of time (like 1 ping/3s or so—maybe less—in the case of accidentally placed pings) to avoid that incessant rapid pinging people have a tendency to do. (I myself have been guilty of such when frustrated, although I make a conscious effort to refrain from doing so.) The ping could linger or pulse slowly on its own actually…

Personally, I believe the turrets should just have a CD that’s longer than the normal life span of the turret (similar to ranger spirits, warrior banners, etc.) That would at least offer some down time between turrets and potentially force some thought as to when and where to deploy turrets since it creates a window of sorts. Also there needs to be a shorter leashing mechanic on when turrets despawn (e.g. if the engineer moves more than 1500 units from the turret’s position—kinda like how mesmer illusions disappear when target runs a certain distance from the mesmer) to include the ones dropped from supply crate. This would also help combat some of the issues with certain classes/weapons having more difficulty than others with destroying “objects” in a reasonable amount of time.

Maybe the shield phantasm will have a trait that draws conditions from the mesmer (similar to how warden absorbs—>reflects projectiles) functioning kinda like having a revenant as a pet? Lol…yeah…that’ll happen

What’s funny is that the classes that currently have access to a shield rarely even use them (aside from engineer). Focus is more likely to be chosen over shield on most Guardian setups, and Warriors are more commonly using axe, warhorn, or sword as offhands. What could a shield possibly bring to a mesmer that is more desirable than the effects of offhand sword, focus, or pistol? That’s the real question that remains to be answered.

The overall amount of downtime between charge uses would remain roughly the same (adjusted to account for the increased recharge time, if any, since they would be removing the need to re-prepare as it is set up currently). That may be slightly more or slightly less dps/hps (most likely slightly less knowing anet) but not enough to be significant considering you no longer have the extra down time required to prepare a mantra. That time can now be spent maintaining dps or reviving or whatever else may arise without having your utilities be unusable until you set them up. Time spent charging mantras is time you can’t perform other actions (like dodging, healing—if not using a charged mantra to do so, use a weapon skill other than say phase retreat, etc) without constantly having the skill reset. No other class is required to go through that kind of ordeal just to be able to USE the utility. I understand that once charged the mantras can be used during ANY action, but once expended, we don’t have nearly enough tools available to have any hope of charging MULTIPLE mantras in combat without having a very specific build. Having to blow a long CD just to ensure the preparation of a UTILITY skill is bad design in my opinion. Most of these issues are non-existent in PvE seeing as how you can pretty much do anything and it works. When having to deal with massive amounts of CC (including conditions like Chill), however, having a utility skill that may only get to be used once in a battle despite having its full CD expire is more of a liability than it should be. Utility skills should not be LIMITED in functionality for most builds, just more effective with certain builds. We need more variety in viable choices, not less if we want to see more diversity. That’s why my suggestion was made as it was, taking pve, wvw, AND pvp into account.

Your distrust of ANet’s ability to make “proper” adjustments is really the issue here, but that has no bearing on the quality of my suggestion. I’m well aware that ANet’s idea of “balance” is really a crapshoot at times, especially when it comes to my main class, but I didn’t even come close to making any of the ridiculous suggestions you’ve stated.

I figured the solution to Mantras was pretty simple. You have 2.75s prep time, which isn’t an issue when not in combat. It’s the clunky in-combat preparation that presents the biggest issue with mantras. I figure the best solution would be to have the mantras only require preparation on skill swap or death/map change (and not on down).

The CD between charge uses is fine as is. The skills’ natural CDs could be summed with the prep time then divided by 2 (and possibly rounded up for the sake of balance) to determine how often one regains a charge of the mantra.

[Mantra of Pain: 2.75s+1s=3.75s, round up to 4s, divide by 2, so a charge of MoP would be regained ~2s after each use (or if they feel that’s too often, then every 2s after the final charge is expended, though I feel the former is a better combat option)]

[Mantra of Recovery: 2.75s+10s=12.75s, round up to 13 (or 14 for ease of math), charges regained at a rate of ~7s]

[Mantra of Distraction: 2.75s+30s=32.75s, round to 33 (34), charges regained at a rate of ~17s]

[Mantra of Concentration: 2.75s+25s=27.75s, round to 28, charges regained at a rate of ~14s]

[Mantra of Resolve: 2.75s+20s=22.27s, round to 23 (24), charges regained at a rate of ~12s]

I feel this kind of change would improve overall functionality of mantras without making them overpowered (especially with a slightly increased overall recharge time—a small price to pay to not have to worry about finding time to prepare while in combat if you ask me) while also making mantra related traits such as the reduced CD and extra charge even more valuable. This change might make them a more desirable option for those precious utility slots. The penalty for spamming is still embedded as doing so will result in the full lengthy recharge before regaining maximum charges, but still gives the option to either use them in a sustained or burst fashion. Changes to damage and healing can be adjusted to compensate for balance if ANet deems them necessary (as I’m sure they will in the case of Restorative Mantras).