Showing Posts For EpicTurtle.8571:
I’d suggest adding some effects to skills that produce clones over existing illusions (a bit like scepter AA when capped on illusions). Here are few ideas:
1. Scepter 2 – if you have 3 illusions up, instead of creating a clone on block, blind the enemy that you have blocked.
2. Sword 3 – if you have 3 illusions up, do an immobilize for 1 sec instead of initial cripple (animation of a clone leaping at enemy has to stay tho)
3. Sword 4 – if you have 3 illusions up, daze an enemy that you have blocked in addition to riposte damage. Also it would be nice to daze enemy even if its not in melee range (this one is open for discussion).
4. GS 2 – if you have 3 illusions up, each bounce does 25% more damage.
5. Staff 2 – if you have 3 illusions up, slow enemies around your phase retreat starting point for 1 second.What do you think?
That’s actually an excellent idea, far more useful than just blowing up a phantasm (and sustained DPS) for one skill. I think for Phase Retreat should add some stacks of bleeding or burning and give a random boon to the mesmer to fit the chaos theme of the weapon.
(edited by EpicTurtle.8571)
Now while I do understand that needed is a subjective term and it will differ between whomever views it, keeping that in mind, let’s dive right in.
Dueling:
- Duelist’s Discipline: Bleeding stack duration is bugged. Perhaps a 2-3% recharge on daze since interrupts are all but useless on any boss or certain creatures thanks to the defiance bar.
- Evasive Mirror: Add it on block as well, maybe give 3 seconds of swiftness, lackluster compared to Blinding Dissipation
- Master Fencer: This was supposed to be Confusing Combatants or whatever the chance of confusion on hit was, I think we’d all like to see that restored.
- Mistrust: Add 2 stacks of confusion on Daze, same reason as Duelist’s Discipline. Change it to 2 stacks on interruption to keep it the same.
- Harmonious Mantras: Extend the % damage buff to phantasms.
Domination(Disclaimer: I don’t use this tree often, suggestions welcome):
- Rending Shatter: Increase stacks maybe to 2 or 3.
- Furious Interruption: I’m not really sure how to improve this one, maybe some swiftness on interrupt or superspeed, something to make it at least a little tempting
- Imagined Burden: I’ve seen it tossed around that this should deal damage on boon rip and all illusions should give might rather than just GS clones and I agree.
- Power Block: Add some minor damage and weakness duration on daze or something, same reason as before since interrupts are useless against any defiance bar foes.
- Illusionary Defense: Add 1 sec of protection per second if you have 3 illusions up.
- Master of Manipulation: Add 5 seconds of swiftness upon using a manipulation skill
- Chaotic Interruption: Lesser Boons and Conditions on Daze, interrupts useless against defiant foes, etc. etc.
- Prismatic Understanding: Remove a condition every 2 or 3 seconds.
Inspiration: - Add a heal on interrupt with a minor heal on daze somewhere here, maybe in Healing Prism or Mender’s Purity. Maybe have Mental Defense give 3 seconds of protection.
Illusions:
- Persistence of Memory: Change this back, you already fixed the shield cooldown.
- Shattered Strength: Change to 2 stacks, requires a blown shatter bar to even be remotely useful.
- Phantasmal Haste: Needs a better reason to be taken since you’re trying to encourage players to shatter more rather than just leave phantasms up.
- Malicious Sorcery: Add “Ether Clone hits 2 more targets around your primary target if you have the maximum number of illusions”
Chronomancer:
- Delayed Reactions: Add a small amount of slow on Daze, same reason as before.
- All’s Well That Ends Well: Increase Alacrity duration by 1 second to compensate for the 50% nerf
- Danger Time: You do 10% increased damage to slowed enemies
- Improved Alacrity: Add “Alacrity on you is spread to allies when you activate a shatter skill”, maybe the duration of spread alacrity could be halved or the trait could be given a small icd to compensate.
- Lost Time: Increase duration of slow slightly
Weapon Skills
- Across the board increases for sustained DPS, stop making mesmer the utility bots.
Staff:
- Winds of Chaos: Extend the duration of the burning or increase it to 2 or 3 stacks, it’s still not on par with how it was before the conditions were revamped. Increase the bounces by 1 or increase missile speed.
- Phantasmal Warlock: Better missile tracking, increased missile speed, make it extend condition durations by 1 or 2 seconds. Make it actually hybrid.
- Chaos Armor: Lower the cooldown, 35 seconds is overboard if Chaos Armor had an effect nearly as decent as Fire Aura or Shocking Aura (both of which have lower cooldowns), then maybe it’d be understandable.
- Chaos Storm: Increase the damage, lower the cooldown, switch some conditions to damaging, or something to make it actually impactful. For example, add 1 stack of confusion for 8 seconds on each hit, make it apply 2 conditions and boons per hit per target. Something to make it worth the cooldown.
Sword(Main and Offhand):
- Increase the AA damage, I don’t use power builds that often, but mesmers are so incredibly crippled in the DPS department, I think a lot of people would like to be more than just quickness/alacrity bots. And no, spike damage potential does not count as an offset to at least decent sustained DPS
- Blurred Frenzy: Great skill, up the damage a tad more
- Illusionary Leap: Give it some damage or something, other gap closers do some damage except this one. Don’t say, oh but you could use Mind Wrack to deal damage with it, it’s an entirely separate skill.
- Illusionary Riposte: Increase the speed of that wonky counterattack animation please.
Pistol:
- Magic Bullet: Give it some damage, not some massive amount but not a pittance.
Torch:
- The Prestige: Increase the burning duration and stacks to 3, it’s not even remotely impactful.
- Phantasmal Mage: Increase stacks to 2, lower the cooldown. Better missile tracking and speed. A ton of people have asked that this be converted to an AOE because of the inherent unreliability of bounce mechanics.
I personally believe Scepter, Focus, and Shield are in a good place, I am unsure about Greatsword, like Domination suggestions are welcome.
Utility Skills
- Arcane Thievery: Lower the cooldown, make the tracking better. Tried it in PvP for a short time, if it actually hits, it’s pretty nice. Having it hit is the problem
- Utility Phantasms: Lower the cast time, otherwise in a good place
- Well of Precognition: Ungut this, split it between PvE or PvP. I don’t know of anyone that takes this skill, maybe for extra alacrity if traited, but not for it’s intended purpose.
Suggestions are welcome, these are just what I think a decent baseline would be.
(edited by EpicTurtle.8571)
I think the best comparison to traps would be necro’s marks, which are basically ranged traps and start CD as soon as they’re cast, as well. Not arguing for or against the OP, necessarily; but it seems to me that if we nerf one’s CD, the other really should be nerfed as well.
Marks don’t all have a control effect on them.
Neither do all traps.
They kinda do seeing as 9/10 DH take the daze on trigger trait.
I think the best comparison to traps would be necro’s marks, which are basically ranged traps and start CD as soon as they’re cast, as well. Not arguing for or against the OP, necessarily; but it seems to me that if we nerf one’s CD, the other really should be nerfed as well.
Marks don’t all have a control effect on them.
kitten every one here (presumably DH themselves) is only talking about whether traps are overpowered or not and OP just wants them to function like all other skills in that their CD starts when they are triggered, not when they are cast. Is consistency that big of a problem to you guys? OP didn’t say one word about traps being too powerful, he’s just rightfully annoyed that the cooldown starts prematurely allowing DH and rangers to annoy him more than they should be able to with their traps.
Just because it isn’t OP doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be addressed. Likewise, since traps are apparently so useless according to y’all, you shouldn’t even care if they get “nerfed” because no one who is “good” will be taking them anyway.
To explain my point of view I have to adress why I think the skill mechanich is fine as it is. To be able to listen to others opinion you have to read what said opinion is based upon. I stated my point on why they are fine as tehy are now.
Moreover, let’s just imagine the CD only applies when someone triggers it….
Ops wrong button while leaving base, stored a trap in my base…. GUESS I’LL BE WITHOUT 1 TRAP UNTIL THE SKILL RESETS.gee…
Obviously you’d be allowed a premature detonate skill like engi gyros or something, how are you that stupid.
Why not? They still have inordinate amounts of damage and each one has a control effect on it. The excuse that you have to spec into it is bullkitten since if you don’t take the daze on trigger trait most people would consider you to be deficient.
Every other skill has their cooldown go off when the skill actually has an effect, DH and rangers should not be able to drop traps and just kitten out 5 more right after you start fighting them.
Okay that’s assuming the populations of PvP and PvE are the same and that every single PvE player farms for Store items, which is vastly untrue. The amount of players that make up PvE is significantly more than PvP and a small percentage of them grind for gemstore items.
(Forgive my sarcasm, but it’s about time)
Hey so I logged in today and I noticed there’s two other entire game modes besides PvP. I think this means that we have to look at how balance changes are going to affect the entire game instead of trying to make some appeal to a maximum of 33% of us and an even smaller percentage of that on the basis of Esports.
It’s balanced to keep the non innovative members of the PvP community happy and that’s it, to hell with PvE or WvW.
besides, Thread titles like this get ignored by professional developers, because you don’t point out a problem, just nag and whine. take that, grow up and deal with it.
I’m going to point out that nagging and whining is the entirety of the PvP forum and is also what we get balanced off of, so clearly it does work.
You say it’s over the top, it’s not over the top. Just because you believe in your argument does not make it correct.
My point is still valid.
So your solution is to just not use utility skills and swap legends to use all of your staff skills. Great suggestion guy, I’m totally listening to you.
The damage is only 66% of Surge of the Mists but the combo actually costs more, increase each step of it by 15-33% to compensate or lower the energy cost. Surge also has more cc so don’t say the daze compensates.
Have you seen the energy costs on Staff? They are what’s over the top. #2 costs 20 energy, #3 costs 10 and #4 and #5 cost 15. No other weapon set is that demanding.
Thank goodness Esports is drawing sooooo much attention to this game. /sarcasm
Thanks for ruining it for the rest of the community, y’know all the other players that play PvE or WvW. Congratulations on your great “victory”
Staff was versatile, it’s not used at dps or burst and surge almost certainly didn’t fit that bill because the only way you hit someone with each impact is if they are trying to get hit by all impacts.
With the unnecessary nerfs because of PvP, seriously. It’s bonkers. The rest of us hate it and hate the PvP community because of it. As if staff damage wasn’t mediocre enough you nerfed Surge by 15% for no particular reason. If someone is standing in the exact place to get hit all 9 times by it then they deserve to take that much damage, you have to be aiming to get hit all 9 times by it.
Considering that all second generation legendaries excluding the upcoming shortbow are “indefinitely suspended”, it is not undue to ask the the Mystic Tribute can be salvaged into it’s component materials. A lot of people had been getting ready for a new legendary and being pragmatically enthusiastic, started preparing now. I myself was going to make either the new sword, scepter, or shield. Seeing as there is no timetable on that I feel it is necessary to demand that we are able to salvage the Mystic Tribute since it’s such a costly and time consuming item to make.
Well in the gloom and darkness and disappointment of this announcement. You should offer a way to trade Mystic Tributes for Gifts of Fortune since some people may have made them in advance to prepare for the new legendaries that are no longer viable to wait for.
I noticed today that upon creating staff clones using Bifrost, the projectiles they use for Winds of Chaos are the standard purple lightning chaos bolts instead of the Bifrost rainbows. I asked a couple people and Nevermore clones are working as intended.
I don’t want to be rude, but the only one of these that makes sense to all modes of gameplay is Coalescence of Ruin. The rest of these are purely PvP warranted nerfs and are ill considered at best since only maybe 2 of those nerfs address a problem (Blur Communing and Demonic Defiance).
PvE balance isn’t important because AI has no sense of fair play and others on the map won’t hate you for rolling an underpowered spec whereas if you’re suboptimal in PvP it potentially hinders your team. PvP balance matters because some of us want to play thief but don’t want to bring the team down. If you overpower it they won’t hold over your head how your class mechanics are carrying you (even if you beat people with similar builds to yours when dueling on points) whereas PvP is player versus player and should therefore be given precedence in balancing. It may be fun steamrolling people with a one man army, but it isn’t fun or fair to have that guy steamroll you. In this game however you can queue that class and immediately have access to good runes, sigils, and traits so it’s much fairer than WoW where a just introduced death knight has its top gear and you’re still gearing.
Can we at least balance them separately then? I’m tired of getting screwed over in the vast majority of the game because a smaller section can’t think around something.
I don’t want to be rude, but the only one of these that makes sense to all modes of gameplay is Coalescence of Ruin. The rest of these are purely PvP warranted nerfs and are ill considered at best since only maybe 2 of those nerfs address a problem (Blur Communing and Demonic Defiance).
Every other world boss is immune to blind and I’m trying to craft The Legend, getting crystallized isn’t exactly easy already because of player crowding, the fact that he misses almost every other attack makes it nearly impossible. Do it for consistency and convenience.
Okay, so we literally have nothing beyond speculation and wild, ungrounded hopes. Thank goodness, I hate time mages.
Has chronomancer actually been confirmed in any way? Just wondering.
About the Minstrel, it’s nice, currently, it’s quite subtle, a harp chord upon drawing or switching and some elegant music notes, but that’s about it.
It’s too subtle, now I’m not a huge fan of the confetti and rampaging unicorns, but perhaps if you were using a ranged weapon and had The Minstrel in the offhand, it could change the missiles to the Siren’s Call missile, and perhaps for melee, on the third attack of a chain it could play a sharper chord with a more aggressive sound to it.
Well where I’ve never had the problem, I have a consistent team for when I run fractals or dungeons, none of them are condi, I can’t provide specifics on what stat combos they do use, but generally condition pushing isn’t a huge problem, I see the lack of condi use as a window to add additional DPS that is somewhat unutilized. When I do PUG I’ll re-spec somewhat based on the other party members, as I said earlier Versatility is key. (Praying for customizable trait pages).
I don’t rely on poison, it’s a beyond subpar condition for PvE as there’s not many enemies that heal and the damage on poison is negligible unless a boss has ridiculously high armor and conditions are suddenly slightly more important.
For my second point, torment and confusion are variable conditions, as you pointed out. Torment isn’t generally going to always be at its maximum output except in some special cases. By reapplication, I meant that whatever condi build you’re playing if you’re not continually making the effort to reapply your conditions, you’re doing it wrong. Horribly horribly wrong.
Yeah I was definitely exaggerating the 4 seconds, but the time for me to reach high bleed stacks is negligible
Probably a statistical anomaly.
As for the might and fury, the only realistic way to make that better would be to increase the velocity of WoC from it’s rather dismal state and lengthen each of the buffs at least by 2 seconds. Keep in mind the boons are also rapidly being applied in waves by the clones. All in all WoC needs a major rework of it’s mechanics, removing vulnerability and adding something more useful perhaps. But generally I’ve had the pleasurable experience of always having at least 6 conditions or so with which to power up IWarlock.
A1: I’ve never had that problem.
A2: Reapplication, build mechanisms, rune choice.
A3: I’ve maxed bleed stacks in about 4 seconds.
B1: I can understand that. I don’t agree with it, since I’ve had a singularly opposite experience to what you’re describing.
B2: Yes and when they hit allies, your allies hit harder or have 20% increased critical chance, not every class has easy access to fury, and I believe most builds don’t use Runes of Rage. While in my opinion said team should already have fury in mind in respective builds. I will admit, the vulnerability proc makes me wince a little since 1% increased party damage isn’t a massive contribution. (Suggestions need to be made to Devs)
B3: One point I will concede over, since aoe confusion and torment is heavily build dependent, the only mass burn skill is in torch, and aoe bleed application would have to be from phantasm sources, IZerker and IWarden most notably, neither of which fit in to condition builds very well.
C1: While it is very uncomfortable as you say, it is doable. Personally, if I need a reflection heavy spec, I will put my staff down a bit, and switch to Sword/Focus and Sword/Pistol. In all of my builds, feedback is a recurring event, it’s too useful. Although I will assert that not every situation requires reflection, it does provide heaps of dps, but (and this may just be due to bad luck) mobs tend to move out of my reflections as fast as they can.
C2: I’ve also taken this into account, especially in the olden days, I liked to collect boss projectiles with mimic and fling them right back, mostly for kittens and giggles. Unfortunately not every boss has a projectile, lamentable, I know and then feedback sits there dusty in the corner, wanting to get used, but ends up being the last kid picked for the basketball game. As for minimizing that damage, precision is important in my builds, every time there isn’t a little bloodspatter decal behind those white numbers a little part of me dies inside.
Additionally, I don’t run pure condition damage, I go hybrid with Sinister stats.
Also thank you for going through and stating the facts, it was very considerate.
Yeah, but he’s not correct.
Addendum: I don’t mean to cause a controversy and I’m certainly not going to argue the point with anyone. My only problem with anything Pyro has stated is that power DPS is the “only” viable option. If you would like to discuss it with me you may PM me, but that discussion does not belong on this particular thread.
All of the reasons as to why condition damage doesn’t work at all in dungeon parties have been noted multiple times in this thread. Of course you can ‘play how you want’, even if that playstyle happens to be useless. Nobody is going to stop you. Our job is simply to provide the information necessary to make an informed decision on how to play.
In this situation, the information is very non-ambiguous. Condition damage is objectively horrible in dungeon groups on any class, not just mesmer. Condition damage on mesmer is even worse than on most classes for a variety of reasons. Power phantasm builds are far more effective both in dealing damage and in providing utility to the party.
There is no information, there has only been assertions, not concrete facts, believe it or not your personal experiences do not set the line for the entire game.
Yeah, but he’s not correct.
Addendum: I don’t mean to cause a controversy and I’m certainly not going to argue the point with anyone. My only problem with anything Pyro has stated is that power DPS is the “only” viable option. If you would like to discuss it with me you may PM me, but that discussion does not belong on this particular thread.
(edited by EpicTurtle.8571)
This is my advice, if you would like to form a build mainly around those 3 weapons, go ahead, but keep in mind, it is very very important to carry around other weapons and sometimes other sets of gear in order to make adjustments for any possible outcome. Like I said above, I main Staff and Scepter/Sword, but I always have GS, another sword, and a focus in my inventory for troublesome occurences, such as the Uncategorized Fractal. Viability and versatility are incredibly similar in this game, which is why I frown on the several people suggesting only DPS is important. The most important thing is this game is the ability to adapt to the situations you find yourself in, that is what will determine your usefulness in PvE, sPvP, and WvW.
Addendum: I can show you how to make a build that overwhelms your foe by constantly keeping up 4 conditions, 3 of which will be ticking every second for at least 750 or so damage and the then confusion which will be bursting for a decent amount of 3-5k
(edited by EpicTurtle.8571)
I’m going to ask you to disregard what they have said, very little of it has been constructive.
@OP, If you could tell me about the importance you place on weapon cooldowns I’d love to help you figure out a build for this weapon set. Personally, I run Staff and Scepter/Sword with Sinister stats and it works out pretty well, even in dungeons.