Guild Wars 2

I think you just have to learn to get on with it really.

I think Shattering is quite a boring mechanic at it’s bare bones and no matter what spec we go we are a class that feed into our mechanic more than any other. But i still love my mes!

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

We will not make both fractals.

That isn’t fair! I want both! >:(

I think mesmers should use sleek and simple weapons. In lore they’re a very subtle and stylish profession so i tend to think weaponry should reflect that. I stick to simple swords but flashier staves.

Utility spell

Illusionary Weapon – Summons an Illusionary Weapon that mimics the effect of the Phantasm of your currently equip weapon set (without putting it on cool down). Illusionary weapon will switch which Phantasm it mimics when you weapon swap in combat. Illusionary weapon doesn’t count towards the Illusion cap of 3 and cannot shatter via the F1-F4 abilities.

When cast Illusionary Weapon is replaced with the active ability ‘Overload’

Overload – Overload your Illusionary Weapon forcing it to shatter in an AoE around the target it was cast on having a different effect depending on the Phantasm it was mimicing; Torch – Stacks of confusion, GS – Cripple, Pistol – Stacks of bleed, Staff – Stacks of vulnerability, Offhand Sword – Damage, Focus – ?

Illusionary Weapon’s spell effect would just be the weapon the Phantasm it is mimicking holds.

The spells the Illusionary weapons cast would have individual cooldowns e.g. If you’re using sword/pistol and GS your Illusionary weapon could cast Unload then when you weapon swap automatically cast the aoe cripple.

Just an idea i threw together, i love the idea of more Phantasms

^
Imagine Echoing that?!

Ryuujin.8236:

GalloGSM.8139:

Give me Echo/Arcane Echo NOW.

Imagine Echoing a phantasm or a shatter or Chaos Storm or Blurred Frenzy!

We have a skill called echo, thats’ why someone suggested “master’s echo”. (Mimic captures the next ranged attack used on you, then you trigger echo, to shoot an identical projectile back at them)

I didn’t say we didn’t already have an ability called Echo, i was just referring to GW1’s Echo and Arcane Echo. They were one of the main reasons people went /Me in GW1 builds because they allowed you to Echo your elites. You could even set off an Echo chain where you Echoed Arcane Echo which let you Echo an ability 3 times – it was great! I still don’t understand how it wasn’t in from the start.

Give me Echo/Arcane Echo NOW.

Imagine Echoing a phantasm or a shatter or Chaos Storm or Blurred Frenzy!

Menaka.5092:

• Lack of a phantasm-oriented elite skill (for example: summon X random phantasms at the same time, with x >= 3)

How great would a utility (or elite skill) called echo be that copies the next phantasm cast replaces echo so you can cast it again,

Levitas.1953:

We have some really nice group utilities. If you dont like GS, staff and torch skillsets, what weapons do you carry to say that reflect is not in the ones you use?

It’s not that i don’t use the GS or the Staff (i do), i just think they’re not that fun after a while. I use the staff more so than the GS.

Levitas.1953:

I dont know what to tell you honestly, you seem to hate projectiles and we are one of the best classes to deal with them.
Also, this thread is about what we dont like about mesmers and if you suggest that we need more reflection you are saying you dont like how it works now.
In few words you are complaining about the last of mesmer’s problems.

You’re kind of right, i don’t not like how reflects are now but i just want to see more use of them.

We may have a lot of potential for projectile reflects but they aren’t on the weapon set i use a lot and it’s just a suggestion to increase PvE Utility and make the other weapons sets more interesting – that is all i’m saying.

If you think about it though, with my suggestion if you used focus traited you’d only be gaining one more reflect as they’d both be on 2 handed weapons. It’s not like people load up their utility slots, heal and distortion trait with all the reflection all the time anyway.

I’m just suggesting a bit more group utility within the bounds of a mesmer.

Levitas.1953:

@GalloGSM the problem is that no one is going to agree with you about reflection. We already have a lot of it, asking for more is a nonsense.

It’s just a suggestion, i’m not saying we’re bad/useless/underpowered without it. The thread is here to critique what we don’t like and suggest ways to change it. I don’t like that some of our weapon sets don’t offer as much utility and interesting play as they could so i suggested a way to change that. They don’t even have to be reflects (although i did specifically mention that) – they could be projectile destroyers.

We can have a discussion and you can disagree if that’s what you think – but don’t be dismissive.

Pyro, You’re right we do rely on traits a lot, but they could always add more reflects to that trait without causing an imbalance. Adding 2 extra reflects on 2 handed weapons just means we have more access to it and brings it more into play as a potential mesmer mechanic. They’d just be giving us more utility in PvE as well as PvP on our weapon sets (which is never a bad thing) as well as making our skills more interesting.

I think Mesmers suffer from having some weapon sets that aren’t very interesting to play with (GS, Staff, offhand torch) which is why i think a simple suggestion like adding a reflect gives the Mesmer a bit more to play with. I’d love to see more self combos as well other than Chaos Armour. Maybe change Phase retreat to be a blast finisher of something ?

Pyroatheist.9031:

If you don’t like that, you can go play a thief or something that is less trait dependent.

I’m having a discussion with you, please don’t get petty because i don’t agree with everything you’re saying there is no need when i’m not being rude to you.

Pyroatheist.9031:

@GalioGsm: What are you on about?

Mesmers have the most projectile reflects in the game. We have temporal curtain, pWarden, mimic, feedback, mirror, and distortion.

I’m taking about reflection on weapon sets, the ones on our weapon sets require a trait. We have to trait to get something elementalist have by default.

Mimic isn’t very good, distortion requires a trait to reflect and pwarden can’t reposition itself.

Here’s what i don’t like….

Why don’t we have a utility ability called ‘Echo’ that lets us store the next ability we use for future use? That was one of our most used spells in GW1 and we didn’t get it in GW2.

Why don’t we have access to an array of Illusionary Weapons (an iconic ability of the Mesmer from vanilla GW1)? Oh that’s right because they gave them to elementalists and renamed them elemental weapons.

Why don’t we have more projectile reflecting abilities? Mesmers are the masters of magic in it’s most primal form so it makes sense for them to have more magic/projectile reflection. Chaos Armour (Staff #4) should reflect projectiles and Illusionary Wave (Greatsword #5) should leave behind a wall that reflects them too.

I don’t know if i am the only one who feels this way but i really don’t like shattering. I main a mesmer and do not want to re-roll but i have (since beta) felt like shattering is a really bad class mechanic.

I feel like mesmers are too tied into shattering to point where it leaves us with very few play styles. Other classes mechanics add flavour to gameplay but i feel like shattering is very much like a combo point system seen in other games. On top of that several of the mesmer’s weapon sets are very dull/just not useful so i feel even further limited.

I was hoping the GW2 mesmer would have a bigger theme of spell thievery and magic manipluation like in GW1 through copying other classes/enemies abilities and using them for themselves but for some reason that was given to the Thief and summoning illusionary weaponry but that was given to the elementalist.

Does anyone else feel this way?

Mesmers need some work, i’d like to see them being able to create more combos by themselves.

I think that alone would make the mesmer more fun to play if we could aoe buff people as well as provide aoe chaos armour frequently. The elementalist has a lot going on at once and is really flexible, in comparison to the mesmer which isn’t. I’d like to see more flexibility added to the mesmer but our mechanic doesn’t allow that at all.

I recently started a thread on reddit that got quite a lot of attention that was based around my view that male scholars have a lot less variety in armour sets and looks than females and that the female/male comparison of sets is frequently not the same at all (some sets don’t even look similar in anyway)

My suggestion is basically to put it bluntly, spend more time on male scholar sets because a lot of them look very samey and none of them look as detailed and stylish as their female counterparts which i find to be very unfair.

I don’t want to sound horrible or stuck up or mean towards Anet because i love them as a company but this is one aspect of the game that was present in GW1 and is very much still a problem in GW2. I want to be able to mix and match armour sets, but i can’t because a lot of current designs don’t accentuate the male figure and look ugly (to me at least). Anet said they were making variety a huge part of their design and for male scholars that seems to have gone out the window, especially when it comes to revealing armour sets, we’ve got 1 how many do the female scholars have?

Link to reddit thread:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1442a5/lack_of_variety_for_male_scholars/

I’m really not happy about the Phantasm Line of sight / blind changes. Illusions can be negated really easily already and now with blind… that’s another way!

Phantasms aren’t normal spells so i don’t see why they’re treating them like they are. What’s next… are they gonnna make the phantasm just a spell effect and not a physical construct? >.>

Self bump because it’s so true, no variety for male scholars and it needs to change.

I recently hopped onto reddit and saw a post about how people dye their character’s armour. While i was looking at the pictures i realised about 3 male scholar had posted pictures and most of the thread consisted of female scholars. The female scholars all had different and interesting armour they had mixed and matched with other sets, the male scholars didn’t.

I’ve had a problem with Anet’s design for male caster armour since GW1. I love Anet to death but this is one of the only faults i hold against them and have for a long time. Female scholars sets are varied and look really nice, but a lot of the male counterparts of sets look really bland and not as detailed as the female sets. Where the female sets show skin and accentuate their body, the males are frumpy and cover them up.

My suggestion is basically this: Please spend more time on male scholar sets – if you can make the set look detailed and different for the female, you can do it for the male too. The male sets shouldn’t just be long flow-y robes, you make the female sets look completely different sometimes so you could do that with the males too? Just because the female is wearing a long skirt doesn’t mean the male has to. Oh and most importantly – make the chest armour form fitting to show off the male figure!

One set i can think of in particular i really think you’ve made the wrong decision on is (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/0/03/Light_armor_01_concept_art.jpg) The female version is made of leather and the male of fur? Why? Couldn’t you have made a leather waistcoat and followed the design pattern of the female?

This is very opinion based but, there is nothing wrong with variety (as Anet have said themselves) and there isn’t really a lot of that at the moment for male scholars – just a lot of long robes with less detail than the female.

I play a mesmer for goodness sake, i haven’t got enough outfits! :’)

Thanks for the feedback guys (lol pun), i’m gonna stick this out. I’m enjoying my mesmer in every other aspect of the game so far. It’s only dungeons i’m having a problem with.

I’ve been a mesmer fan since GW1 and i really want to enjoy this class but i just can’t seem to.

I’ve leveled 2 mesmers now, i got the first to level 31 then deleted it after a run of AC story mode as i felt like i wasn’t enjoying it. I felt like i didn’t bring much to the party, like i was redundant and everything i could do other classes could do much better and in a less clunky fashion i.e. elementalists being able to AoE daze on multiple weapon sets that doesn’t have to be traited or have a shatter delay.

Aside from feedback, null field and chaos storm i didn’t feel like the utility i had was enough. When i’d used those abilities and they were on cool down what else would i be doing? Summoning clones/phantasms then shattering them over and over – oh and auto attacking. So i deleted it.

So after re-rolling i got to level 66 on an elementalist and loved it, but i wanted to be a mesmer. They were my favourite class in GW1, i love their concept and basically everything about them… except for how they play…

I’m currently level 45 on my new mesmer and i’m enjoying it, but every time i go into a PvE instance i become really bored yet again.

I feel like because of shattering the mesmer has been limited a huge amount, to the point where no matter how i build my character it still plays the same. I tried a phantasm build and i got bored really quickly as all i was doing was summoning my phantasms and watching them attack and not really having an active role in combat, shattering them, resummoning them… snooze.

Playing a shattering build is equally as boring!

Can anyone enlighten me – am i missing something? Is this really how a mesmer plays in Dungeon PvE?

This isn’t a huge issue that will make me quit if it never happens but…

Since Anet are all about giving us options with armour sets, i would like the option to hide the very common huge sleeves seen in scholar armour.

I’m not a fan of massive sleeves. In other games, if i ever had the option, i would wear gloves that would go to the elbow and overwrite huge sleeve models. But that isn’t available in this game as sleeves overwrite glove models rather than the other way around.

It’s not a huge thing but, variety is a good thing – right?

Screw racials! Humans are the true mesmers

I actually think shatter is the problem. We tie into it too much which limits the class, no matter how we play we will always shatter.

The other class mechanics add flavour, it’s extra. With the mesmer, it’s too important. Shatter has a pre-requisite – illusions which take up space on our action bar no other class mechanic does that!

They’ve given a ‘mesmery’ feel to different type of abilities by taking it away from us and giving it to another entity. This makes the spells so much less reliable, the spells can be negated so much more easily than other classes.

I think shattering is also really boring and lack luster when compared to the other classes and it works counter intuitively when dealing with phantasms.

I think it would have been more interesting if we’d been more confusion heavy and clones were even more disposable but weren’t so easy to summon e.g. If you have clones up and the real mesmer is hit, a clone will take that damage and die. If a clone is hit instead of the mesmer it will take the damage and die like usual – hey maybe this could have been a fun utility ability (if shattering didn’t exist of course)

I haven’t just stopped shattering, i’ve stopped playing a mesmer. I’m really disappointed with this class, it’s a mess!

I agree with the OP i think the mesmer in it’s current state is really boring.

I think mesmers are a mess.

Even with that said i still play mine but… my ele can do everything my mesmer can do (except confuse) much better.

Mesmers are the only class thats mechanic has a pre-requisite this big, and the only class that’s mechanic is tied in to what we do, no matter how we chose to play. It limits the mesmer so much, i don’t understand how people can’t see that.

Mesmers work well in PvP, PvE is a very different matter.

You could have easily put this in the other shatter thread, it didn’t need a new one.

The mesmer you’re describing is one with little to no varied playstyles, and that is the current mesmer because of this mechanic.

EasymodeX.4062:

Oh yes, let’s start wasting utility slots because we can’t manage our existing abilities to use what’s free on F1-F4.

They wouldn’t give it to us on our utility if that was the case!

EasymodeX.4062:

Having 3 phantasms out, destroying them all and summon 1 phantasm will reduce your damage out put a lot.

Which is why no one does it by intention.

Duh?

That’s exactly what i was saying! No one would shatter with 3 Phantasms up because it doesn’t synergise!

Phantasms -are- permanent as long as their target is alive, they aren’t forced to die or are killed. Having 3 phantasms out, destroying them all and summon 1 phantasm will reduce your damage out put a lot.

Here’s something for you that might make you see my point of view:

Clone summoning abilities all have a secondary effect (apart from Mirror Images because it summons 2) this is because clones are weak and disposable.

Phantasm summon spells don’t have a secondary effect because what they create is strong.

This alone shows that phantasms and clones are not one and the same, they shouldn’t be valued the same because even Arena net doesn’t.

EasymodeX.4062:

Are you sure phantasms are supposed to be a source of consistent damage?

You can re-summon them on short cooldowns (most of them), and they die easily, or can be destroyed for additional effects.

Perhaps you think they are pets like rangers?

If Phantasms weren’t meant to be a source of consistent damage would they deal higher damage than clones? No, they wouldn’t. Re-summoning them on a short cool down means you’re still using them as consistent damage.

They are there to be a main damage source for mesmers, there is a reason they have a different name, look different and have different effects. Destroying them along with things that are made to be disposable (clones) makes no sense.

Ranger pet’s are permanent, Phantasms aren’t – you know that. Patronising me doesn’t support your argument.

Somna.5168:

If Phantasms actually stuck around after their target died and re-selected a new target, this conclusion would make more sense. But they don’t.

Regular, run of the mill fights versus a mob out in the field shouldn’t last longer than your Phantasm refresh timer. So fire one off, let it have its series of attacks once or twice (while you are hopefully attacking and not just twiddling your thumbs), then Shatter.

Phantasms will die at the end of a fight with a mob anyway, so shattering them makes sense because you’ll be getting an effect for killing something that was going to die anyway.

Shattering a big source of your damage to daze a mob as it’s about to use a big ability in the middle of a long fight makes no sense because you’re basically resetting your damage output.

EasymodeX.4062:

I find phantasms and shatters to work just fine together if you can time your abilities.

Perhaps it’s your build and/or playstyle that doesn’t synergize.

Destroying something that is supposed to be a source of consistent damage doesn’t synergise at all, no matter how you look at it.

You may shatter away phantasms at specific moments and find it to be useful, but the concepts still clash.

Mesmer feed too heavily into their mechanic, it limits them a huge amount.

The longer you resist that the mesmer class is a mess, the longer it’ll take for Anet to do something about it. You shouldn’t have to work around an all over the place mechanic and skill set to be good.

A lot of things don’t synergise with this class and Phantasms+Shattering is the most obvious example.

I agree with all of what you’ve said Shriketalon.

I’ve said all along how limiting shattering is etc. and i’m glad someone else is saying it too. Most people will just say ‘you don’t know how to play a mesmer, it has a high skill cap’ etc when really the class is a mess.

I would love this option! I totally agree!

gduber.9756:

First let me say that this is about female toons, as I don’t think there is similar demand for scantily clad dude toons. S

No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.

The female ‘toons’ have enough revealing armour.

It’s ridiculous how much variety female scholars have and how little male scholars have. Nothing male scholars have mirrors the female counterpart and the ‘revealing’ male sets look terrible. We need MORE male revealing armour, and more of it that looks good. It was the same in GW1, the female sets looked great and were revealing and the male sets looked uninspired and plain.

Arena net need to get this one simple rule into their heads to make male scholar armour so much better.

-Make it form fitting/Skin tight, whatever you want to call it. Make it accentuate the male figure and the armour will look a thousand times better.

I’m really disappointed with the armour male scholars have been given in GW2 because it’s less detailed than the female sets and very samey. You just need to look at gender comparisons of certain sets and you’ll see how badly they’ve put some of them together.

I love Arena net to the ends of the earth but this is one subject i will gladly bash them on because it’s so true.

TL;DR Make male scholar armour form fitting and spend more time making the male sets and they won’t look rubbish.