Guild Wars 2

Zamiel.2130:

With testing ANET should have seen this even before putting the patch in to the mainstream so I can only assume their QA testing is not up to scratch.

Do you really believe Anet tests these things?

Sabin.4590:

That change to the image is due to how Anet sees confusion. Consufion instead of being a condition where you apply few stacks on a long run ( 1 stack for 9s, or the one stack out of #1 trident) you should apply a huge amount of confusion stacks in a short period of time ( 5 from scepter #3 , 3 from image and 8 from cry of frustation). Which is still a terrible mechanic for pve and even worse for dungeons.

Anet is trying to make Confusion like Backfiring skills from GW1; something you put on the enemy just before the go button mashing. The problem is that in GW1 that could be done with a single button press. In GW2, stacking significant amounts of confusion is a complicated and lengthy process with rewards that don’t even come close to the damage GW1 backfires had.

Mesmers who willingly accept these changes are naïve or have never fought against people who knew well enough what they’re doing to prevent the mesmer from face rolling.

Mesmers who willingly accept these changes have only fought idiots that do not understand the class and don’t care to and as a result have an over-inflated sense of worth thereby blinding themselves the the kitten hole mesmers are really in when they have to fight someone with half a brain.

Mesmers who willingly accept these changes are willingly accepting “fixes” that break further broken mechanics, cut the DPS of a primary source of damage into a third, and significantly cripple a fundamental aspect of their own class.

Mesmers who willingly accept these changes make baseless accusations to mesmers who do not share their unpopular opinion as being unskilled players who are bandwagoning in order to remain in a fictional position of dominance.

Maybe it’s not the Mesmers who are complaining that are bad. Maybe, just maybe,
mesmers who willingly accept these changes are the ones who are bad.

TheRamosOnline.2670:

plasmacutter.2709:

Except there was no patch which handed EVERYONE about 6 different ways to “counter” anyone else’s core mechanic. “counter” is also too weak a word. I believe the phrase is “permanently nullify”. Mesmers are not the tankiest class, but even in my build I can chain evasion ridiculously. Let’s think about what a guardian or a thief could do?

Because every class had about 6 ways to counter everyone elses core mechanics from RELEASE, Mesmers were the black sheep. You couldn’t counter their phantasm generation, meaning no matter what you did you’d have Phantasms on you.
It made iZerker double OP because you couldn’t dodge its first attack.

I’m actually amazed at this, it’s like you’re trying to find things to complain about on purpose.

So what? no matter what I do, I have a Ranger pet munching my kitten I can’t easily keep a Thief from stealing my pocket plasma. WHAT YOU CAN DO: Dodge roll away from shattering clones. kill shattering clones before they reach you. Block the shattering clones. simply out run the shattering clones. Get to a place where the clones cannot reach. Cripple/Chill the shattering clones. Ignore the shattering clones because the Mesmer isn’t spec’d for shatters so mind wrack does next to nothing. That’s 7 already and I could probably go on.

You’re also getting our core mechanic mixed up. Phantasms and clone generation are not our core mechanic; shatters are. illusions are a nice class attribute, but are not the core mechanic. However, regardless of whether its the core mechanic or not is not a problem though.

TheRamosOnline.2670:

You couldn’t counter their phantasm generation, meaning no matter what you did you’d have Phantasms on you.
It made iZerker double OP because you couldn’t dodge its first attack.

This is where you go wrong
Illusion generation is easily countered by either killing them or ignoring them. Simple as that. Clones do no damage and are easily avoided while shattering so the can mostly be ignored. Phantasms do a lot of damage initially but have a wide window between attacks and a very long and are still very fragile.

Saying no matter what you did you’d have phantasms on you is like saying no matter what you did to a Necro you’d have conditions on you or no matter what you did to a Guardian he would be able to block you occasionally. Its a class attribute, you do your best to counter it but they’re going to be there because that’s just part of the class.

Also you could dodge the initial iZerker whirl. It just had a very brief telegraph so it has virtually no warning.

TheRamosOnline.2670:

I agree that all builds need to be viable and I wont deny that this has hard glass cannons, but keep in mind that all glass cannons across the board, regardless of class, have been Ninja-nerfed.

Heartseeker wasn’t touched.

Syn.3459:

i clearly said that if the mesmer skill is used, like every other skill in the game, it should go on cooldown, not that every skill is the same

i simply used the melee out of range message as an example

But it does go on cooldown just like every other skill in the game. No one is arguing that we should be refunded the cooldown time because the skill failed. We’re arguing that it shouldn’t have failed in the first place. If you are blinded when you cast you get nothing out of it which is unlike skills of the same kin which do not simply vanish or cease to happen and go on cooldown.

Syn.3459:

Hildebert.4196:

Syn.3459:

Hildebert.4196:

Syn.3459:

Hildebert.4196:

Syn.3459:

just like every class, of course it goes on cd… if a melee class uses there skill and you aren’t in range it goes on cd(i assume) so how is mesmer any different? if you miss the skill you don’t do damage

see->

Hildebert.4196:

plasmacutter.2709:

You cast zerker or warden on a pack.. the ONE target you had in the pack was blocking, invulnerable, or made you blind

you now lose aoe on THE WHOLE PACK

Which is completely stupid. That’s like making Dragon’s Tooth fail just because your target blocked while casting or making Death Blossom fail to cast because your target had aegis.

The problem is they aren’t like regular skills. Not only does it function like a pet summon, many of them function like targeted AoEs which don’t normally don’t completely fail as an AoE just because your target avoided it. It’s still a functional AoE and it’s still a pet summon so both of these things should have been considered and weren’t.

they function as a targeted aoe but they aren’t though and they’re a single target skill which means they’re prone to blind/block

Please elaborate how a skill can function as a targeted AoE and yet not be a targeted AoE. Dragon’s Tooth and Death Blossom are both single target AoEs and yet they will still deal damage to nearby enemies regardless of blind/block.

death blossom = 3 hits = 3 blinds/blocks to negate
the skill for phantasmal berserker = 1 hit = 1 blind to negate
no idea about dragons tooth

do you really not understand that?

But that’s not how it works. They function as AoEs so they are not affected by blind.
iZerker hits three times in a single button press just like Death Blossom so by that logic it should take three blinds to stop it. Dragons Tooth and Death Blossom are just two examples of skills that function as targeted AoEs, there are many more that work exactly the same way.

my mistake for thinking a single target sword throw that creates an illusion that can aoe is different than 3 dagger hits, it’s almost as if every class has different skills!

now you’re just being asinine. There are obvious differences between a bouncing projectile skill and a single target AoE.

Bouncing projectiles strike their first target then bounce to the closest other target and repeats this until it’s out of bounces. This can hit anywhere from 1 to n number of targets, n being the number of bounces the projectile has and only if n is equal to or greater than the number of players that are close enough to each other to solicit a bounce. The targets can be any distance from each other, so long as there is another target close enough to bounce to and only effects one target at a time.. Once the Bouncing projectile bounces from its initial target, the projectile is no longer bound to the initial target. In short, it functions like a projectile shot from each bounce location.

Single Target AoEs are a lot like normal targetable AoEs, with the distinction that their location cannot be directly determined by the caster and instead rely on the location of the target. Once cast, the AoE is either centered around the target’s location (such as Dragon’s Tooth or Leap of Faith), or it is centered around an entity traveling towards/through the targeted location (such as Death Blossom and previously Phantasmal Breserker). The AoE can effect 0 to 5 players (per hit unless otherwise specified) depending on how many players are within the AoE’s radius simultaneously. All players must be within the AoE radius at the time of the strike or they will not be affected.

I’m not sure why I’m explaining this because we’re not talking about Mirror Blade, we’re talking about iZerker.

I was originally assuming phantasms didn’t need line of sight to make up for our lack of targetable AoE. I guess I was wrong.

Syn.3459:

Hildebert.4196:

Syn.3459:

Hildebert.4196:

Syn.3459:

just like every class, of course it goes on cd… if a melee class uses there skill and you aren’t in range it goes on cd(i assume) so how is mesmer any different? if you miss the skill you don’t do damage

see->

Hildebert.4196:

plasmacutter.2709:

You cast zerker or warden on a pack.. the ONE target you had in the pack was blocking, invulnerable, or made you blind

you now lose aoe on THE WHOLE PACK

Which is completely stupid. That’s like making Dragon’s Tooth fail just because your target blocked while casting or making Death Blossom fail to cast because your target had aegis.

The problem is they aren’t like regular skills. Not only does it function like a pet summon, many of them function like targeted AoEs which don’t normally don’t completely fail as an AoE just because your target avoided it. It’s still a functional AoE and it’s still a pet summon so both of these things should have been considered and weren’t.

they function as a targeted aoe but they aren’t though and they’re a single target skill which means they’re prone to blind/block

Please elaborate how a skill can function as a targeted AoE and yet not be a targeted AoE. Dragon’s Tooth and Death Blossom are both single target AoEs and yet they will still deal damage to nearby enemies regardless of blind/block.

death blossom = 3 hits = 3 blinds/blocks to negate
the skill for phantasmal berserker = 1 hit = 1 blind to negate
no idea about dragons tooth

do you really not understand that?

But that’s not how it works. They function as AoEs so they are not affected by blind.
iZerker hits three times in a single button press just like Death Blossom so by that logic it should take three blinds to stop it. Dragons Tooth and Death Blossom are just two examples of skills that function as targeted AoEs, there are many more that work exactly the same way.

Syn.3459:

Hildebert.4196:

Syn.3459:

just like every class, of course it goes on cd… if a melee class uses there skill and you aren’t in range it goes on cd(i assume) so how is mesmer any different? if you miss the skill you don’t do damage

see->

Hildebert.4196:

plasmacutter.2709:

You cast zerker or warden on a pack.. the ONE target you had in the pack was blocking, invulnerable, or made you blind

you now lose aoe on THE WHOLE PACK

Which is completely stupid. That’s like making Dragon’s Tooth fail just because your target blocked while casting or making Death Blossom fail to cast because your target had aegis.

The problem is they aren’t like regular skills. Not only does it function like a pet summon, many of them function like targeted AoEs which don’t normally don’t completely fail as an AoE just because your target avoided it. It’s still a functional AoE and it’s still a pet summon so both of these things should have been considered and weren’t.

they function as a targeted aoe but they aren’t though and they’re a single target skill which means they’re prone to blind/block

Please elaborate how a skill can function as a targeted AoE and yet not be a targeted AoE. Dragon’s Tooth and Death Blossom are both single target AoEs and yet they will still deal damage to nearby enemies regardless of blind/block.

Syn.3459:

plasmacutter.2709:

Syn.3459:

Carighan.6758:

Syn.3459:

just like every class, of course it goes on cd… if a melee class uses there skill and you aren’t in range it goes on cd(i assume) so how is mesmer any different? if you miss the skill you don’t do damage

Oh, Necro pet summons and Ranger pet calls, the closest comparable thing, go on CD when they don’t connect or the Ranger/Necro is blinded?

no… and neither do our shatters, but these are skills going on cd when blinded, which is the way it should be

Yes, our ability to shield friendly players from projectiles, ALL ticks of the warden’s aoe on ALL targets, the regen boon the warden provides when it activates, and the 30% progress to the next shatter should all be nullified by ONE blind, block, or dodge!

Might I remind you that AOE is not subject to blind, but somehow our aoe phantasms get negated by blind? You still stand by this hypocrisy of only mesmers being socked for no aoe damage by a blind, only mesmers being denied non-offensive kit by a blind, and only mesmers being denied a second attack by the same, single blind?

I think this has gone far enough. Enjoy my ignore.

i’m unsure of how you don’t understand that a single target skill can create an aoe summon, it’s funny really

Did you really completely ignore both of my previous posts? and he’s the dense one.

Escthiil.3210:

aaron.7850:

You guys are a disgrace to us real mesmers, reroll all you want, I am still smashing no matter what class I face

^This.

A lot of my mesmer friends and myself am laughing at this. This is actually great. This will get the coattail riders who wanted to ride on the Mesmer meta to screw off and play something else instead of saturating the class as a whole. Let the true mesmers stay, the coattail riders > The exit is over there.

oh god the irony.

Syn.3459:

just like every class, of course it goes on cd… if a melee class uses there skill and you aren’t in range it goes on cd(i assume) so how is mesmer any different? if you miss the skill you don’t do damage

see->

Hildebert.4196:

plasmacutter.2709:

You cast zerker or warden on a pack.. the ONE target you had in the pack was blocking, invulnerable, or made you blind

you now lose aoe on THE WHOLE PACK

Which is completely stupid. That’s like making Dragon’s Tooth fail just because your target blocked while casting or making Death Blossom fail to cast because your target had aegis.

The problem is they aren’t like regular skills. Not only does it function like a pet summon, many of them function like targeted AoEs which don’t normally don’t completely fail as an AoE just because your target avoided it. It’s still a functional AoE and it’s still a pet summon so both of these things should have been considered and weren’t.

plasmacutter.2709:

You cast zerker or warden on a pack.. the ONE target you had in the pack was blocking, invulnerable, or made you blind

you now lose aoe on THE WHOLE PACK

Which is completely stupid. That’s like making Dragon’s Tooth fail just because your target blocked while casting or making Death Blossom fail to cast because your target had aegis.

yep that’s the gist of it. Don’t forget our portal has a longer cooldown, iBerserker was stricken anemic, and the iMage is more useless than ever.

We buried him right on top of GW1 mesmer.

probably not. Actually fixing things that are broken is so low on their priority list I wouldn’t expect to see it fixed until the next expansion.

lupercaleb.6041:

Hildebert.4196:

lupercaleb.6041:

Ross Biddle.2367:

3 seconds is short unless its effected by +CD duration effects, in which case its not so bad.

it’s not, and it never was affected by condition duration from any source

but it was.

When playing with an experimental confusion build about a month ago, I could get the confusion to last about 14+ seconds. Both in the tooltip and experimentally.

I’m not sure if it still does this, but it most definitely did.

you must be thinking of something else; several other sources of confusion were certainly affected by condition duration from anything that wasn’t food, but Illusionary Mage’s could never be boosted. same applies for Confusing Combatants, and conditions from clones

I knew Confusing Combatants wasn’t affected, but I swear I was able to make that confusion last 14 seconds. Maybe it was more than a month ago, I haven’t been in sPvP in a long kitten time, but summoning a single iMage and letting him go about on his business on a golem lasted the full duration listed when I timed it.

You’re making me think I’m crazy. Are you a mesmer?

E Tan.7385:

Confusion had always been the worse and the most useless conditions in GW2.

Too short to be usefull, and too low damage except if, by miracle, you succeed to have MIN 10stack.

In GW1 the curse skill who had the same effect as confusion WAS really usefull
( 25% of the total life if the foe was casting a spell, and about 10% of the total life if the foe was attacking, and all that during 10sec… with a 30sec reload and 10sec reload, and i dont speak about somes others skills / elite with the same function. )
You was sure to see the foe stop casting / stop attack.

Actualy, who really care about having confusion on him ? seriously.

Really awfully made and thought.
Except doing burst damage / randomly daze / group haste / feedback. ( and play at “where is charlie” ) the mesmer is good for nothing. ( very saddly )

The only way confusion looks useful is in WvW where you get the more potent PvE formula for confusion damage and there are enough idiots that ignore it.

In sPvP it’s pointless because it does so little damage over a duration that could easily be waited out with little consequence or even cleansed off.

In PvE it’s pointless because monsters attack maybe once every three or four seconds.

GW2 Mesmers are not mesmers.
They can’t backfire.
They can’t shutdown.
They can’t do anything.

lupercaleb.6041:

Ross Biddle.2367:

3 seconds is short unless its effected by +CD duration effects, in which case its not so bad.

it’s not, and it never was affected by condition duration from any source

but it was.

When playing with an experimental confusion build about a month ago, I could get the confusion to last about 14+ seconds. Both in the tooltip and experimentally.

I’m not sure if it still does this, but it most definitely did.

Division.9618:

Mek.2947:

Embolism.8106
All Phantasms except Berserker (and maybe Disenchanter) were always negated by Blind and Invulnerability. It amuses me people cite this as a HUGE NERF when it has in fact been the case for most Phantasms already.

No….you could still summon the illusion…the illusion’s attacks were interrupted, yes, but not the actual generation of the illusion. I think they should be treated like pets and not like attacks. You can’t block necros, rangers, and theives from generating their pets why are mesmers blocked from doing so?

1) Thief pets have large cooldowns, low durations, and are easy to kill

2) Same with necro pets, except for the added fact that necro pets have godawful AI.

3) Rangers keep their pets out constantly and they rely on these pets for 45% of their damage. They don’t teleport to their targets, instead they have to chase them down and hope they stand still (ranger pets can’t hit moving targets).

Mesmers had these nerfs coming.

Have you attacked a phantasm lately? They die at so much as a cough. Thief and Necro pets are weak, but they still take a few hits to kill.
Also you don’t think phantasms/shatters don’t make up more than 45% of a mesmer’s damage? Ranger pet attacks don’t hit moving targets but they can still attack faster, more consistently, and soak up more damage than phantasms.
Not only that, but Necros and Rangers have their pets out constantly which means they don’t have to summon a new one every time you kill your target which more than makes up for their long cooldowns. Even thief pets last for more than one kill.

The problem is that mesmer really isn’t that ridiculous in PvP (compared to thief cough, cough), people are just stupid as hell. After playing a mesmer for a while you learn their tricks, you learn their weaknesses and strengths, and you learn what to watch out for. I can say with certainty that in sPvP, and especially WvW, I can kill 90% of the mesmers I find regardless of what class I play. I know I’m not that good and I know they’re not that bad (most of them). It’s simply the case that I know what to expect from a mesmer and I know how to spot them in a crowd of clones, which isn’t hard.
Now what upsets me is when I see some idiot ranger or warrior sit there with two or three of my iBerserkers blending them into a fine paste every couple of seconds while mashing buttons trying to kill my clone. It upsets me because these are the people complaining that mesmers are OP and these are the people Anet is listening to.

As a result we get more nerfs on things that weren’t really broken to try to appease these imbeciles. The problem is these imbeciles will still die to the nerfed mesmer because they can’t figure the class out fundamentally. They will continue to die until they figure out the mechanics and they will continue to moan until the nerfs effect us so much that even these basic mechanics can’t kill the lowliest among them.

It is because of this we have such a monstrous reputation in sPvP while our PvE is utter kitten. It is because of this that we continue to see (and will continue to see) numbers nerfs in every patch, despite our abysmal PvE numbers.

I’ve come to the point where I’ve pretty much had it with this game. This last patch has been the straw that broke my mesmer’s back. Until they get their act together and actually fix things that are broken, stop arbitrarily changing numbers, and stop listening to the people who are upset that it’s a bit harder to kill a mesmer than clicking the person and rolling their face on the keyboard, then there’s really no hope for the future of mesmers. On top of the gear treadmill they’re adding, I’ve lost all hope in the game.

Confusion in general is awful, but Cry of Frustration can be great if you’re traited/at the right time/Mind Wrack is on cooldown.

Also, I most definitely consider the change to iMage to be a nerf. Yes, you get two extra stacks, but it only lasts for about 1/3rd of its original duration. This is probably the dumbest thing they could have done with it as it was the only long duration confusion we had. Now it’s just another bit of confusion that ends before it even gets the chance to do anything and can basically be ignored. At least when it was a single stack lasting 9+ seconds you would likely get something out of it. Evidently Arenanet’s idea of fixing things is just arbitrarily nerfing it.

Sarelm.8317:

Most people don’t use it because it doesn’t seem to sync well. Staff does ludicrous amounts of condition damage while GS has absolutely no damaging conditions on it whatsoever. GS does wonderfully with crit/damage builds because of it’s crit-soaked auto-attack and all over power. But staff’s mindbendingly slow auto attack and inability to stack on-crit traits or sigils with any of it’s abilities is downright painful. That’s not to say it’s not usable. As most people are demonstrating here, ignoring one or the other’s strengths and using the base utilities on the weapons still works. Personally, I’d just rather find 2 weapons that seems to fit the same build rather than fight the system like that.

This pretty well hit the nail on the head.
One plays on the other’s weaknesses which means you cannot specialize into one without neglecting the other. Greatsword and Staff are great weapons to use, they just mix like oil and water. I really would recommend using alternative combinations and specializing into condition damage or crit.

AlfredKlios.9657:

If anyone needs the 15k health its theives, being an Adventurer profession and also not having access to the extreme mitigation that mesmers, ele’s, and guards have.

This has to be a troll post. EVERYTHING a thief does evades damage. They have more blinks and stealths than a mesmer could ever dream of and they don’t even need them with the insane amount of damage they pull off.

KratosAngel.7289:

Personally, I’d rather have the clone removed from the auto attack and have a defintely better use of auto attack, which would stack a condition (probably not confusion as there is #3) maybe poison, weakness or … something.
I mean, seriously, mesmers need a reliable alternative weapon for condition builds PLUS the scepter is supposedly designed for condition damage (as speccing into it adds condition damage, seems legit) so why having a mechanic that has absolutely nothing to do with condition and based on direct damage (attack) ?
Does not make sense to me.

I see nothing wrong with giving a stack of confusion to the sceptre auto attack. After all, elementalists get burning on their autoattack and their #2 when using sceptre in fire attunement. Putting a stack of confusion on the sceptre #1 would give us a reliable source of confusion which would help strengthen the already weak confusion builds.

Confusion builds right now rely too much on large, slow, difficult to perform, and long cooldown stacks of confusion. They’re one trick ponies and that one trick has a high probability of failure. Giving mesmer a reliable source of a small amount of confusion with a short cooldown would help mitigate the enormous amount of downtime and give them a fighting chance when a combo inevitably goes horribly wrong.

TheRamosOnline

Greatsword

No comment here. Actually decent advice.

Staff
If you think you can survive its conditional onslaught, get as far away as humanly possible. It’s condition spreading depends on distance, the closer it is the more damage and conditions it can dish out on you. Did I mention that it’s boons and conditions come from its autoattack?
It’s boons and conditions come from its autoattack!

You’re overrating Staff damage and boon potential. Boons require bounces from your autoattack, which are unreliable, slow, and have limited range. Onslaught is a strong word for the three possible conditions from winds of chaos that only hits maybe once a second. Otherwise, decent advice.

Scepter
If you see a Mesmer with a Scepter, expect to be confused with 5 stacks of confusion.
Don’t have a condition remover? Run the KITTEN away! 5 stacks of confusion from a condition Mesmer will do 1.5-2k damage to you every time you do an action (attack, dodge roll, etc). It’s a giant purple beam, hard to miss.

This is a gross overestimate of sceptre’s potency. If you get hit by the full duration of confusing images, you’re just bad. Its a blatantly obvious beam of light with a 900 range and a three second channel time. The mesmer can do nothing during this duration except sit there and channel. If you don’t dodgeroll or simply walk out of range, you may as well sit in every giant red elementalist circle because that pretty much what you’re doing.
Also, unless you’re talking WvWvW (which doesn’t count because you can kill anyone with anything there), the only way you’d be taking 1.5-2k damage per attack with 5 stacks of confusion (which were easily avoidable in the first place) is if the mesmer is condition damage stacking, in which case plant your foot in his kitten because he has virtually no survivability.

Sword (main hand)
Once you’re that close to him, he can and most likely WILL root you in place. He’ll then proceed to pull off a Pistol Whip Rip Off and be completely immune to all attacks when doing it. He can even reflect all attacks back at you while doing it if traited, as if it wasn’t bad enough.

This is wrong. Blurred Frenzy does not benefit from Masterful Reflection. You’ll only be rooted in place if illusionary leap works as intended and it has a nasty habit of not.

Focus
Stay the kitten away from the Phantasmal Warden, it will destroy you in seconds. Luckily it doesn’t move. You can. SO MOVE!

Post-nerf Phantasmal Warden has some of the lowest DPS of any phantasm. Destroy you in seconds would only be accurate if you were talking tens of seconds. Yes get out of its way, but it’s really not that frightening.

Sword (off hand)
If you see a Mesmer with a sword in its offhand, laugh at it. Laugh until the cows come home. Then stop laughing when you see the Phantasmal Swordsman and kill it before it hits you, it will poke your eyes out.

You underestimate the offhand sword this time. The block is nigh useless but the phantasm has perhaps the best DPS of all phantasms. It attacks slightly faster than the Phantasmal Duelist and does about the same amount of damage. It also evades attacks while attacking which allows for more survivability.

Pistol
If you see a Mesmer with a Pistol in its offhand, throw down your keyboard and mouse and sit back, you’re not getting away from this one alive. It’ll stun you can spawn a Phantasm that uses Unload, that cheap thief attack.
If you’re stupid enough to think you can fight this one, kill the Phantasm and stay far away.

Huge exaggeration on the duration of Magic Bullet’s stun. It’s really no longer than any other class’s stuns. Hell, hammer warriors get two stuns on their bar. Yes, it’s a kitten to deal with, but two seconds of stun is far from game-over.

Stealth

Mesmer stealth is annoying but very short lived (unlike thief). Also, any mesmer taking Mass Invisibility into battle over Time Warp or Moa Morph is brain dead.

I know this was a troll post/intentional hyperbole for comedic purposes, but there will be people who will believe every word you posted and cry out “See! Even the Mesmers think they’re OP”

If I’m not mistaken, Illusion of Life can revive up to 5 people while Signet of Undeath can only revive 3. It also has a 130 second cool down, not 240. That’s 50 seconds less than Signet of Undeath.

However, I do agree this is not a fair trade-off. 50 fewer seconds on a skill that is rarely used and the ability to revive two more people in the tiny AoE is hardly fair considering one is absolute revival while the other is conditional. To be honest, I’ve never had the opportunity to revive more than three people with Illusion of Life and if five people were downed within the same area I would question whether they’re worth reviving in the first place.

Putting more clones on Sceptre 1 is redundant to extreme proportions. You’d be generating more clones than you would know what to do with.

SoulStichMMO

Why not just have each attack cause 3sec confusion, like ele earth dagger 1 causes bleeds?

This is much more reasonable and I’ve been campaigning for something similar to this for weeks now.

The armour does not have a unique skin and the stats are pretty meh. Power and condition damage are pretty niche stats to have. It’s probably great for a necromancer’s or maybe some elementatlist magic find set, but regular explorer’s gear with its power and precision is a little more universal.

Here’s some screenshots of what is happening (names censored for obvious reasons)

Masher

Seriously you guys are doing something wrong here, as fear does not work on people who are not brawling.

It shouldn’t be an issue in the first place. You shouldn’t have to go out of your way to reset your brawl status if your costume wore off before timing out. You shouldn’t have to give up large win streaks because someone wont let you back into the cauldron when your costume wears off.

You also completely ignored

the food fight stuff affects players not in brawl xP

Donato

I turned into a giant candy corn for the costume brawl … got crazy amount hits with the ground stomp… I pretty much instantly won since everyone was so clustered together.
I think we are talking about the same thing.

Not quite, but the right idea. The Candy Corn Elemental ground stomp is a large AoE knockback. While it is nasty, it has a long cooldown and a long channel time so its easy to counter and prevent. The Mad King’s Outfit has a large AoE fear that has a short cooldown and an instantly affects everyone around the user. People are using this to troll people trying to get back up to the mouth of the cauldron by fearing them off of the platforms of the mini jumping-puzzle you have to go through to get in the cauldron. They don’t care for their brawl score or achievement, they just want to ruin you fun by preventing you from getting back into the cauldron once your costume has worn off or if you want a different costume.

samrogan

That’s why you find a friendly witch to spawn a cauldron for you!

It doesn’t contain the same costumes.

So ignoring the fact that the Mad King’s Outfit is blatantly overpowered in costume brawl, it can actually prevent people from reaching the rim of the mystic forge cauldron and prevent them from getting costumes from it again.

If you are out of costume, whether it wears off or you manually remove it without leaving brawl, you will stay in brawl. So say I had a nice streak going but my costume wore off. I would just jump back up the puzzle and into the cauldron and resume my brawling. So here’s the problem: someone in the Mad King’s costume standing and waiting at the last platform. The moment you set foot on it he fears you off and it’s back to start. By the time you get back to his platform, his fear is off of cooldown. Even trying a mesmer portal didn’t work. So what can you do? You can try to knock him off with something else, but there’s a catch. He isn’t in combat unless he’s busy fearing people off the platforms. The second you try to attack him after his fear ends, he hops out of brawl and waits for his fear to cooldown (which doesn’t take very long). This can also be done with the skeleton kick and mummy stomp, but with a limited range and to a much lesser extent and are pretty easily countered. Mad Kings are by far the worst offenders when it comes to cauldron denial. The only solution I have found is to give up. Sacrifice your streak or go do something else.

Ritz

The answer to this problem is simple, turn the trait Sharper Images into a trait known as Baffling Images. Then replace the Bleeding in the description and functionality into Confusion.

that smells a little ridiculous with greatsword clones and looks like it could get really overpowered really quickly. Plus, dueling already has every other really useful trait. I’d like to see usefulness spread out a bit.

Also I’m terrible at detecting internet sarcasm, so I can’t tell if you were joking or not.

Embolism

Confusion, therefore, is literally twice as powerful in WvW as it is in sPvP.

That actually makes a lot of sense and further supports my reasoning to disregard all WvW builds.

Ki Bear Punk

How can you buff mesmers confusion without making him OP?

Hildebert

Anet even added “confuses enemies” in their tooltip for the sceptre 1 skill during one of the beta weekend events or stress tests, but nothing became of it. It would simultaneously bring the sceptre from the grave and give us options for confusion so we’re killing two birds with a single fix.
The only other solution I could think of would be an across the board increase in confusion duration but this seems hamfisted at best.

I’ve been having this issue too, but it happened before I readied any mantras. It also continues to happen even though mantra of concentration isn’t in my bar.
Edit: It no longer chants without it in my skill bar, but will continue if I place it back on.

The iMage is amongst our most underwhelming phantasms. It attacks incredibly slow, and the single stack of confusion or the 3 seconds of retaliation it makes is barely noticeable. A few things they could do with it to make it better would be to allow it to cast multiple stacks of confusion and longer duration retaliation, allow it to attack much faster, or allow it to cast its confusion and retaliation simultaneously in a large AoE around it. I find option three to be the most interesting personally.

I think phantasms/clones will give you stacks of “Gain X stat when you kill a foe,” if they kill something because they count as a skill, but the chance on crit and weapon swap sigils wont proc for them because they’re technically not using your weapon.

As for recommended sigils on a glass cannon, sigil of Ice, Earth, Air, Fire, Rage, and Purity are among my favorites, but test all of them out and see which ones you like. If you’re stacking crit, you’ll probably want to use an on crit sigil, but it’s really up to you.

It makes me sad how many people have a hard time with mesmers. Anybody who has spent any amount of time playing a mesmer will faceroll them every time. The second you can exploit the class’s weaknesses they become borderline harmless, or at least an easy kill. Honestly the only time I’ve been killed by a mesmer is when the person was genuinely a good player, at which point it wouldn’t have mattered what class they were playing.

EsLafiel

Someone miss my point completely.

It wasn’t obvious it was meant to be a joke. For all I knew, you could have been some newbie who thought grandmaster slots were reserved for grandmaster traits.

wintermute

Subjective much? Enlighten me, which classes would that be? Maybe a look at the other classes forum will help you find examples. Oh wait…

No need to be rude.
I was mostly referring to warrior, elementalist, and ranger. Three of their classes that have been around the longest and have had the most amount of time to be polished. Classes whose mechanic works well (some debate over ranger pets) and traits that aren’t total kitten.

Just look at the most recent patch notes. Necro got some well-deserved bug fixes, other classes got traits and skills tweaked around while mesmer gets some more tooltips updated.

EsLafiel

I am not getting a single grandmaster trait, the most I am spending in one line is the vit line with 25 in it.

You don’t have to use a grandmaster trait in a grandmaster slot. We have plenty of other decent traits, its just that the traits that unlock at the 30 point grandmaster level in any tree are godawful.

@shenhua
I was just going off secondhand information. Good to know we can mark another trait on the “Pitifully Bad” side.

@Aruun
From what I understand, Mender’s Purity only activates when you use your “healing skill,” not whenever you receive healing.

This does however have some interesting implications as you can remove a condition upon charging as well as using Mantra of Restoration as the charge technically counts as a use of your healing skill.

Another interesting trait combination is Restorative Illusions with Illusionary Persona. The mesmer friend I had mentioned earlier made a build that centered around this combo.

Voodoo Tina

MMO’s run on a time scale of years. It’s been a month. Expecting everything to happen over night while they are busy fixing problems that actually make the game literally unplayable is unrealistic. If you play a game at launch, expect polish to be lacking. If the mesmer doesn’t make you happy right now, play something else until they get to it.

Have you seen a lot of the patch notes? a lot of their fixes are for incredibly minor issues. Meanwhile Illusionary Retreat is still popping us under the ground.

It’s beyond that though. Many mesmers feel a little neglected. Since BWE 2 we have seen very little change beyond bug fixes and a trait added or swapped around. The class still feels a little clunky and inharmonious. Meanwhile classes that have been polished to a near spit shine are still being tweaked while mesmer just gets their tooltips adjusted. It’s a little bit aggravating,

So the other day, running tournies and the like, my party eventually ran into an unstoppable force which finally brought our undefeated spree to an end. This took place at the Battle of Khylo arena and many of you could probably guess what happened. A crafty mesmer camped the trebuchet for the entire duration of the fight and rained hell upon all of us. So we tried what every sane group of people would do and tried to attack the problem directly and sure enough we took out the trebuchet. but as we were leaving, the booming voice over the loudspeakers chimed “ENEMY TREBUCHET HAS BEEN REPAIRED.” Sure enough, the mesmer was back on its merry way raining fire and brimstone upon the folks at the windmill. We marched back up scared the mesmer away and took out the treb once more. Once more it was back up within seconds. So instead of wasting more of our time and man power, we leave one person to deal with the mesmer and trebuchet. One of two things would happen: either a) the mesmer kills the person we leave behind, or b) the same scenario happens where the mesmer runs off and portals back with the repair kit. Eventually the enemy wins because of their Treb support and our one less man working on trying to stop the treb.

So what happened.

Well the mesmer is able to drop a portal and run (as you all may well know, when a mesmer wants to get away, it’s sure as kitten going to get away) then repair the treb faster than one to five people can destroy it. Now while most people cry “MESMER PORTAL OP,” I’m not so sure it’s the portal that’s the problem. The real problem is that while it takes a few seconds to destroy, the trebuchet can be repaired instantly. If the trebuchet can be repaired so easily and so quickly, what is the incentive to protect it? The mesmer knew this and that’s why it would drop a portal and run when things were slightly not in their favor. It was easier to let the treb fall and rebuild it than it was to fight a drawn out fight just to throw more rocks at people.

So what can be done to keep Kyhlo from “he who camps the treb wins the game”?
Make the repairing the treb take time. Make it hurt when the enemy team takes out your seige engine. Make the Trebuchet worth defending. Make the consequences for not protecting your siege more significant than ten seconds of down time.

So people don’t have to go hunting for them or pretend like they know what they’re talking about I put them all in one place:
(I’ve added my commentary in italics)

• Harmonious Mantras:
  Mantras can be activated three times before needing to be channeled again.
  Mandatory if you’re a mantra build; too bad no one uses mantras.
• Confounding Suggestions:
  50% chance to cause a 1-second stun whenever you daze a target.
  pretty much the epitome of lacklustre. Only a 50% chance to get what’s essentially an immobilize whenever you daze. We have four reliable sources of daze and one unreliable. One of those sources is a mantra so you’d probably want Harmonious Mantras instead and another source only occurs as a secondary effect. This is basically a trait that sometimes makes something you will rarely use slightly better.
• Empowering Mantras:
  4% more damage for each readied mantra.
  Again, only useful for a mantra build only this time you only benefit if you’re not using your mantras.
• Furious Interruption:
  Gain 4 seconds of fury when you interrupt a foe.
  Slightly more useful but still not more useful than other traits in the Dueling tree.
• Bountiful Interruption:
  Apply a random boon to yourself when you interrupt a foe
  It doesn’t specify for how long or if there is an internal cooldown. Still not worth taking if you just get a single stack of might or regeneration for 4 seconds. It certainly wont change your game in a significant way.
• Prismatic Understanding:
  Cloaking skills last 1 second longer.
  Another Grand Master trait that hinges on something most mesmers use rarely. Everyone loves Decoy, but few people use Torch, Veil, or waste their time with Mass Invisibility. One extra second on these skills is nice, but not nice enough to use over some other trait.
• Shattered Conditions:
  Using a shatter skill removes a condition.
  Finally we have a genuinely useful trait. With this puppy you basically don’t even need to bring a condition removal utility in most cases. Conditions will slide off of you like teflon.
• Restorative Illusions:
  Heal a small amount when you shatter illusions.
  Unfortunately, it doesn’t specify how much the heal is and I haven’t tried it myself, but another mesmer friend tells me it’s nothing to sneeze at. Might be worth looking into.
• Illusionary Persona:
  Shattering illusions creates the shatter effect on you as well.
  Pretty much mandatory on most shatter builds. In the right place it can increase your shatter damage by 33%. Very useful; no problems here.
• Imbued Diversion:
  Diversion hits multiple targets.
  It should have hit multiple targets in the first place. Still pretty lacklustre considering daze doesn’t stack duration.

savant

2. Allow the Mesmer (and only the Mesmer, not clones) put on 1 stack of Confusion for each Ether Bolt attack (without changing the third attack to stop conjuring a clone) – and let those single stacks of Confusion last for 4 seconds.

This option is mostly what I was getting at earlier. Anet even added “confuses enemies” in their tooltip for the sceptre 1 skill during one of the beta weekend events or stress tests, but nothing became of it. It would simultaneously bring the sceptre from the grave and give us options for confusion so we’re killing two birds with a single fix.

The number 1 option sounds like it could snowball far too easily, but it might be possible to balance. The only other solution I could think of would be an across the board increase in confusion duration but this seems hamfisted at best.

Mayama

People that say confusion builds rely on your opponent beeing braindead dont play it right. You need to FORCE situations in which the enemy has to use skills to survive but at the same time has like 5 stacks of confusions on him.

A few things wrong here. An intelligent player won’t let this happen. They will have enough condition removal to prevent it or will use clever dodging and crowdcontrol to keep a combo from happening in the first place. Second, and it has been mentioned before yet chosen to be ignored, why should I work so hard to get such a mediocre return? Why would I bother setting up an elaborate Rube Goldberg device to catch a rabbit when I can just walk up and bash its skull in with a rock? Far less can go wrong with a rock and I’m not completely SOL if something does go wrong.

I don’t mean to single you out Juno, but your post seems to sum up what a lot of others have been saying.

juno

In WvW it’s amazing. If an opponent is at 30% health (ish), hit them with Scepter 3 and watch them self-destruct. That’s powerful.

Phantasm specs do better. Significantly better. Just pop an iBerserker and watch as your opponent’s blended pulp gets smeared across the ground, say from 50% to zilch in under a second. No suicidal intention required. Butthis is beside the point.

Remember when I said confusion relies on your opponent being braindead? That’s why I don’t consider its use in WvW seriously. Almost everyone in it is braindead and confusion will kill them just as easily as anything else. People in WvW will actively stand in elementalist meteor storms, let pets maul their faces, and spam inside feedback bubbles because they don’t even realize they’re there. I’ve pulled countless people off of cliffs consecutively with Into the Void (if you haven’t tried it yet do it now, it’s possibly the funniest thing you will ever see) but just because it culls the sheeple does not validate it as a viable strategy anywhere else.

juno

Maybe I’m missing something but I think confusion is the most powerful condition at the moment.

You’re correct in the point that it does more damage per tick, thereby in a loose definition the most powerful. HOWEVER, it relies on an opponent using skills in its duration, which more than likely will not happen every second considering animation and channel times and awareness that the condition is upon them so in reality it ticks far fewer than once a second. This translates in to far less dps in the long run. You’d be better off using a condition like bleed.

juno

I think it’s a clever mechanic that rewards skillful play and situational awareness.

The problem here is already hinted at by AndyPandy. Confusion isn’t as rewarding as bleed which requires neither skillful play nor situational awareness. What is the incentive to work your kitten off for confusion damage when bleed damage is higher, more reliable, and easier to get?

What ever happened to it? weren’t we supposed to get it on the sceptre auto attack or was that tool tip added one beta weekend just to screw with us? Will we ever get some rune/sigil support?

Are we ever going to get a reliable source of confusion? It’s kind of depressing when our two most sustainable sources of confusion are on our downed state and from trident clones; especially considering it makes up a nice chunk of our class. Sure we have Confusion Images, but that only lasts 5 seconds (though those 5 stacks only overlap for maybe 3 of those seconds) and has at least a 12 second cooldown. Without a reliable two-feet-on-terra-firma source of confusion, it seems to be a flashy gimmick on traits not worth taking.

Don’t believe me?
Lets do some maths.

Using generous estimates and a painstakingly theorycrafted “confusion build” viewable here we have some numbers to crunch

Condition damage: a whopping 1456. Makes some of those necros jealous.
Now we take the confusion damage formula: 25 + 0.5 * Level + 0.075 * Condition Damage per stack per skill use
We get a measly: 174.2dmg/stack/skilluse
Well one stack of confusion never got anyone anywhere so lets stack them up in a realistic scenario where our opponent has so generously decided to stand still and take a combo like a man. Lets assume we have the two mirror images clones and a iMage. You dropped both of your glamours on your opponent and your iMage cast his confusion on him. We’re up to 5 stacks. Now we Cry of Frustration our shatter fodder and iMage and give him another 6 stacks. Climbing to 11 stacks. And of course how could we forget our favorite source of confusion, Confusing Images. Where you have the fingers and hands to do all this at once I don’t really want to know. So now we got 16 whole stacks. I think a few jaws hit the floor. So what ungodly number of damage will we hit if the poor sap attacks shortly after this assault?

2787.2dmg/skilluse

Still a pitiful amount, but since when did anyone ever attack once? Lets say our opponent attacked maybe three times in our five second butter-zone. What are we up to now?

8361.6 damage.
That sounds like a high number right? Consider the following: you worked your kitten off just for a few brief moments of punishment. Punishment that probably didn’t kill anyone short of a button mashing elementalist. Punishment that can be immediately cleansed off. Punishment that your enemy could have just as easily avoided by not attacking for a moment. They may not have even noticed it. Punishment that you’ll have to wait another 20+ seconds before you can perform it again. 16 stacks of bleed for five seconds will do almost 1000 more damage and doesn’t rely on your opponent being braindead. The only one being punished is the mesmer.

Confusion is the forgotten condition. It has no rune or sigil support beyond generic condition damage and duration. It fills the nooks of the mesmer trees and skills and even appears to form feasible builds. So what is with the lack of rune support? we have at least three runes specifically for burning duration and most of that is dominated by elementalist and guadian alone. That’s not to mention the other handful of runes centered on bleeding and poison duration. Where’s confusion’s invite to the party? It doesn’t even get a single rune?

At long length and connecting back to previous statements, where is our confusion? For a class with so much confusion, we sure seem to be pisspoor at making it happen. The pitiful damage it causes would be excusable if only there were a way to consistently keep about a third of those stacks on a single target. As it sits now, while confusion isn’t too few, it’s most certainly too far between. Almost every one of our sources have a cooldown longer than 30 seconds even with traits. On a condition with a completely avoidable bite, 8 seconds of confusion on a 30 second cooldown just does not work. It leaves you a one trick pony who’s trick has a high probability of abysmal failure.