Guild Wars 2

Aaaaand then multiply that by 5 for the different races… 8000+ armor pieces to modify… Yeah, this is never going to happen. Not worth the time involved.

Again, it’s not that many. As near as I can tell, there are 487 Chest pieces, and 457 Leggings, which would be the only pieces in need of serious work, and like I noted, they could likely leave a lot of them alone. So at most we would be talking 4720 pieces to change, and we don’t know how much time-saving design they have in porting an armor from one race to another.

Either way it would be worth doing.

And you state not every piece combo would work but apparently our mentality should be just give it to us anyway even if no one would bother using it. That is the illusion of choice.

My point was, let’s say that there were an armor set for every letter of the alphabet (obviously there are hundreds more, but let’s keep the example simple). It’s possible that the gloves from “Armor J” or the shoulders from “Armor N” would not look right with the Chest of the Ice Encased armor. Fair enough. An individual player would have to decide whether he liked that combination or not. But of the alphabet available, MOST of the combinations would look perfectly fine alongside Ice Encased armor, and by opening up ALL the possibilities, it gives players those options.

Just as some examples, the Ice Encasement armor might look good with Crystal Nomad shoulders, or perhaps a Hexbringer helm, or Slayer’s Helm or gloves, etc.

Having millions of total possibilities, of which only hundreds of thousands look good, is hundreds of thousands times better than only having the one option of all or nothing.

Hang on. A lot depends on what you mean by rigs and skeletons. We don’t really know how anet have done it (unless you have insider info?) so we’re going to have to do a little guesswork. My guess is that a single animation rig wouldn’t be sufficient for an entire weight class. Trenchcoats and pants, for example, would suggest different rigs.

Well, I’m pretty sure I remember an ANet person specifically saying that each weight class had a different animation rig, and that this was part of the problem. On the other hand, an outfit can work on any character of any class, so presumably the armor’s rig just piggybacks the character’s rig, or an Outfit built on the Light rig would not know how to animate Warrior movements.

This is all a bit speculative, but I really can’t imagine this is a completely insurmountable problem, I just think that either they’re working on it in secret, or they decided that it wasn’t worth the effort, in which case I would wholeheartedly disagree.

But I would also guess that there would be a separate rig for chest pieces vs leg pieces, for example. Heck, there may even be multiple rigs for each weight’s chest pieces, since not all of them might move in the same way.

Now that you mention it, aren’t buttcapes attached to light and Heavy Leggings, while all Medium armors have coat tails attached to the Chest?

That could be more of an issue than I was thinking.

I think the best way to square that circle would be to make it so that ALL pants were just pants, and ALL capes/buttcapes/etc. are rigged to the chest. This would mean snapping the existing Light/Heavy leggings in half and grafting those halves onto the equivalent chest piece, but I don’t think that would turn out too bad.

If they wanted to make it a bit more complex, then they could just use an A>B system, in which both the Chest and Leggings are rigged to run “capes,” and every set of Leggings would have a “caped” and “non-caped” model for it, and the basic implementation is that if you combined a Heavy, Light, or non-trench Medium Chest, with a “butt caped” heavy or light, then it would render exactly as it does now, while if you were wearing a “trench coat” Chest, then it would cause the Buttcape to vanish.

This seems complicated, but they already employ a similar method when displaying gloves/boots with certain types of long sleeves/pants.

This would be more work than I’d originally considered, but even so, totally worth it.

Only if you ignore how some peices seamlessly fit together. For example, Ice encased.

There’s nothing about the Ice Encased armor pieces that couldn’t be mixed and matched with other pieces. It is not any more “seamlessly fit” than any other armor. Would every possible combination look as good as any other? No, but that’s for players to decide.

I’m all for cross-class armour (or is it cross-weight?) but I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t have to be as hard as you describe. We don’t need a new kind of skeleton or any re-tooling.

Unfortunately the skeleton thing is necessary. Each armor weight uses a different animation rig, mainly to control skirts and such. By default they can’t be mixed and matched at all, so to make it work, they would have to go through and fix that. My assertion is that they should.

Not sure where you got “dozens” from, but a quick look-up on the wiki gave 1,676 pieces.

Not all of those would require significant work though. Based on what we’ve seen so far, helmets are already almost entirely mix-and-match, and for the most part so are shoulders. Gloves and Boots may be as well, although perhaps some would have to be adapted to work as shoes and hand-gloves that don’t already (I think all do?). So it’s mainly just the torsos and legs that would require significant reworks, and maybe not even all of those.

If the rig they go with is one of the existing ones, or close enough to it, then that would cut out a third of the potential reworks. As for the rest, it’s not like they would need to build them from scratch, they would just need to pull up the pants or pull down the shirt waist or whatever, relative inches of difference that might not look absolutely perfect, but shouldn’t be a major issue.

As for why I like outfits: They look good. They not only look good, but in some cases, they look like something you could never wear before, which is a troubling issue when I go to make an armorset look. Most pieces look the same as the other lists of options with some changes (swap a spike or two for a jagged spike, or maybe an added cloth texture under those spikes). Outfits are a great thing. You’ll look even less like everyone else when more outfits are released.

There is not an Outfit in the game that could not exist as armor pieces. All the Outfit does is prevent you from swapping out portions that you don’t like for other portions you prefer.

As an aside, there’s nothing wrong with looking alike sometimes too. Having everyone wearing a “team uniform” like those old comic book supergroups can be a neat option too.

And again, if you want to look example like someone else, nothing is preventing you from wearing the same armor skins. This is not a “feature” of Outfits.

I actually think what they could do is allow players onto the new maps even if they don’t have the chapter unlocked, but don’t allow them to unlock the mastery or the unique mechanics for that map, which would make it much less fun. Yeah, you could whip around Draconis Mons if you like, but with no grapple vine? Or Bloodstone Fen without the glider skills? Or Ember Bay without the Lava Tubes? Siren’s Landing without the Shrine portals?

I tend to think that playing those maps, without those travel methods available to you, would really get people excited about actually buying them.

One of my biggest disappointments in the PoF announcement is that they didn’t announce that they were making a major infrastructure change that should have been made years ago, rebuilding the armor system to allow for cross-class armoring.

I understand the challenges involved here, but the longer they let it ride, the worse it’s going to be to fix it, and fixing it would be a MASSIVE improvement to the game.

I get the difficulty, the way it’s set up now, light, medium, and heavy armors use different animation rigs, and have different separation lines and design trends. But what they need to do is build a single unified skeleton that can work for all three types reasonably well, rebuild as many of the armor pieces as possible to fit on this new skeleton, lengthening and shortening hem lines as best they can. In the most extreme cases they can fuse the top and bottom together, like you already see in things like Citadel of Flame armors, where if you wear the torso, then it automatically shows the legs as well, even if you have different legs on.

This may require going in manually and retooling dozens of armor pieces to fit properly, and that’s not inconsequential, but it is worth doing. Doing this would not only allow them to take Outfits and release them as mix-and-match components, but would also just instantly triple the costume design variety for every class. Suddenly Heavy and Light armors could wear Thieves hoods. Heavy armor classes could wear the skimpy light armors, or Light armor classes could wear beefy heavy jackets.

And as for the original consideration that “the class should have a single armor type because it allows PvPers to visually tell them apart,” well with all the auras, Outfits, and added intra-class variety added since launch, that’s a completely pointless argument already, and besides which they’ve added “show generic opponents” options to both PvP modes so that the skins an opponent is wearing are moot.

They need to do it, and they need to do it as soon as possible. Put whatever people are needed on the project to make it happen.

Since when Anet listen what the community wants?

Intermittently.

You have to shut off 1 of your facets. the only one worth shutting off in a fight is Facet of Elements which leaves you with only 1 tick of upkeep which means you are getting 1 energy a second.

I don’t know how experts do it, but whenever I played Revenant, I would use its buff-stacking potential to stack up buffs in between engagements, and then as soon as the fight starts I could burn the Swiftness one, and maybe one of the others if I wanted, so that I was only fighting with one or two active, but I’d still have stacks of buffs from before the fight for a while. Then when the fight ended, I could throw them back on.

Just because something is working as intended, doesn’t mean that what’s intended is what people want.

“Condition damage” is still just the role DPS. It hardly matters how the numbers you produce above the enemies’ heads is formatted.

Well, not quite. There are distinctions, and I’m not “hardcore” enough to know all of them, but the easier ones are that some enemies are especially resistant to either Power or Condi damage, so whichever enemies need killing, that’s the more useful damage ot have. Also there are certain interactions with buffs/food/whatever that mean that it’s easier to accumulate condi damage potential than direct damage some of the time. Obviously the devs can make either stronger than the other, but they are not always in perfect balance.

I was trying to brainstorm ways to make Weaver operate a bit more simply. I, like apparently many people (but not all, of course), find the Weaver spec interesting, but very complicated, and requiring really dancing on a wire to play well.

I was thinking, perhaps instead of having your first click change the main element, then your second push that element to second and a new one into first, and so on, what if you could manually just swap “mainhand” and “offhand” elements at will, so you could go from fire/air to fire/earth or water/air, in whichever order you prefer.

But how to do the controls for this, we only have four f-keys, not counting the f5 this doesn’t use. Well why not the weapon swap that Eles can’t use anyway?

So that’s my UI suggestion. Have the standard row of four elements, bound to f1-4. Then, above that, have a smaller row of elements, also bound to f4. If you start jamming on f-keys, then all that will change is the 1-3 attacks, they’ll keep swapping around to whatever element you pick. If you hit “~” or “Weapon Swap,” then the larger bottom row and the smaller top row flip places, and then jamming on the f-keys will only change the 3-5 attacks (since the 3rd is a dual skill).

In terms of overall balance, it’s not that different than the current design, you can still reach the same targets, just maybe in a couple less cycles of the keys, but I think it would make the class much easier to operate.

Just as an example, if you were in fire/fire, and wanted to switch to air/earth, you would see the big row on the bottom and the small row on the top. You would hit f3 to swap main to air, and therefore be in air/fire, then after the CD you’d hit ~ and then f4 to swap to air/earth.

Since the ~ key doesn’t actually change anything it wouldn’t need a cooldown like Weapon Swap does. If they have difficulty implementing it that way since Weapon Swap isn’t meant to work that way, they could do the same thing using the unused f5 key, but personally I think ~ would be more intuitive.

So what do you think, better than the current? Worse in some way I’m not seeing?

We are squishy – we have to burst fast and get out of the melee. At the moment the weaver doesn’t have range, doesn’t have enough DPS, doesn’t have fast burst and is squishy AF… Not to mention that if we make mistakes with this “play on a piano to win” profession we are punished very hard.

Weaver is a class that could definitely benefit from an “easy mode.” Like as it is might be a solid “hi spec” class, but it’s just not as fun for the more casual player. Maybe figure out a way to simplify it a bit, and add more survivability to it, while at the same time limiting the option of playing “all the keys,” so that basically if you know how to play it really well, you can do so, and get like 5-10% better performance out of it, while if you don’t want to invest that heavily, there’s also a build option for you that works very well compared to other options. Alternate between them using a trait.

I am probably repeating myself (and others) – but superspeed is not good replacement for standard dodge animation – reason is lowered speed when strafing & backpedaling.
Result of this mechanic is that you can move approx same range when going forward in Mirage Cloak (not really much usable when ""dodging") slower to the sides and reaaaaly slow backwards. Overall it is a huge downgrade for in-combat mobility.

Ok, so if they could give you free range of movement, backpeddle at 100% speed, they would be enough? That could actually be a big improvement over standard dodge in some cases, since you could fully control your movement. You’d never overshoot and could move in “L” patterns.

Now I agree that a dodge/blink would be “cool,” but it’s clearly not what they were going for here, so if Mesmers do get it, it would likely be in a different spec entirely. Besides, you have Jaunt if you want to blink-dodge around.

IMHO new class mechanic should be pure update (waves at Daredevil) and not partial update in some cases and downgrade in the others.

Keep in mind, Daredevil was only a “pure upgrade” because a few months earlier they nerfed the core traitlines significantly. You don’t want that kind of “purity.”

Honestly, when I first heard about Mirage, I had the same reaction as the OP “but I LIKE to move when I dodge!” But after playing it, I think this is ok as it is. It just requires rewiring your brain a bit. It provides Superspeed and evade, so if you want to move outside a circle, you still can, it just requires manually running out of the circle while in your evade frames. Now maybe they could tweak the numbers here, more Superspeed, for example, and maybe they could provide better Endurance management, but once I got used to playing that way, it wasn’t nearly as big an issue as I thought, and they definitely don’t need to give Dodge a blink-like effect.

To be fair, Superspeed as a GM minor is just a lazy ass fudge factor.

I’ve never understood complaints about what ends up in a minor. Sure, it was an issue back when you had to pick and choose what to put points into, but ever since the NPE you’ll be getting the minors no matter what. They can put as much or as little into each minor as they feel you should have. They could have a Master minor that has a ton of stuff and a GM minor that says “I don’t know, your feet glow or something,” and fair enough. It really doesn’t matter what they put into the minors or not, so long as the sum total of the passive benefits add up to a balanced result, and in this case, they thought that “Gain Superspeed when you gain Mirage Cloak” was enough. They could add more effects to that minor, or move it elsewhere, it would not make a difference on their end.

Fun to play is preference I’m afraid, and you can’t balance on preference. The issue is, if you ignore balancing in PvP, you break PvP, if you ignore it in PvE, it’s an annoyance.

No. An unbalanced PvP class just means that either more people will be playing it or less people will be playing it, and if it’s OP and people play it even thought they don’t enjoy it, or if it’s weak and people don’t play it even though they wish they could, then that is impacting their fun factor, and that fun factor is the important part. So again, it all boils down to making the game fun. Making it fun for PvPers is not more important than making it fun for PvEers.

Yes, they are referring to PvE, but by missing it’s amazing performance in PvP/WvW they are being facetious. Implying Spellbreaker is weak in PvE due to being undertuned when really it is due to it’s design philosophy being centered on PvP/Wvw.

But again, that is not a problem of player perception, that is because ANet did not design the specs to be good in PvE. “Lame in PvE but good in PvP” is not a trade-off players should care about. It needs to be good in both.

The problem with balancing 2 elite specs around the same mode is, then you have Elite specs which compete for the same slot. In this situation, if they make Spellbreaker too strong in PvE, Berserker will be left behind, and vice versa. This is because’s Warrior’s main usefulness comes from Banners and PS, which is on core Warrior anyway.

Each should offer unique options, should play slightly differently in practice, but each of those options should be valid ones. Maybe at the most competitive levels a clear favorite emerges, and all the ranked teams only play as one of the two, but both should be good enough that more casual players can play the “wrong” one and still be almost as good as if they were playing the “right” one. Ideally both would have an equally useful role, like one is better for 1v1ing people, another better for team support or defending, and the one you use might vary based on what you expect the enemy to bring.

The point is, when a new expansion comes out, it should have nine new specs that are ALL viable in ALL play modes. If they can’t commit to making each spec viable in each game mode, then they need to add more than nine of them every two years. When a PvE Warrior buys PoF, he should have a new spec to play with, and it should be fun and balanced.

You can technically run anythingyou want anywhere yes, but are you really going to tell me facerolling a dungeon, or fractal tier 4 (which people DO faceroll) is equivalent to playing a Platinum/Legendary PvP game, provided everyone there actually is of rank?

Look, you can argue that PvP involves a tighter tollerance than PvE, and I think that’s true, but ultimately it comes down to fun. If a given class is not competitively balanced in PvP then it is not as fun to play, and that is the important part there, whether it is fun. But likewise, if a class in PvE doesn’t have fun and rewarding mechanics, if it leads to an inordinate amount of failure and frustration, then that isn’t fun either. A PvE player not having fun with his character matters exactly as much as a PvP player not having fun with his, and by all accounts there are way more PvE players than there are PvP players, so in aggregate, their balance concerns should take priority. I hope that all your balance concerns do get met, just so long as they don’t come at the expense of making PvE builds even slightly less fun to play.

To address your point, it’s not “weak to other players” as you will have noticed the high ratings if you didn’t cherry pick the thread. It’s that Ahlen is tunnel visioning one specific aspect of the game. Yes SB doesn’t look too valuable in PvE at the moment, but in PvP and WvW is one of the best new elite specs.

If you’ll pay attention, both players were referring ONLY to PvE, and I would agree with them that Spellbreaker really doesn’t seem to offer much to PvE, and that’s a disappointment.

See this is what I don’t understand about some people’s criticisms of the new elite specs…

Why would you want 2 elites specs competing for PvE right now? When you could have 1 for PvE, 1 for PvP/WvW, 1 for etc scenario… I thought that was the point of elite specs?

No. Every expansion, every new spec should offer something new for every play mode. People who only PvP, and want to main certain classes, should be able to play a new and interesting spec for that class. Players who only PvE and want to main a certain class, should also have a new and interesting spec to play with. It should not be a case of “oh, sorry, your main is getting a raid support spec this expansion, maybe better luck in two years. . .”

There should not be “PvE specs” or “PvP specs,” the spec should work for both. The differentiation should come in traiting, and there might be a trait thread that offers benefits only useful for PvP, sure, but then if you just choose a different thread, it should offer equally useful benefits to PvEers. I’m not sure what the best course is for Spellbreaker, but it definitely does need to offer something more for PvE players.

I don’t think it would be a good idea to give player GMs any actual power, any actual abilities to impact other player’s games. I do, however, see a space for player filters, players who are authorized to look through incoming player reports, and then sort them, flagging the ones requiring immediate attention so that official GMs get to it right away, flagging the ones that are worthwhile but not immediate (like a player is AFKing, he can be punished for that later), and flagging ones that seem unwarranted (so GMs wouldn’t deal with those unless they had nothing better to do).

They could also “clean up” the reports a bit, not erasing them or anything, the original should remain intact to prevent abuse, but adding “tr;dls” to some, or clarifying the original intent, maybe tracking down some context on a vague issue so a GM doesn’t have to.

Basically the paid GMs would be making the actual decisions, the player-support could accomplish nothing on their own, for good or ill, but the players could help to speed up what needs immediate action, and save the GMs a lot of time in parsing each request.

Or they can simply give a breakbar to the things that are summoned instead of a lifebar. When the breakbar is removed, so is the summoned being. This way there is counter play but it stay usable almost everywhere. With scaling it could even live a bit in wvw zergs.

Interesting idea to it. I’m not positive that would suit their purposes for PvE, since enemies can’t focus down breakbars, but it might be interesting in PvP, and maybe they could either have it be easier to break in PvE or just not worry about it.

Even the animations (which are praised by some players) looks to me way below what other classes (as Firebrand) got.

You, sir, do not have a Dreamer.

They messed up this spec, badly: I’m not interested into play a Spirit Ranger with a bad short bow. A corrupted quaggan has more appeal (and is more cute)…

Yeah, I mean I’m not looking forward to the class in its current state, but I don’t believe it’s completely hopeless. I think there are small numbers tweaks they can do as a start, and then commit to some slightly larger changes over the first balance patch, but I would never expect anything too massive.

I dont except anything, i simply wont purchase xpac. Vote with wallet. Proper spec or no $.

Ok, that’s fine. The number of players they will lose over the Renegade being bad is outrageously small. They are not afraid of losing you. Don’t expect them to be.

They do, however, want to make a fun game, so they will try to make something that works in a way that players enjoy, but that goal has to be something they can reasonably achieve, and “start over, try again,” just isn’t happening.

Sorry, those are the Utilities you’re getting, and really don’t expect any major changes by launch, if they commit to anything big, it’ll probably be months after launch. But really, these will be the same Utilities, thematically, that you’ll see in a year or two. These are the Renegade Utilities. Now, that doesn’t mean they can’t tweak them, perhaps significantly. They can change what they do, they can change the timing of them, the costs, the range, they could make them far more useful, but don’t expect anything completely different from this.

There have been a lot of proposed reworks for the Renegade, because everyone agrees it needs something, but I’d just like to try and keep everyone within a reasonable proposal. Some things they are almost certain to never do with the spec. They are unlikely to completely change the core nature of the Utilities, for example.

The Shortbow will be the weapon, and the visuals will likely stay at least mostly unchanged. They might change one or two if absolutely necessary (3 seems the likliest candidate).

The Utilities will involve summoning ghost charr in some capacity. What they do is more flexible.

Now what can they change? They can change any numbers they want, causing attacks to do more/less damage, take more/less energy, longer/shorter CDs, longer/shorter range, etc.

They can swap/add/remove boons/condis from an ability. They can make an ability that grants Poison instead grant Bleeds, or both, or neither. They can make an ability that grants Might instead grant Fury, or both, or neither.

These would be easy to do (although might take a while to balance out).

Now the trickier thing is to change the actual nature of an ability, like to make the summoned Charr behave differently. This might be possible, it depends on how they’re set up. It might be impossible to make them more mobile and active, or perhaps that’s doable.

Optional:
- ranged greatsword instead of shortbow (same skills but Kalla had a greatsword).

No. Removing Shortbow removes the entire purpose of this spec.

I’d definately give the elite a 7/10 since guardian gets mantras on steroids compared to mesmer, so I wasn’t as turned off by this mechanic as most guardians go on about

Yeah, to each their own, I guess. I definitely want a massive overhaul to the FB as it is now, but I don’t dispute your right to like it and hope that what they end up with can satisfy us both.

Funny how one is always more critical of ones own class which ones knows in and out isn’t it?

Well right. I think part of it comes from knowing exactly what the class is capable of when played to its limits, and therefor knowing what the benchmark for “good enough” is for that class; then it’s partly that different players enjoy different types of gameplay, so they might agree on how a class is working but disagree on how much that actually matters; and finally there’s probably some degree of veterans on a class getting stuck in their ways and saying “this isn’t doing what I normally do as well as my current build does,” which may be true, but novices are stumbling onto completely different play styles that work better with the new specs. Not saying all or even any of these definitely apply to you personally, but I imagine each applies to at least some of the feedback.

I do hope that they can please both sides, but a lot of people do seem to think the new spec is “fun,” which is a great start. “Balance” is typically easier to fix than “fun”.

I think they should have gone full support with this character as a person who made a guardian to feel like a support character or to you know.. GUARD.

I disagree, in that I don’t think any spec should be full support, but I do believe that you should be able to trait for full support. I think that the FB should ideally be balanced around being able to trait for full support if that’s what you want, but with a viable alternative of being a medium-damage tanky build, basically focusing all that support onto yourself for better soloability. I think they can manage both.

@Ohoni, try to use Axe 2 to reliably summon clones in a competitive environment and then tell me it doesn’t have problems.

Again, I have never argued that the class doesn’t have problems, I have never argued that they should leave it 100% as-is. I’ve just noted that I, and many others, it seems, enjoy playing as the spec, and that’s a good thing. If the devs want to improve the spec, that probably won’t harm the fun people are having with it, and will likely only improve it, so why not? I am not your enemy here, stop treating me like one.

Mesmer mains are “freaked out” by people enjoying the spec because you are the ones ANet will look to when they look into actually fixing mirage, and then they won’t.

I would hope that they don’t. I mean, clearly we don’t know what we’re talking about, why would they take our feedback as more important than those who know the details? I obviously hope that they do take our feedback to heart as far as the features we enjoy, and not remove those elements, but in terms of balance tweaks they should obviously focus on those that are making a more scientific analysis of the class. If Anet chooses to ignore that feedback, that’s their own failing.

Jaunt has an ammo mechanic, so what? That doesn’t justify a 400 range shadowstep. Should be 600 range.

Again, I wouldn’t hate a 600 range, it would definitely be better, I was just saying that with the ammo mechanic, I do feel that it provides a useful function. Could be better, but currently useful and interesting.

Really though, I think you guys are doing great getting your balance points across in the Mesmer boards, so maybe it’s not worth arguing with every player who says a positive thing about the spec in a spec-review thread?

You cannot, for some reason, cleanly blink around/past broken walls in keeps/smc/towers/etc. Whatever calculation they’re running, the game just doesn’t allow it.

I’d guess they designed it “better safe than sorry” in terms of pathing so that players couldn’t accidentally glitch through unbroken walls. Annoying, but better than the alternative.

Too much work? Look at Ele and Holosmith, they had lots of work. Why not use as well…?

Because this is the Revenant, and the devs have never cared that much about the Revenant. They clearly made the Weaver and the Holosmith and then we’re like “eh, let’s knock the rest of the specs out over the weekend so we can make the announcement trailer.”

I like the upkeeps, but I can create perma-Swiftness that spans minutes by running Jalis and using Inspiring Reinforcement followed by Echoing Eruption. I can create 25 stacks of Might (over a couple repeated cycles) from Searing Fissure followed by, again, Echoing Eruption.

That seems complicated. I’d prefer to just click on the toggles and play the game instead.

I don’t expect to be able to summon unique minions for each Legend, that would be too much work and they don’t care that much about Revenant players like they do about Eles. I definitely would like to see a more active “warband” themed Renegade, where you can summon various Charr and they are legitimate teammates, providing actual battlefield assistance the entire time. They should be more like pets that you can turn on and off, and you can only maintain 1-2 at a time safely, maybe 3 if you don’t go nuts with your weapon, and all five for a few moments every now and then. Maybe the Elite skill could just be to summon them all out at no cost for ten seconds or so every couple minutes.

Spoken like someone who doesn’t main Mesmer and does give a kitten perfectly.

Yes.

Go complain about what you dislike about your own main class and leave other classes to people who have actually played (and suffered on) them for the last 5 years.

Will do, but I play a lot of classes, and of the nine available, the Mirage is one of the few new specs that I plan to be playing around launch. I’m still on the fence about running Deadeye instead of Daredevil, but Mirage I like.

Not even going to comment on the argument that weaker utility skills from elites compared to core utility skills are fine since one doesn’t have to use them. Pure bias confirmed right there.

It’s just the nature of the game. I main a Thief, I only used one DD Utility over the past year. I also like Guard, I ran Dragon Hunter with no Longbow. I played Tempest without Warhorn, Scrapper with only the med-bot and hammer, Herald without Shield, etc. You don’t have to like every element of a spec to like the spec itself, and Utilities are the lowest priority since you have 20+ other options for each slot, many of which work fine with the new specs.

You don’t like the new spec? That’s fine. My liking it doesn’t mean that you have to. You want changes made? That’s fine, me liking the current base doesn’t mean I would hate any positive changes made. I really don’t get why Mesmers are so freaked out by people actually liking this spec.

It’s a balance thing. Blink can’t cross gaps you’d have to jump, but it can climb up onto certain things that you couldn’t jump to (ie hopping onto a ledge that’s too high to jump but that you could theoretically reach by going around the back), and has longer range than any leap in the game. So some plusses, some minuses, depending on what you’re trying to do with it.

Now theoretically they could intriduce some other power, like a “mirror transit” power, that would be a short range “teleport” that actually functions like a leap, in that you project a mirror to a location exactly 600 range or less in front of you, and then invisibly and instantly “leap” that distance, but then it would have the same limitations of other leaps, in that it would have shorter range, and couldn’t adjust for elevation, so if you tried to use it to move higher than you started, you’d just smack into a wall.

what I’d like to see also is an ammo system so we can have like two blinks before it recharges or something, like Jaunt or engineer rocket boots etc.

That is exactly what Jaunt is. Why would they make two Jaunts?

Same argument could be said for phantasms and shattering in PvE before HoT.

Sort of, but Phantasm generation is way slower than clone generation. If you get three good Phantasms out and then lose them, that’s a much bigger deal than losing three clones.

Our elite is fun to use, hopping in and out. But its a 400 range leap on a 20 second CD per charge.

Yeah, and if that were it, then ugh, what a terrible skill, but the ammo system makes it tollerable, because while it is 20s per charge, you can also spam three in five seconds if you need to, and wait a minute for them to all come back. There’s plenty of downtime even in PvP, much less in PvE, so this is fine.

I see your point with Blink, but you only get ONE blink out of Blink, and then have NO options until it refreshes, whereas you can Jaunt once, then 5-10 seconds can go by, and you can do it again, then forty seconds go by, then again, and so on. It’s much less of a cost to spend it, since you have reserves. If you’re only using it to run as far as possible, then it’s not the best ability, but if you’re using it for a quick movement as often as needed, it’s much better. Also, you can use both.

The range is a bit short, yeah, and I’d love to see 600 range on it, but I don’t need it to be happy with it. It’s better than a lot of Elites.

The deceptions skills sound fun, but ultimately are not. 1 of them is a worse version of blink.

Yeah, most of those are kind of lame, but you never have to slot them. That’s the nice thing about Utilities, you have plenty to choose from. Most of my HoT builds ran with only 1-3 of the five possible slots filled with HoT-only skills. Again, they could change or buff these, but I don’t consider that a priority considering how ignorable they are.

Not to mention, you have yet to defend the actual mechanics of mirage. More specifically, how poorly planned and implemented they are. Our ambush attacks need to be rethought. Mirrors need to be redesigned (number tweaks will make them useable, but it won’t make them a good mechanic by any means). We need way more endurance regeneration considering we now use our dodges defensively and offensively (again, DD does this to some degree and it got an extra 50 endurance on top of literal kitten tons of endurance regeneration. Mirage got vigor on shatter and that’s it, yet shatters also destroy our ambush attack fodder. Go figure…..).

Personally, the change I’d like to see is that Mirrors regenerate Endurance rather than proc Evadeframes, but ultimately I don’t care that much. More Endurance would certainly help the build, but I wasn’t feeling too tapped out.

The spec was not designed cohesively. I don’t know how I can put it any more clearly. You might enjoy it, but that doesn’t change that it was just designed poorly. And it shows.

Check out the Revenant boards.

I don’t argue that no change is wanted, and if the Mesmer elites get their way on this and they buff everything up, great, that’s just awesome. I just don’t see it as absolutely necessary, I think the class is pretty fun in its current form, and again, the issues are all just “this number should be bigger, this number should be smaller,” and maybe “this attack should proc slightly differently,” which are all tiny things that they definitely can fix, when compared to things like “Firebrand Tomes are a complete fiasco and need to be redesigned from the ground up to function in an entirely different manner.”

You just ignored the next sentence about the weapon not reliably summoning clones.

Yeah, because I didn’t agree. It summoned them plenty reliably for me. Would it be even better if they didn’t have to be near the enemy to spawn? Sure. Do I need that? Not really. Could they do that? Yeah, so why the freakout?

Additionally, how are you suppose to permanently leave clones out as a damage source when they get killed in one whack?

Because you can make more.

The axe skills looks impressive for sure, but still have their problems. Namely they are really weak in general, and mesmers didn’t need another weak weapon.

Again though, “is it good enough?” maybe not. I certainly wouldn’t kick a buff out of bed, yeah, it’s fun to play, so if it’s not strong enough, they should fix that, but it’s not hard to fix that, you just change a few numbers in a table and you’re done. That’s a way smaller problem than something like the Firebrand or Renegade which are non-functional at a fundamental level.

Also I should make clear that I don’t care about PvP, so additional tweaks might be necessary there.

I don’t think animations could ever cut it in GW2 for tells. There are a few fights where I actually can rock the fight using animations alone, but these are only featuring very large enemies and not in open world scenarios. It’s never going to be feasible in general situations.

I don’t care about PvP, but I did play some DE in PvE today, and while I do actually like it, it does take getting used to, and could use some tweaking. The problem it has is that it’s a very single-target spec. It has almost nothing for multiple enemies, just a few minor effects on Utilities, and it’s core effects are based on focusing a single target.

This works to a point, but it means that when facing multiple enemies, you have to take each down one at a time, which means that the damage per enemy needs to be WAY higher than a spec that can cleave or AoE-circle entire groups. The DPS for a DE is ok, but I’m not sure it’s actually better enough when against a group of three or more enemies.

And yes, the class can be frustrating to play because of how certain mechanics are just deliberately cumbersome.

I got used to kneeling, but it would help to be able to jump out of kneel, and to have a bigger visual identifier that you’d gone into a kneel. Seeing the actual character animation is a little minimalist on an Asura. Maybe have a screen edge effect?

I like the max range circle while kneeled, but I’d like to always see the max range circle while the rifle is equipped, so that I’d know whether I was in range before kneeling.

Maybe display Malice stacks above the enemy’s head, so we could see them count up without losing sight of the target.

Gw2 raiding is focused around grouping up and staying that way, for the most part. So it happens a lot

Ok, I don’t really raid myself, but I have seen videos, and from what I’ve seen and what little I’ve played, you NEVER stand still! Yes, you tend to stick together with other players in a lot of the encounters, but you do so while constantly on the move, circling the enemy, avoiding AoEs, basically never being in one place. so while a stationary buff circle might work in a few encounters, it’s basically worthless in a ton of them.

Agree to disagree. First off Renegade does not chain you to Kalla. Or the shortbow. Only thing you’re chained to as renegade is the elite spec line and wholly optional F2-F4 skills that don’t take away anything from core Reve.

That’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the spec as a whole though, is it? “Yeah, 90% of the class is completely worthless, but if you just take the absolute minimum that it offers, that’s not too bad. . .”

That, to me, is a failure. If that’s true, then they need to make that other 90% of the class so good that you’d take it even without that 10% that you like. And then if the resulting 100% is too strong then they tone back that 10% to balance it out, but the point is that each individual function of a spec should be enough of a selling point that you would want to have it.

Agreed, it is a bit of a mess. I just want to be able to shoot flaming ponies at people in peace.

I’d like to see them make the summons more functional, either more mobile, or with longer effective range, so that you can reasonably apply your effects to an entire battlefield, rather than just one small corner of it. I actually like the idea that Kalla is a general, so her Noble Phantasm is to summon an “army” to command, but hers is one of the least “army-like” summon sets in the whole game. She should have an actual army, you bring these guys out and they swarm the enemies or bounce from teammate to teammate doing their role like an active participant. In the meantime I’ll be using Thieves’ Guild, thank you.

I’d like SB3 to have a tighter grouping so that it’s less likely to get caught on terrain.

I’d like them to sort the energy management issues, so that you can reasonably fight without running out.

I’d like to be able to be Kalla/Glint spec, because the Revenant requires Glint to be playable.

I’d like to be able to use traits to make either a solid Power spec with negligible condi impact, OR a full Condi spec out of it, depending on my choices.

Very low self-esteem, leading you to believe that you don’t deserve to have any fun?

Maybe there’s some other reason, but I’m a bit stumped as to what it might be at this point.

Yeah, there seem to be a lot of attacks that are hard to see. I was fighting a Hydra using a Scourge, and attacks just came flying from all directions with no warning I could see.

Oh, the dodge key? I was worried that it would use a weird special key if I turned that on.

How are you people giving mirage such a high score if you don’t even like its main mechanics of mirrors and ambushes? Quick comparison of mirage to other 2nd gen elite specs

I really love the axe skills and the teleporting around. The ambushes I like in principle, but don’t know enough to judge whether they’re strong enough. Might need tweaking. The mirrors are a bit of a dud to me, but I’m fine with that, not every element has to be a winner.

Mounts don’t work right on ramps. When they get to the top they often stick and you have to jump to clear it. Which costs endurance on mounts. This needs to be fixed. A clear example of this is the water pipe areas around the city, with the metal grate ramps. At the top of any of these I would get stuck and have to hop to clear it.

Hmm, based on what’s in right now?

Spellbreaker: 5
It’s got some pretty effects, but I’m just not seeing the point in the current game. It seems to have a lot of boon-stripping going on, but most enemies don’t have boons.

Soulbeast: 4
I was underwhelmed. I don’t like the leafy green aura on an “animal” based spec, and I was hoping for more “beast mode” style of play, where your character animations are more visceral and your stats buffed. At the moment it just seems like playing as a vanilla range, without a pet.

Firebrand: 2
I really hate the implementation on this one. I want to play as a Tome-mancer, constantly using the spell tomes, but instead they are very situational, long CD things. They are too much hassle to use as intended, but not available enough to use like an Engi kit. I would prefer they rebalance this entire class so that 1. each tome is viable as a “weapon set,” with at least a little damage in each and a spammable #1 move, and 2. That you can use them infinitely, although maybe with a recharging resource like Thief Initiative, 3. that they have little to no cooldown so that you can swap books as needed. Mantras I can’t bother with and the axe is kinda lame with its short range, but I didn’t like Longbow either.

Weaver: 7
10 for effort, and some of the new moves are gorgeous, but loses points for being so complicated. There is a whole lot to this class, and after a while I might enjoy it, but it just seems so confusing to swap elements in. I kind of wish that they’d limited it down to only two elements choosable at a time or something.

Holosmith: 9
Really excellent in gameplay and visuals. Lots of options, but each gated with traits so it’s not too much at once. I doubt I’ll main this, but I can’t fault the design.

Scourge: 6
I’ll have to spend some time on this one, but at the moment, I don’t like it as much as Reaper. The Shades don’t enthuse me, and like the Spellbreaker it seems to have a lot riding on boon corruption, and enemies don’t have boons.

edit (post stress): I played this a little bit today, and did not like it. Having to manage the locations of the Shades with quickly moving enemies was a huge pain. The radii on them need to be WAY bigger than they are. Once I got a solid amount of LF I could do at least a little stuff, but I felt my survivability was all over the place and I didn’t feel very effective. I will definitely not be playing this after release.

Mirage: 8
The Mesmer mains hate this one, but I played one in PvE beta and it was super fun to play with the axe. The experts say it doesn’t do enough damage, and maybe that’s true, but that’s fixable. I definitely want this spec to live up to the intention of leaving clones out permanently as a primary damage source, so if clone damage still isn’t up to spec, make that happen. I also don’t like the Mirrors, I feel like instead of causing an Evade instantly, they should instead restore Endurance, so you can dodge when you need it.

Deadeye: 5
This one will take more practice time to figure out. I like the Rifle conceptually, but I’m not sure it will do the DPS needed to be worth it. Kneel is too clunky and needs an alternate method of exiting it, either jump or double tapping a movement key or something (does anyone still double tap a direction to roll?). The problem here is that ANet nerfed core Thief mobility to make the Daredevil shine brighter, so now the Deadeye is super sluggish without it. They need to do something about that to make it “feel good,” especially if you don’t plan to use the Rifle.

edit(post stress): I played this class some in PvE, and really got to enjoy it. I went D/P as my secondary weapon, because rifle is worthless once enemies start surrounding you, but I enjoyed picking enemies off at max range. I like that when kneeling it projects a max range indicator line, but given how kneeling roots you, I wish that this line was visible ALL the time when using rifle. Range is vital to this spec. I also got into a decent rhythm of marking targets as I fought, and having it refresh automatically on kill was really handy. I’d play it again.

Renegade: 2
I enjoy firing flaming death ponies. That’s the only thing this spec has going for it. The SB is an ok weapon, but not spectacular, and the #3 ability is a neat idea, but interacts very poorly with terrain. I would make it so that the #3 skill portals spawn in a honeycomb pattern behind you, making it less likely they’ll collide with terrain. Also, make the summons more mobile, like pets, rather than stationary totems, or make it so that they can tag enemies/allies within their range and then continue to effect them over a much wider range after that, otherwise it’s just not worth standing inside their tiny circle.

The main problem here is that it’s just nowhere near as good as Glint, and never can be. Would I swap this in over Ventari or Mallyx? Sure. Would I swap it out for Glint? No way. Figure out a way to let players use Glint AND Kalla, and you’re good, but otherwise, this will be a never-used spec, no matter what else you do with it.

It is. But I don’t think rifle has enough DPS – Not to be confused with burst – to do continuous damage. P/P is still a better option in my opinion.

That may be true atm. I haven’t run the numbers, but to the theorycrafter in me, Malice was intended to be the balancing factor there, that against an enemy that stays alive for a while, the Deadeye might be lower DPS than Pistol over the first ten seconds, but that ramping Malice should lead to being higher DPS over the last twenty seconds, or something like that. Now maybe that’s not the balance they achieved, but it’s one that would make sense to me. I think that a kneeled Rifle DE should balance out to be higher DPS than a mobile P/P, and if it doesn’t right now, that’s just numbers.

so tell me, how am i suppose to choose in what direction i want to dodge roll if by pressing a direction key will get me out of kneel? do i have to use more initiative and waste time getting into stance again?

Yeah, I thought about that, but ultimately, to me, the convenience of being able to walk again by pressing a direction is more important than the ability to dodge roll without getting up. Maybe this could be a menu optional command, so that players that are fine with the existing method could continue to use it, like the alternate ground targeting systems.

Did you guys ever play Star Wars Galaxies rifleman? Kneel and prone were very important for accuracy. I can see why people might think this is odd but I welcome this change, it’s quite nice to be able to just sit far away and shoot the hell out something.

I don’t mind the kneel mechanic itself, I just find it very clunky to use. I’d like a more intuitive option for un-kneeling than hitting 5 again.

Every class has at least 798 billion projectile denial skills

This sounds like a PvP issue.

I believe the developers have given Tomes of Justice a certain level of damage in order to temporary replace your weapon. For example. Tome of Justice skill #1 Searing Spell does 905 damage plus 3 seconds of burning and #4 Scorched Aftermatch does 2,495 (x5) damage plus 2 seconds of bleeding and burning (x5). You make a good point with regards to Tome of Resolve & Tome of Courage though. We sacrifice all of our damage in order to use the supportive Tomes. We get little in return.

I think Tome 1 works fine as a “main weapon,” except that you can only make a few attacks, and no auto-attack, and then it’s done and you can’t use it anymore for half a minute. I think for Tome 1 to work ideally, it needs a #1 attack that you can spam without cost, like every other weapon in the game, and no maximum limit to the amount you can use the other spells before putting it away.

Balance them using their own cooldowns, like any other weapon attacks, and if necessary, treat pages more like Thief Initiative, where different attacks use different amounts of pages, but the pages regenerate over time and as procs off of traits and other effects, which limits how quickly you can use the biggest attacks, while still letting you cycle the weaker ones indefinitely.

And then for the other two tomes, just least them mostly as-is, but add some damage to 1-2 of the abilities, especially the #1, which should also be spammable, so that if you’re in Heal tome, it’s mostly good for healing, but can also do some chip damage like Ranger Celestial form, and same with Support tome.

You switch to the tome with the effects you want, without having to worry about putting them on long CDs, or having to put them away after a few uses.

I have the worst time trying to kill enemies with a staff from 1500 range.

“Rifle can be useful in Pve if you don’t use it”

More that it’s situational. You use it for alpha strikes against single targets, and for DPSing Champs. If you’re cleaning up packs of small mobs you switch to something more AoE.