Guild Wars 2

Cookie.1042:

I disagree with your post entirely. I’m going to begin by saying that you must have never truly faced an above “competent Mesmer” . There is an art to playing Mesmer that doesn’t include just relying on phantasms. People are seeming to forget that slightest bit of AoE along with a missed stealth (which we only have one with a 45 sec recharge), its game over. I’ve had multiple guildies run their own Mesmers in TPvP only to realize that its not the class they imagined. Go ahead and nerf the phantasms as long as i see an absurd weapon boost or survivability boost.

You’re only proving my point with the AoE comment, we have almost no control over our abilities, it’s all in enemy hands. And note, I wasn’t just talking about phantasms, I was talking about clones too and how they can be incredibly effective or worthless, based off of how much AoE you’re facing and how intelligent your enemies are. That applies to shatters as well, they’re well telegraphed and easy to avoid, and if that weren’t enough the clones can of course be killed, and short of stunning the enemy to let the shatter land, there’s very little Mesmers can do about it. If it were an effect directly tied to the Mesmer, we could at least ensure the package arrives because we could get into position ourselves, but instead we have AI reliance.

And yes, that’s the general idea, nerf the hell out of phantasms and turn them from damage powerhouses into continuous utility effects, and buff up the damage that the Mesmer itself can do. Not survivability though, or at least not directly, that’s one thing Mesmers are kitten good at that actually is within their own power rather than their illusions, surviving about as well as a Guardian.

Westley.4716:

No one complains about bad mesmers. Its the good ones they complain about. They are simply overpowered. Their mechanic is overpowered, having copies of themselves, their indirect damage with their insta-spawn pets is overpowered, making escaping them ludicrously hard, and to top it off they get stealth, blink, and AoE quickness. Even worse they can be tanky and still put out far more punishment than most classes can muster.

There aren’t “good Mesmers”. There are only competent ones, and bad ones. You do have a few points on them being too effective in PvP, granted, but it’s not due to player skill. On the contrary, Mesmer is easy to play, it’s just that the results vary wildly based on your opponent, this is part of why they have so much difficulty in PvE, their skills are geared towards taking advantage of player stupidity and unawareness, which mobs can’t duplicate perfectly due to preset patterns, but random target choice.

The difference between a competent Mesmer and a bad one largely has to do with build and knowing what your buttons actually do. If you don’t know what you are doing with traits, weapons, and utilities, there are a lot that are really terrible and will weigh you down almost to the point of uselessness. As it is right now, it’s no use being mad at the Mesmer players over their phantasm builds or shatter builds, they have very little control over either, and for the most part it’s really one or the other, those are the only effective ways to play Mesmer in PvP. What needs to happen, is clones, phantasms, and shatters need to be consolidated into their class mechanic, removing them abilities from their weapons and giving them actual usable abilities instead. Then the weapon abilities can be buffed up while the shatters and phantasms are nerfed, and more power can be within the Mesmer itself instead of letting AI do all the work.

You speak of balance, and why suggestions of that kind aren’t taken lightly, but what of fun? Balance shifts constantly as it is, but if professions aren’t fun enough, if the game isn’t fun enough, then people won’t stick around.

Bugs are a big part of it to be sure, with bugged abilities and traits out of the way many professions do feel a bit better to play. But do you ever question design decisions about mechanics and traits, and whether it’s actually fun to play as or against?

Take Warrior and Mesmer for example. Warrior, in terms of balance, is quite clearly a pub stomper, the kind that doesn’t dominate tournaments or dungeons at any higher level, but rolls through everything at lower levels. The result is a fairly bland to play profession that is very effective at easy things, requiring almost no thought or effort at all, but is hampered by it’s very low skill and utility ceiling. People don’t enjoy Warrior because of class mechanics, they’re almost nonexistent, the people who have fun with that are having fun looking like a kitten or smashing their faces across the keyboard and doing well in PvE.

And then there’s Mesmer, the profession that seems like it would be a high skill ceiling, but really isn’t due to how heavily constrained they are by their profession mechanics. Pretty much everything a Mesmer does is out of their hands and in the hands of the enemy, whether PvE or PvP, the heavy reliance on illusions to succeed regardless of your build makes them dependent on the AI of both the illusions and enemy NPCs, with your control being limited to where you were when you spawned them, and being able to command them to shatter. The effectiveness of clones is dependant wholly on RNG in PvE, and how intelligent your enemy is in PvP, about the best you can do to make them work for sure in PvE is using a stealth skill, and in PvP you can attempt to pretend to be a clone, but experienced players won’t fall for it, while newer players will get slaughtered. Similarly confusion is a condition that is horribly niche, it’s almost completely useless in PvE despite having a higher scaling there, and in PvP it only succeeds in punishing mindless spam by the enemy, which once again has to do with preying on new players.

And then there’s the fact that shatters and mantras aren’t actually fun to use at all, shatters being a glorified combo system not unlike a target-able adrenaline bar, and making you feel like a mindless minion bomber instead of an illusionist or enchanter, while mantras as one person once put it feel like alpha testing abilities, they are literally abilities in their most basic form with no utility or other purposes to them, with an annoying tacked on charge time as well. Combine that with how focused the profession seems to be on randomness with Staff, the Chaos tree, and the like, and it feels like you can’t depend on anything, it really feels like you just throw out a bunch of abilities and let a mix of AI, RNG, and enemy skill take over rather than player input.

So to take those two cases as examples, how willing are you, Arenanet, to go about actually improving professions in a way other than just balance and power? Are you perfectly satisfied with how fun and diverse each one is? I say screw complete balance for the moment, as far as I know you don’t have any money based tournaments yet as it is, and if you really do want it to be an “e-sport”, you have some work to do on removing RNG, giving more diversity in abilities and builds for the different professions, and managing to keep the playerbase that plays the game to have fun, not just win PvP games, happy. That was your whole motto before release, right? Making everything fun, making sure the game was ready before release, that sort of thing.