Guild Wars 2

Well why not an evade with that daze? So you actively parry as it where like a duelist in some silly western who shoots the bullets of his enemies out of the air. A daze with a channeled block in case it doesn’t work perhaps? that would reverse the order of most of our blocks too.

Mainhand pistol needs a daze on pistol 2 or 3. Just a 3/4s one, but a nice solid interrupt would be an absolute requirement on any mainhand pistol in my opinion, to better open up synergy with the pistol dueling theme that the mesmer itself naturally possesses.

Artyport.2084:

GalloY.9640:

Levetty.1279:

Artyport.2084:

Like its a mesmer its not suppose to be a direct damage class.

That is a pretty bold claim. Have you got a source for that?

I kind of agree with that idea, although I’m open to having a damage spec.

I’m a GW1 Mesmer main and the builds I played were very much support based through Interrupts/energy denial and that’s how I view the Mesmer. They deal damage but that’s a secondary effect – the crowd control and utility are the primary.

exactly.. ive played gw1 mesmer. and it was so awesome to stop a spell only for it to hurt the enemy. it was about crowd control and mitigating damage while having the enemy hurt itself.

All of this i just want to hit very hard is not very mesmery. Mesmer were the class that would watch you die as you aimlessly attack not knowing whats wrong with you

The problem with that, is no one wants to play against it. It’s not very fun and thus very bad for sales for that kind of gameplay.

I myself want a pistol spec, that builds into interrupt mesmer, this would be the closest to the old gw1 style in my view, but in GW2 it would be a notably power based build, because of the nature of the active counter-play.

I will be honest, I do kinda like the sword ambush skill, but it feels like it should have been part of the base sword kit from the beginning… The other thing that gets me, it feels like we are not getting enough endurance. We ultimately seem to now have a second resource to manage for our damage, and like our clones it is again tied to our defenses. This is kinda insane… Would probably feel much better with a third dodge…

Why the hell couldn’t GS get the trident ambukittenhat is so much better than stupid lasers…

Tseison.4659:

glenndevis.8327:

Not a fan of the sword ambush either. both GS & Sword ambushes should be damage bursts.
And having you & 3 clones using the sword ambush won’t do much since they’ll attack at the same time anyway, what’s the point of having 3 illusions have a daze at the same time?

My thoughts exactly, they need to be looked at again.
For sword: I would keep the daze but then add this sort of continuous dash or shadowing stepping around the target, hitting them multiple times.

For greatsword: Probably have an illusionary greatsword violently ram into a target, causing a burst of damage and knocking them back (though the knockback would probably not affect the clones) or something like that.

For staff: I’d probably keep the chaos storm but maybe have its radius slightly bigger and duration longer.

If Greatsword had an interrupt proc of some kind on it it would be glorious. That was actually sort of what I was holding out for. Otherwise, if they gave the chaos storm some way to inflict a daze that would be good too. What mesmer has been lacking for so long is a way to generate an on demand daze, especially as ostensibly, we should be seriously looking towards interrupt based builds.

musu.9205:

Takashiro.8701:

Sword ambush + confounding suggestions could be pretty evil though.

its like trading off your huge defensive tool to a bit more bonus stuff ,this is at max a DE trait , this is nowhere close to DD dodge lol not on bar with defensive effect not on bar with offensive effect

But it does fit with what is in effect the mentality of an interrupt mesmer, that to stop the enemies attack with an interrupt is your defense…

I have to admit, Mirage Thrust looks good to me. Having an interrupt on short cooldown seems really potent for Mesmer. Further, it is an additional gap closer, which can be more or less used on demand. I do like this..

Hot Boy.7138:

I disagree. I don’t think base mesmer illusions mechanic needs to change. In time, there may be an elite spec that doesn’t use illusions, similar to how rangers are getting the option to not use a pet with their new soulbeast spec. But illusions is a very fun mechanic. In pvp, shattering sees a lot of play because pvp is about burst. It makes sense that you don’t shatter as often in PvE because it’s more about sustained damage over a long fight. Also, in PvE, clones act as a diversion so the caster can attack without aggro for seconds at a time.

I wouldn’t want to see base mesmer’s core mechanics changed, just improved upon. Or the addition of utilities that can cover some weak areas, such as my ideas. That’s what utility and elite skills are for after all.

But you’re entitled to your opinion of course. I think clones are fun. And I feel like I’m living the dream being a frontline, melee, dual sword, master of illusions caster that can create shadow clones.

We are complaining about clones, we are complaining about phantasms. Much better in my view that Phantasms become a once off skill that leaves behind a clone, which then gives us two clone generators in most of our weaponsets and lets us use shatter more often…

Well they did seriously help out Guardian Spirit Weapons, maybe we can get something similar with phantasms, where they are a one time summon that unleashes a big attack?

apharma.3741:

Hot Boy.7138:

Alright fellas, let’s not derail the thread please. I put a lot of thought into these suggestions and would like to keep things on topic.

Alright.

Your suggestions are terrible because it’s trying to put a bandaid over a problem with the core design. You’re coming up with ways for the retargeting of illusions (read phantasms) but the reality is that had these been simple clones and played no part in a mesmers damage outside of shatter fodder and a byproduct of an attack we would have no need for it.

Phantasms as a mechanic just about worked at launch and for a year afterwards but haven’t been particularly good without there being a huge HP sponge and very little other targets to deal with. It also works counter productively to the class mechanic of shattering where you don’t want to shatter as you take a massive hit in damage for no real benefit given the HP of many enemies.

The answer isn’t to come up with several new skills to make an awkward mechanic work, the answer is to change the mechanics.

I think Alpha has it fully expressed here. About the single best thing they could do, is decouple entirely phantasms and clones. Let them be entirely separate of each other. Have phantasms be target bound visible dots, while in contrast, the clones become bound to the mesmer and more akin to a kind of defensive mechanism. Of course, this is not going to happen until the balance team in their wisdom decides to give Thieves the ability to summon clones at some point…

Loboling.5293:

Cataca.3867:

Expiatus.4210:

So I figured it out, mesmers are Kralkatorrik minions, so its not a PvP match but a mini-boss fight. PvM – Player versus Mesmer! The other 4 players are just adds/trash mobs.

The new meta will be a 5 man comp—tank, dps and one support just to take on the mesmer and their triple alacrity uber PU shatter attack, all the while dodging the power wells of timey-whimey stuff.

Usually when a match starts and i see no mesmers on the enemy team, i just tell everyone to sit back and ejoy, because i got this. I then just press my elite and have 90% uptime of moa on everone. Because continuum split allows me to travel back in time, thus clone myself and multiply my uses of everything. The issue is when another mesmer is on the team, then its called the “time wars” and the server is likely to explode

I came here for proof mesmer is OP and I found it. *Scurries off to send this to the devs.

But seriously, mesmer was on the OP side before the update, everyone simply expected it to get some shavings to decrease the power creep that occurred with HoT.

Classes people wanted to see nerfed in S2:
Necro (condi dmg)
Mesmer (Moa + condi pressure)
Rev (dmg/sustain)
DH (burst)
Scrapper (sustain)
Ele (sustain, although they had no alternative so they got spared)
Ranger (rezes nerfed)

What happened:
Necro (Condi dmg nerfed)
Mesmer (slight buffs)
Rev (slightly touched in terms of both damage and sustain)
DH (burst slightly lowered, and made harder to pull off with the bow changes)
Scrapper (sustain nerfed)
Ele (slight buffs to try and give them another build outside support)
Ranger (rez ability nerfed)

So some people are surprised with mesmer, and since ele wasn’t really killing anyone, just supporting, people are more frustrated with mesmer. I personally think that nerfing moa would be enough for this upcoming season. I’m very excited to see how things develop. However, mes was already played a lot at the higher level last season, it didn’t get nerfed like the other outliers, and its main counter (reaper) got nerfed. Some claim warrior can fill this role now, but I’m not so sure. Mes is still a squishy class, so nerfs will have to be carefully considered.

One last thing, a lot of people (myself included) consider fighting mesmer to be the least fun fight in the game. However, the problem is made much worse when you get two mesmers or three (especially if they look the same). I hate any meta where mesmers have large presence. I like having a few of them around, but they simply siphon fun away when their numbers increase. (Funny considering mesmer is all about clones, but it just gets annoying seeing 10 characters who look alike. Focusing a target is a pain.

And in this one post you show yourself a scrub, just consider the active meaning in that final paragraph, you want to see fewer mesmers, you want to actively reduce the number of mesmers around to increase your fun, at the expense of others, what a selfish person you have to be, so self centered, so entitled…

The way I see it, Mantras should be like the old DnD spell memorization, powerful effects, which you need to have time to prepare again. They need to be balanced around being prepared not around cooldowns imho.

I actually wouldn’t mind seeing mantras going back to 1 charge, but getting 0 cooldown. Let a mantra’s restriction be in getting the time to channel it. Make it a 3-4 second channel, and then make Harmonious Mantra’s reduce the channel, or even better, do something like for each mantra you charge the next mantra will take 25% less time to charge.

And so it begins, before we even get the chronomancer the ineptitude of Anets balance team is ruining it for everybody.

Or like me they gave up playing because anet proved they still had stupidly idiotic balance team. I can no longer bring myself to play a game where the class I enjoy is routinely made a tedious mess by a balance team that do not seem to understand synergy. An innovative change would have been to restore the original mantras with a long charge time and a single charge and leave the cooldown change, but no, lets make playing with manta a pain in the kitten .

I have always said, the biggest limitation to this games success, is the developers. They seem to delight in ruining their own game. What stupidly nihilistic behaviour.

Is exactly my point. If microsoft was to claim that the ability to indent by pressing tab in microsoft word was being removed because it was not designed to do that, could you imagine the outcry.

It would have been far better to reduce the number of charges of mantras and leave it as it was than this pain in the kitten .

Lol, a fix that makes mantras worse than they were before the trait changes? Surely if this was intended, they would have given us a trait to reduce cooldowns.

You don’t get it, without a recharge trait, mantras are now worse than they were before the patch. I would rather the patch had never happened, or see CS deleted from the game than “fixing the bug”. The mantra gameplay now is clunky, painful, and slow. Prior to the patch we could reduce the cooldown and kinda get around this. Now though, mantra cooldowns are far too long for anything other than the kittened healing mantra. Once more the balance team show they are kittening morons.

Seriously, your balance team seems to only be good at ruining things. Can we expect to get chronomancer only to find that alacrity is too unbalanced so that all classes but mesmer will end up with it and the chronomancer will instead lose it entirely? Finally mantra’s made sense, prepared spells with a cooldown that ticked in the background, this actually fit with the idea of a kitten ed mantra. Now though, to revert this kitten ed change without returning some way to reduce the cooldown? Thanks a lot, mantras are now worse to use than they were before the trait overhaul. Rather than you know adjusting either the mantra charge count back down (which would have worked) or instead altering the cooldown, you instead took the inane choice of re-adding the problematic and long complained about old behaviour back… thanks for ruining the single best thing from the overhaul.

To be honest any adjustment to mantra’s should be in charge time. Bump it up to 3.0s and mantra’s become more in line with other skills. Alternatively, reduce the cooldown and boost charge time up again. I could live with 0 cooldown and 5s charge time. Then the balance becomes finding the time to prepare the spell, not preventing you from using it if you are not getting focused.

If you guys are so intent on turning the thing into an interrupt trait, why not make CS itself inflict a 3s stun on interrupt with 10s ICD. Nothing more, nothing less. This would make it have a place alongside CI, and would seriously interrupt the stunlock shatter combo you lot are complaining about. Have the CS effect itself inflict the stun btw, not convert anything. It is now suitably boosted and adds another effect that a lockdown mesmer has inflicted, increasing the chance of a high pay out for such a reactive style of play.

leave the kitten ed manta’s alone! to be honest, I could live with CS being deleted entirely, I tend to rely more on CI and PB for lockdown, with harmonious mantras to increase my counterplay. Make CS have another effect, hell make it simply double the duration of stuns and dazes, or maybe increase it’s effect to include moa and leave it as a simple +50% increase to control effects. But do not start talking about nerfing mantra’s which are used well outside of CS builds without seriously thinking about the ramifications.

To be honest this was one of the suggestions we made when discussing how horrid mantras felt. This change I believe is intended, they just kept quiet to allow them to wait and see how powerful it is in the meta.

mmm now that could be an idea, make in an elite and halve the cooldown :P

Yes it allows for triple shatter. Which is amazingly powerful with baseline IP.

I am mostly posting this here as a bit of a joke, it is a build based entirely around seeing just how many instant interrupts I could fit into one build. It relies on using mimic to reset the signet to allow for a triple use of diversion. In this way, our class mechanic now becomes an instant use interrupt, with three times the use.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-RFRZ;1VP-61C7BWF71;9;4STU;0048236236;4Nw05W;1TsW6TsW66K

Soldier amulet is used to boost the the survivability and to push this build into the realm of just plain annoying. Melandru runes are used to further mitigate some of the potential damage. With 2900 armour and 25,000 health this build should be able to duck and weave with the best of them, and with a triple reset on distortion and double casts of a signet with distortion you should have a healthy amount of invulnerability.

I would not seriously recommend playing this with an eye to get many kills, but if you enjoy just making other people headdesk all day long, then this the trollmer is for you!

half of it is in built the other half is a minor trait in illusions line.

I am looking at doing a mantra heavy chaos, dom dueling build based around MoD. I fully expect that with that kind pressure I will not even notice the lack of clones. Sword pistol looks bloody awesome in a lockdown build with the new pistol trait.

What happened to the mantra cooldown trait? I am kinda used to having MoD on a 24 second cooldown.

There is some consistancy to that Fay, just imagine, the time the Mesmers get a buff it is negated not by nerfs but because the buffs to everyone else were bigger….

Fay.2357:

I think that calling it a ‘New Moment-to-Moment combat style’ is nothing more than the absurd rhetoric that Anet loves to spout. The changes aren’t going to remake the class and game; combat is still going to be very similar to how it is now.

That being said, a lot of the changes we’ve now heard about are potentially substantial boosts to mesmer. Crying doom and gloom at this point is silly.

Fay has a point here, there is a lot of things to be concerned with in the teaser so far, I for one am desperately afraid of how op the defiant bar GM is liable to end up against us. But there are substantial boosts in an arcane theoretical way that are coming from these changes. I for one look forward to being able to do a Manta/Powerblock/CI interrupt build kitten long as the trait consolidation is not assine it would be reasonably possible to get a reliable interrupt every 10 seconds.

That all said I suspect the area to be concerned is not simply the shield, but just how much warriors and ele’s are likely to be improved by such consolidations.

“I’m personally excited about a grandmaster trait that has the power to grant my character a defiance bar!”

And now, rather than just our trait being passively useless, one of our enemies will be able to make all our cc useless… It’s a hard life….

There is the saying, “Have faith and faith shall be given unto you” So if we believe we have a mainhand pistol, anet will give us one? To be honest, I fully expect anet will end up caving and giving a mainhand pistol when the mesmers start demanding refunds for HoT under false advertising law, you lot should check out Australian consumer law, if what Mesmer’s get can be proven to be not as good as three additional mainhand skills then they would be forced to refund all Australian purchases :P

I would like to see phants become something like a visible condition, they are immune to damage, do not add to the count of clones, but have a timed life. In this way shatter becomes a clone mechanic rather than a phantasm mechanic which becomes something else entirely. After all, people can dodge the attacks of Phantasms, which is the balance between phants and traditional condition.

adelaide.6213:

Would be too overpowered in a 6/2/0/0/6 IP build with daze mantra and mirror images.

The increased burst would not make up for the loss of DE and the sustain reductions.

Glamours require the unnerfing of the related trait set, and the illusion utilities could probably do with a blanket reduction in cooldown. Manipulations likewise could probably work with some cooldown adjustments as well. If I am honest, mesmer cooldowns feel like they are some of the most prohibitive in the game.

mmm you have a point. I would agree though Photoloss, if nothing else, something has to give, we need some form of solution to the issue of charges and combat end. On anther point, someone mentioned the idea of hidden cooldowns being problematic, but I wonder, how is the cooldown being hidden an issue? Yes if you want perfect efficiency/maximum spam it might be annoying, but that kinda goes against what mantras seemingly intend to be, powerful situation reversing skills that require precombat preparation. It strikes me that it would be better to shift the cooldown initiator from the last charge to the first rather than introduce a recharge to mantras. They hardly seem like something that should be spontaneously generated, except perhaps as a consequence of a rng trait, something like each mantra cast has a 50% chance to randomly regenerate a charge of the just used mantra. That however could be both frustrating and absurdly broken…

On removing the cooldown entirely, if you extended the cooldown between charge uses by 50% would that make mantra’s less spamable while also changing the focus towards more efficient play, with mantras having 0 cooldown between charges if used on no target or out of combat?

MoD would not become a monster, you are forgetting the internal cooldown’s between charges. As it is, you can almost do what MoD would allow by using Blade Mastery and going 3 points in shatter tree using sword daze.

You could even change the charge times to balance them within themselves, with mop staying low, and mod and mor becoming more time intensive to charge. It would also then enable different synergies with the various on charge mantra traits, it might even be viable to use the one that adds toughness while channeling.

Well, perhaps the trick would be an increase in the charge time, I mean, I always felt that mantras were a throw back to Vancian casting from DnD, the whole, lets prepare a spell and have it stored within our memory so we can use it without complex rituals later. To be honest, I would not totally object to a 5 second chant time for mantra’s if they were capable of being available without a cooldown, in this sense, mantras would be a backwards cooldown skill, where you pay the cooldown in cast time and have the ability to use them instantly and always.

Also consider the following, do Mantra’s really need cooldown’s at all? Mantra’s have cooldowns between skill uses, and other than the healing mantra I cannot really think of a reason to add an additional recharge time. Consider also the purpose of a mantra, to prepare for a need in battle, perhaps instead moderately increase the charge time, by +0.5s and instead remove the cooldown entirely. The trait that currently reduces the cooldown could instead reduce the charge time. This would again succeed in making mantra’s feel less clunky, as currently, the dilemma in PVP is the waiting 20-30s after expending the 1 remaining charge, rather than the whole recharging aspect.

Fay is right to be honest. I also think people are going a bit crazy with how they are thinking clones/phants may change. I think it is highly likely we will keep some form of pet mechanic. I myself hope we may get ai pulsing fields that can be targeted and destroyed, or be shattered by us to trigger a different effect. In this sense, we have kept the behaviour of our mechanic, but it has been altered into a different focus.

I still think the optimum change is to alter when the skill goes onto cooldown, make the first charge to be expended start the cooldown, in this way there becomes no loss really with having extra charges left over and indeed may end up being self balancing by increasing the time we are likely to spend trying to chant in combat.

considering how many of our traits proc interrupt effects, should we not have a greater access to them ?

mmm I have always found that if you turn your back as a mesmer you tend to die pretty kitten ed fast…

Ah okies, I do not use stealth much, but I was under the impression it broke combat. Of course I am probably wrong in the assumption, but it is worth considering how the mechanics might interact behind the scenes. The last thing we need is something like the power block over reaction occurring against a mantra QoL change.

So while I was considering how to try and encourage some of my guildies into taking up mesmer in pvp, it struck me that it is seemingly rare for an important part of gameplay to be expressly discussed, the psychology of your build.

Take for example myself, I typically play 4/4/6 or perhaps, 4/4/0/0/6 and in both builds I rely on an extremely aggressive assaulting style of gameplay. I did find that PU for me was a style I could not embrace, it required to much of a passivity, in that I had to wait in stealth for the boon procs before throwing myself back into the fight. Likewise, I found that condition builds outside of confusion where similarly problematic. Confusion as a condition is an excellent aggressive supporting condition for a power build, the more aggressive you are the less likely the other player will think in their reactions. That all said, how would you characterize how you play your mesmer?

Are you the double sword wielding type who uses the sword swap and blink to move from target to target, without giving a kitten about survival.

Or are you the illusory type, carefully blending illusions and stealth to avoid being hit at all? So i invite you to share with each other how you feel most comfortable as the master of illusions

That might potentially be a fair balance, so long as it could not trigger while you are in stealth. As 3s + PU could enable you to recover a charge on each mantra simply by using decoy or torch.