Guild Wars 2

I’ll just come out and say it:

I think that literally the only correct fix is to make Power Block affect Initiative (and Energy) skills just like it affects any regular weapon or utility skill with a cooldown.

This isn’t, like, unfair.

There’s no technical reason this can’t be done. (Maybe there’s a reason it can’t be done in an emergency patch, but we’ve had how many months of waiting for PB ?)

Power Block, as designed, is one of the most interested Mesmer traits out there: situationally desirable, powerful with the right investment, but by no means a no-brainer must-have, nor a “hard counter” that makes a fight a foregone conclusion. It doesn’t need to be replaced with an alternative mechanic. It just needs to work, consistently.

Rewriting it to use a different mechanic would be throwing away one of our most conceptually interesting traits.

cyyrix.6105:

Someone earlier in the thread hit the nail on the head. The first version of Power Block put CDs on rezzing and stomping. I’m guessing that whatever they did to fix that also ended up affecting the thief interaction, and Anet can’t be bothered to refactor the code.

Everyone talking tokens and new effects is wasting time. Because they’re so busy on HoT, the only balancing Anet does right now is number tweaking (think boon/condi duration, CDs, attack radius, etc.).

The upcoming stab change is the first technical addition/rework in over a year. If I had to guess, it was probably only implemented because of some road block with the Revenant.

Yup. They rolled out a version that (mistakenly?) hit EVERYTHING, including autos and non-skill stuff like rubbing downs, patched it immediately, and haven’t looked at the trait since.

If you’ve played mesmer for any length of time or pay attention to the patch notes, you’ll know this is a fairly typical cycle for mesmer abilities: stuff that gets emergency-nerfed spends forever languishing in uselessness before they have the resources to take a deeper look and make it work as intended. It’s understandable, really: Mesmer is a niche profession with a lot of rather complicated mechanics — making changes to Mesmer skills and traits probably involves more mucking with AI, animations, pathing, and special exceptions than any other profession.

But note this! HoT is giving us a profession with spammable Energy-based utilities. The time to fix Power Block is now.

On paper, Power Block is an excellent trait specifically because it’s a niche ability that soft-counters a potential skill-spam meta. It’s not so powerful that it would be in every Mesmer build, or even every interrupt-focused build (since it’s very hard to take Power Block and Chaotic Interruption without gutting other stuff you need more).

In practice, it’s trash because it doesn’t actually work in a critical situation.

~

I mean, here’s a thought:

You know how the most common rejoinder to getting rolled by Backstab is (justifiably, usually) “l2play?”

Well, all you folks who have no idea what to do when you’re locked out of C&D for five seconds? Maybe this’ll be your opportunity to learn to play?

(Hey, Anet even gazed into the future and gave you a way to cover your important plz-don’t-Power-Block this skills with de-facto un-rippable Stability in the form of Consume Plasma! You’ll be fine unless you’re, like, absolutely married to your rotation!)

Absconditus.6804:

Personally, I can’t stand recharging more than one Mantra at a time, and since it’s only to be expected that it uses Mantra of Distraction when focused on lockdown, I swapped the healing skill over to our staple Ether Feast one.

You’re taking Aegis available every 10 seconds (on an insta-cast non-interrupting skill, to boot) and replacing it with Aegis available every 20 seconds.

I don’t think Aegis once every 20 seconds is worth the rune slot.

Fay.2357:

The very last consideration is (similar to a build that Keenlam posted recently) where are you going to use this? The obvious choice is a point bunker in PvP, but these runes don’t exist in PvP. This would be pointless to use for roaming (since you can’t do damage as a full bunker build post-immortal). These would also be pretty pointless to use in a group. You’d be taking the already abysmal mesmer damage and making it even worse without any significant gain in utility for your party.

I think I’d much rather have this for a mostly-glassy build, since you can do a lot to avoid bursts — without having to burn clones for Distortion, use up dodges, or interrupting your casts — by insta-popping Aegis off a Power Return.

To start off with:
Are you already using Blink and at least one Energy sigil?

I think it looks like a good rune for dueling, since getting Aegis on MoR gives you a great relatively low-cost/low-cooldown way to hinder bursts.

Buuut… Runes of the Defender don’t seem to be available in SPvP. And movement is so important in WvW that I’d be hard-pressed to dump Traveler for anything else.

tetrodoxin.2134:

Random thought: What about Power Block vs. Revenant? Their utility & elite skills won’t have CD. Given how poorly anet handled this trait vs. thiefs, can we really except anything different?

That would make two classes basically immune to the trait.

They need to fix it.

It’s a trivial fix, really.

Not holding my breath, though.

A friend’s making me post this because he’s lazy.

Sure, mesmers have all these illusion powers. You know, ostensibly. But then you’ve also got Blink and Time Warp and Portal and such. Clearly — clearly! — you’re doing some nasty stuff to the fabric of reality itself. So it kinda figures that maybe all your powers are dimensional powers, huh?

Like, your clones are like the ghosts in Bioshock Infinite.

Srsly, all y’all better go watch The Prestige. ;)

Me Games Ma.8426:

Do you want to see yourself die over and over? Do you want to feel death over and over? Do you want to experience it every time you shatter and feel it twice when using iPersona?

Do you dare live a divided life, though? Is there enough of you to go around?

For WvW, the game-changer would be if they changed might stacking to be uncapped as well.

(Plz don’t do that.)

Well, if you don’t shatter them, maybe they’ll shatter you?

Some folks love to duel on the south camp dolyak path for some reason. Grrr. This is not a good place.

Also not good: guilds trying to do scrim-in-the-middle-of-nowhere GvG on a queued map.

:/

Only thing I’m worried about is whether this adds additional lag to big fights.

The impact is pretty minimal otherwise.

Halting Strike allows you to use interrupts aggressively. That in itself doesn’t really allow you to play “lockdown,” it’s just a great skills that helps you pressure and burst harder, and dedicated lockdown builds have a lot of ways to benefit from it so why not?

Along very similar lines, here’s a 6/6/0/2/0 build I’m playing right now (mostly as a WvW havoc build).

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQNAsfRl0npMt1oxRNcrNipxcqqIdANcQpDZ8FA-TpRBABBu/wCPAANOBAkVG4hDBAAHBAA

I decided to avoid CI because I really wanted Mender’s Purity + Harmonious Mantras for the condition drop, but also because I felt CI was less reliable than my teammates’ unconditional immobilizes. (It gets better if you run Staff, though.)

Simplest change to implement, though probably quite boring:

Just make it actually heal you when you interrupt (flat numbers or granting regen boon) instead of doing the “Have some Healing Power for these next few seconds, which you should really be using to capitalize on your interrupt with a burst of your own!” design it has now.

Err, disable food, srsly?

How is someone spending money on fancy food different from someone spending money on omegas or guild catas?

For that matter, how is food a particularly unfair advantage in an environment where some people can get guard stacks and others haven’t picked up enough ranks to unlock the traits?

Seriously, just making Power Block hit thief skills 2-5 and the rest is probably fine (maybe also make it work on channels or something).

This is not at all OP because:
1. Having one more not-quite-meta mesmer spec that has a semi-good counter to thieves isn’t gonna leave thieves stuck in the trash heap.
2. Sic ‘Em is already a thing, and it’s pretty great and totally fair. Power-Locking C&D is a more complex version of the same thing, really.
3. Heartseeker spam (if you interrupt Heartseeker) is not at all required to achieve good DPS on a thief.

There’s a bunch of dredge, right? Feedback and Focus (w/ Warden’s Feedback) are great vs. shooty dredge and priesty dredge.

The melee ones you can kite. Except maybe those metal-head mole ones; you can dodge their pop-out attack or interrupt them when they start tunneling.

Reviera.5183:

also a stealth bug all stealther classes are using to “finish” you, how to hell are they able to stake you when a guardian clearly can push you 10 feet away when you lack stability, and then still be able to stake you? whats more is they Im hearing rumors that they apperently can stake you from almost 10 yards away. make it to where you actually have to be traying to climb on top of the player in order to finish them, not from a foot away nor 10 yards.

… Are you sure it’s a bug?

Thieves can use Shadowstep to initiate a stomp, port away, then port back when it’s about to land. They can also cause your disrupting attack to miss by blinding you.

Mesmers can do the same with Portal or Phase Retreat + Blink. They also have invulnerability via Diversion.

Rangers have decent access to stability and quickness.

It’s rather awful that shatter confusion (from Cry of Frustration, plus the Illusionary Retribution trait) only lasts 3 seconds.

Mesmers used to have much better confusion application on glamours, if I recall correctly.

If you could stack 9 Torment off a single shatter and 6 more off the next one, they’d just nerf MTD back to 1 stack of Torment.

No thanks. Not worth it to buff the other specs with some incidental damage.

(I almost never play MTD, by the way. I just want them to Have Nice Things.)

EDIT: OOPS necro thread. :( :( :( :/

Ross Biddle.2367:

• 2) Doesn’t effect thieves weapon skills

The second problem is part of a larger issue that Anet needs to look seriously at, and I’m not sure there’s a simple solution the community can provide (except things such as eating initiative etc, which seems outside of the pale of the traits actual function).

The solution to the second problem is trivial: make it put a 10-sec CD on thief 2-5 skills, just like any other skills.

Thieves are designed to be able to spam their skills a bit, but, hey, they also have a lot of varied skills and some reasonable redundancy thanks to their utilities. And, you know, a weapon swap.

The only people I can imagine getting truly wrecked by Power Block are bad thieves from the getgo (folks running D/D or P/D specs getting panicked when C&D goes on cooldown because they’re absolutely married to their rotations).

Not to mention thieves have a built-in way to mitigate Power Block against their most important skills using Consume Plasma.

Generally speaking, you want to kite a lot and make good use of active mitigation (e.g. dodges and Blurred Frenzy) and stealth.

Staff is the easiest weapon to get the hang of kiting with, since you’ve got that sweet Phase Retreat on a short cooldown. It can take a while to kill stuff, though. But you’ve got a bouncing attack and the phantasm hits pretty kittence you put some conditions on your target.

If you’re used to guardian, one big difference with mesmer is that you want to be moving sideways a LOT more to control range (sideways because it’s faster than backpedaling).

While you’re waiting for a “perfect meta…”
And then for players to get used to the new changes so they can actually execute well…
You might as well have a tournament in the meantime, you know? >.>

Shaimou.6182:

2. Shattering takes way too long to execute. The illusions always have to catch up with the enemy to shatter. If I want to make any use of shattering in PVE for example, it takes too long for the illusions to catch up with the opponent and 80% of the time the opponent is already dead when they get there.

Mirror Blade (Greatsword #2) and Scepter autoattacks will spawn clones near the target. Sword clones are melee-range so they follow their targets closer.

A common way to set up a shatter burst is something like this:

• Circle around your opponent.
• Try to drop clones so they form a triangle with your opponent in the middle.
• Activate the shatter. Which ever direction your opponent goes, they’re basically running towards some clones.
• (If you’ve got Illusionary Persona, rush them yourself to add your damage to the burst.)

In PvE, I generally focus on phantasms and mostly use shatter for some extra AoE, though. (Try to put the clones on different targets so they don’t all die from one being focused.)

Shaimou.6182:

4. Clones. Is there any other use for clones but to shatter them? They do not get aggro from the AI, they doubtfully fool players in PVP, they get instakilled by pretty much everything in the game and they do 0 damage. Can I even get any use out of them in a dungeon if any enemy happens to use an AOE attack?

To get aggro onto clones in PvE, try some of these:

• Initiate with a clone-spawning attack (Mirror Blade is good for this).
• Pop clones, then go into stealth.

In addition to shattering, you can use:

• Clone death traits. Clones that die naturally will bleed, confuse, cripple, &c. your enemy.
• Condition damage builds. Clones don’t do damage but they can spread conditions.

Shaimou.6182:

5. No passive speed boosts. Most classes have passive speed boosts. Mesmer is a light armored class and has to stay away from melee combat so it adds even more incentive to have a passive speed boost but there is none. Why is that?

This sucks and it’s the reason why almost all of us use Traveler runes a lot.

Shaimou.6182:

6. Some skills feel pretty weak. I understand the Blink skill was pretty neat before but now its just a small step forward with a massive cooldown. Mirror Images? Create two clones that:

(1. Do 0 damage.)
(2. Get instakilled by any damage.)
(3. Do not take enemy aggro even for a small moment.)
(4. Spawn right next to you which make them take a long time to reach a target and shatter.)

Mirror Images is a skill for dedicated shatter bursts. Usually you want to already be on top of your target when you pop it. E.g. Mirror Images + dodge for clone (with Deceptive Evasion) → Mind Wrack.

You can play a Power (well, Power/Precision/Ferocity) Mesmer in every game mode and do well. It’s never not optimal or close to it.

Condition builds or “tankier” Power specs are much more of a niche thing. Still, lots of stuff can work in map exploration or WvW havoc/roaming. Which weapons do you enjoy the most?

Honestly, I’d rather deal with the status quo (Deceptive Evasion being a must-have for a lot of PvP builds) than adding ICDs and reworking this and that.

Dueling’s the trait line with 1200-range Blinks and Vigor-on-crit. It’s always gonna be a near-must-have in a lot of builds. I hate-hate-hate piling ICDs on everything, though.

Some of these seem rather gimmicky, to be honest. Like they help when you don’t really need the help, but don’t do much when you’re hurting for clones. (E.g. clone-on-rupt: helps you chain Diversion into Mind Wrack, which is a big burst, but it might just do a fat load of nothing other times when you desperately need another clone — overall that’s en even more fragile, all-or-nothing approach to shatter; ditto clone-on-clone-death seems like it doesn’t really help if they just got melted by repeated AoE.)

Here’s an idea.

Stick this somewhere in Illusions, maybe major level:
Mirrored Form
Skills that create clones create an additional clone.

You have a lot of control over your clones because they come from you activating skills. The “flow” will be different compared to DE, but you can three-clone shatter off of just one weapon’s set worth of skills, or with Mirror Images by itself.

(The question is, would it be excessive with DE + this thing? Assuming DE still makes 1 clone per dodge, of course. My gut feeling is that shatter cooldowns would keep it mostly in check.)

Vieux P.1238:

Lots of thieves don’t need to use plasma to kick our kitten.

This is true.

Being able to pound on a mesmer while you’ve got Aegis, Stability, and Protection on you is Easy Mode, though.

Vieux P.1238:

You need to rechk your figures again.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sleight_of_Hand

Sebrent.3625:

This can put Mesmer builds without boon removal (they do exist, lol) in a tough spot.

Consume Plasma granting ALL OF THE BOONS!!! also puts mesmers with boon removal at a disadvantage, because they still can’t get at the most important ones very easily.

Sebrent.3625:

Personally, I’ve always wished that Mantras would just become multi-charge abilities that you didn’t have to precast and just regained 1 of their charges after their cooldown … though that might be “too powerful” … ./shrug

A bit of front-loading to compensate for the way mesmers are otherwise “backloaded.” I like it.

Sezneg.8630:

My only gripe with mantras is having to recharge them on zoning… It’s an interesting mechanic.

If you have Harmonious Mantras, you also seem to get your charges reset back down to 2 any time you pass a “level scaling boundary.”

(I haven’t complained about this because it’s minor and I’m worried someone will break something bigger if they try to poke at it with a fix.)

Fay.2357:

This is why mantras are a singularly awful design. A change or some sort of trait adjustment needs to be made so that adding more mantras into a build doesn’t cripple it. Potentially something like when expending the third cast of a mantra, gain quickness, allowing you to rapidly charge up another one.

I don’t really have a problem with mantras being “the spice.” Two mantras on a bar is still plenty.

But most of the traits for them DO suck.

The good mantra traits are:
Harmonious Mantras.
Mender’s Purity.
Halting Strike.
Note how two out of three of these aren’t specific to mantras. >.>

(Empowering is a pretty good trait also, but at the moment it’s really a “trade utility slots on your bar for a fixed damage bonus” trait.)

The other mantra traits are pretty weird and useless:
Mantra Mastery — Your mantras either already have great cooldowns, or they’re skills that you don’t necessarily burn super-fast anyway, so the cooldown improvement just isn’t a worthwhile investment.
Protected Mantras — The whole idea here is backwards. You don’t want to charge while you’re taking fire. And if someone’s bursting you while you’re charging, the extra toughness is not going to help you.
Restorative Mantras — Builds that utilize this are basically standing around spamming Mantra of Pain to do a poor imitation of another class’ healing build. :/

To bring these up to par, you need to:
1. Reduce mantra CAST TIME for super-invested builds (the ones that would take a boatload of these traits).
2. Make the abilities actually match what you should be doing when you charge or activate mantras, which is anything but standing around trying to facetank. (Protected and Restorative both fail this, hard.)

Here’s an example of a rework:
Harmonious Mantras — good as-is.
Mantra Mastery — reduces cooldown AND CAST TIME by 20%.
Protected Mantras — charging a mantra gives you [small-to-moderate duration] protection; OR activating a mantra gives you a 1s pulse of protection.
Restorative Mantras — it’s a GM trait so, screw it, add a further cast time reduction of 20% to this, so people who want to go super-deep into weird mantra builds can get -40% off.

(cont’d from above)

Mantra of Concentration – again our mantra skill is outperformed by other skills that accomplish the desired effect better. Granted this might not get fixed with an instant cast time.

Actually, in PvE, where there’s a lot of annoying pulls and knockbacks you can see coming, it’s better than Decoy. I absolutely adore this skill against random environmental nonsense like those breath trap things.

(You know why we don’t take it more often? Because stability won’t save you from being just being killed by damage like invulns, teleports, and (sometimes) stealth do. And mesmers generally don’t do well when they try to just take a lot of hits instead of avoiding them.)

Cyninja.2954:

I just don’t see how our mantra skills are bringing any value to our class. In general they are either underperforming compared to alternatives or they are paired with mediocre competition skills. For a unique class mechanic that is more than underwhelming.

Look again.

MoD is the most precise interrupt in the game. That you can use while stunned or while executing your own burst. You need high skill to get high impact out of it, but the potential is there, and it’s a solid callback to the mesmer’s GW1 identity.

Traited Mantra of Recovery requires playing every differently from Ether Feast, but it makes you wonderfully “slippery” and gives you great tools against condition builds.

Mantra of Resolve does its job and does it pretty well.

This really isn’t bad, overall!

Alright, let’s get super-detailed about mantras.

Mantra of Resolve is our only accessible semi low cooldown skill for condition removal. Considering Mesmer as a whole is lacking or requires special attention for condition removal that doesn’t say a lot. The alternatives are very underwhelming aswell:
Nullfield – situational and imo the most useful of the remaining condition removal skills. Cooldown to long for PvP, etherial field combo effect less desired in PvE/WvW.
Arcane Thievery – very situational very high cooldown skill mostly if at all useful for PvP and small skirmish WvW.
P.Disenchanter – underperforming condition removal skill in part due to weak ai and general pet performance problems.

To sum it up, “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”. Doesn’t make MoR fit any more in with other skills or our mechanic. The competition is just way worse.

In PvP, insta-cast condi drop is awesome because it helps you get out of Immobilize, which is the “YOU’RE ABOUT TO GET REKT” condition a lot of enemies use to set up their burst.

In PvE, Mantra of Resolve is nice because you can slot it in and get bonus damage from Empowering Mantras. Also the recast isn’t much of a problem. Lots and lots of opportunities to recast it while your phantasms do work.

So, it’s actually just straight-up a pretty good skill that slots easily into a lot of builds.

Cyninja.2954:

Mantra of Distraction might have it’s uses in preassure/controll builds. I don’t see any use for it in PvE. Granted it’s one of the few on button press disorient skills in game making it somewhat unique.

Look at any class. Tons of skills across all classes are almost never used in PvE, especially when you get down to “meta” builds.

Though, actually, I’m super-lazy and I half-kitten PvE, so I just play my WvW build in PvE, with MoD on the bar. And, enh, about once a week it’s actually really useful against some boss with an oddball mechanic and a bit of Defiance I need to strip to interrupt with. (See also: wyvern in the previews.)

Cyninja.2954:

Mantra of Recovery – so basically our one class mechanic heal skill gets outperformed by our other class machanic heal skills. Looking at our heal skills (while subjective) the general usfulness can be sumed up as follows:
1 – Ether Feast – usualy best in slot
2 – Mirror – second best in slot thanks to the reflect
3 – MoR – let’s put this here. It synergizes well once some traits are used to buff it up. untraited it’s near useless
4 – SotE – interesting Idea, falls flat due to horrible illusion survival.
Basically MoR outperforms our one healing skill that is broken due to our weak class mechanic.

Mirror’s a small heal and the reflect time is only, like, 2 seconds.

So, if you were to ask me… PvP:
1. Ether Feast — easy to use, big heal, standard for meta builds that focus their traits on offense.
2. Mantra of Recovery — requires a trait investment but it can remove GOBS of conditions with ease (reasonable healing output, too), plus amazing at proccing on-heal runes.
3. Mirror — fun gimmick but the heal is low and reflect time is quite short.
4. SotE — slow and kind of a death sentence.
Honestly, I see more people using SotE than Mirror in unranked arena, though!

PvE:
1. Ether Feast — dumb and easy.
2. SotE — sees real use in PvE builds that are willing to trade their heal for faster phantasm setup.
3. Mantra of Recovery — Empowered Mantras lets you trade your heal slot for damage; you can still use it as a nice condi clear with Mender’s Purity (which is easy to slot in when you’re grabbing Warden’s Feedback anyway) as well.
4. Mirror — who uses this?

As far as I’m concerned, arguing that MoR is bad because it’s not meta is like arguing that Withdraw is bad because most people prefer Hide in Shadows.

(cont’d)

N.B. making clone-on-dodge standard does hurt phantasm builds. Though arguably there’s an easy fix: don’t allow new clones to blow up phantasms if you’re full up on phants.

I kinda like fragile clones because I like the way they POP! almost the second someone attacks them, so I’d definitely rather see more consistent access to clone spam than more durable clones. Doing something to make phantasms a bit more durable might be fine.

Cyninja.2954:

Question is, how much do mantras actually get used at the moment compared to our other heal/utility skills. A question only Anet can answer through their data.

Well, anecdotally speaking…

Mantra of Resolve sees real play in a number of builds, both PvE and PvP. There seems to be a real non-trivial choice between this skill, Null Field, and Arcane Thievery, with tradeoffs between each that different players weigh differently — a sign of decent balance between these skills (even if you’re one of the folks who think overall mesmer condition cleansing is anemic — which, tbh, I disagree with). It’s far more popular than Phantasmal Disenchanter, as well.

Mantra of Distraction sees a fair amount of play. It’s a big part of one of the better mesmer builds, and sometimes finds its way into others.

Mantra of Recovery has a particular niche (Mender’s Purity) and it’s very strong in that niche. It’s not our most popular heal by a mile, but I think most classes have a definite “best of breed” heal skill (ours is Ether Feast), so I’m not too worried about this. It’s way more popular than Mirror.

Mantra of Concentration doesn’t seem very popular. I don’t think the thing holding Mantra of Concentration back is the recharge cycle, though. It’s just not as multifunctional as Blink and Decoy, which are our go-to stun breaks. (I used to use it when I ran PU, and I found it was pretty handy for getting out of all sorts of nonsense.)

Mantra of Pain is a mostly used for gimmick things and I think there’s room to rework it. That’s one mantra. (Maybe make it more like Arcane Blast or Arcane Power rather than this sorta-spammable minor effect that mostly gets used in oddball kinda-do-nothing-y healing builds?)

If anything, I think signets are in a way worse place than mantras. And there’s other mesmer skills that, AFAIK, are straight-up less popular than any of the mantras (Phantasmal Defender and Illusion of Life, for example).

Cyninja.2954:

- make Mantras instant and rebalnce as needed. For example make the cast instant but the now available mantra starts on a 4 second cd as to not be used immediately. This would allow for mantras to be rebalanced and more viable for reuse in prolonged fights.

I’d be strongly opposed to any mantra change that increases overall cooldowns or modifiers the insta-cast multi-stack mechanic.

Which is what we’re likely to see if they modify the basic one-charge-up/multi-cast-on-demand system that mantras have right now.

Fay.2357:

There’s a pretty good reason why this theoretical style of play never actually ends up working. The reason is that it’s very easy to say ‘get out, and reload’. In practice, this is incredibly difficult to do.

It’s easier to do with access to stealth and teleports. But then you have to drop some Mantras for utilities that enable that. Which I think isn’t a bad idea overall since it also means you have to spend less time recharging: with mantras, even if you trait heavily to boost their power, every additional mantra you take is liability as well as a benefit. >.>

(I really like traited Mantra of Recovery as a condition drop in non-solo WvW. I play it with MoD. In WvW, there’s a lot of breathing room to recharge, BUT I have Blink glued — GLUED — to my bar. And usually Torch and Decoy as well.)

I’d love a stronger Wastrel’s Punishment. Basically make up for some of the strength you lose by not going full-deep in Illusions.

(Would it hurt build variety in PvE, though?)

MOA TIME!!!

It’s fun to see someone going all-in on shatters with Mental Torment. You seem to have a well-developed sense of exactly when to pull the trigger on Mind Wrack even without all your clones up.

Tarnished Coast represent.

Aha, now we’ve bumped into the difference between doing-stuff roaming and having-a-fight-in-the-woods roaming. >.>

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

As a side note, I think this x seconds reapply sort of reflects on why shatter mesmer isn’t dominating the celestial meta. In theory celestial builds should suffer a huge DPS drop/moderate survival drop due to boon strips, but in reality our boon strips simply can’t keep up with boon stackings.

This is dead-on.

100,000 likes and thumbs-up and +1s and retweets.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

This might means one less reason to bring boon strip/shatter mesmer, perhaps 5 seconds will make a happy medium?

I’d want to see something like this:
“Gain one [medium duration]-second stack of stability every [short duration] seconds.”

You’ve still got stability coverage to prevent being stuck as a chain-CC piñata for 30 seconds. But, if it’s ripped or overpowered by a team effort, you don’t get ALL of it back right away. Gotta play just a bit more carefully while you’ve only got 1 or 2 stacks on you.

StickerHappy.8052:

Okay dude, I don’t see what is your issue with it. You make it sound like that boonstrip is the only way to deal with the stability. You can still wait it out. You can steal it too. You can corrupt it.

Uhh, these examples don’t at all support your argument.

“You can steal it”:
Before: ~30 seconds of stability for you.
Now: ~3 seconds of stability for you.

“You can corrupt it”:
Before: remove the boon.
Now: remove the boon, it’s reapplied after 1-3 seconds.

This tangent y’all are going on is dead silly.