Guild Wars 2

apharma.3741:

Shatters under 4 bounce Mirror Blade accounted for less than half of the burst. Now it is in line with the 60-80%.

The annoying thing about this change is that the more you focus all burst on shatter, the more DE becomes a god-tier “take me or suck” trait.

That was the nice thing about old MB: you could play an HM build and it constrained your options a bit — you were stuck mostly doing the one-clone Mirror Blade quick shatter — but there were at least two competing viable ways to build bursty mesmers.

The worst part is, once anything is “fixed” enough to reduce the cries of “OP!” it just stays in whatever clunky/useless/Smiter’s-Booned state it ended up in for months or years. It takes a major major major patch to actually see anything polished back to usefulness.

Mantras are just annoying, though. They’re not useless. But, jeez, it’s such a shame.

stof.9341:

You cannot have such a system with hard lockons like I mentioned. Anyone could exploit the “low coverage spots” to play in prime time instead.

Map caps.

Moving to T1 if you want to play NA primetime is largely a waste of both your time and theirs. That’s why they don’t bother to court those guilds.

stof.9341:

Because there’s no way to deal with coverage gaps without closing the server if off hours.

Look at it that way. Say, you got server A that only plays from 00:00 to 12:00. They have 0 presence the rest of the time. As a result, they are more or less guaranteed 100% PPT for that period and nothing the other. That other period sees PPT split between the server B and C.

What do you want the system to do? The servers have the same population on average over the day/week. Should it allow more people to join B and C cause they are “losing”? But B and C are already at max capacity during the day. Adding more players at that time period will not help at all. And even if there was room, it wouldn’t help either.

The only way to solve that is with hard lockdowns based on current time. Say, you want to join B for the 00:00-12:00 period, fine you can. But you aren’t allowed in WvW outside of it. or you plain close the servers down to a small time period. Is that what you want?

What I want is a system that doesn’t just further cut off servers’ attempts to balance their coverage themselves. The hoops we had to jump through under the old system were terrible, but now it’s just a brick wall.

And folks are crowing about how this brick wall will somehow fix WvW even though it has next to no effect on the current population distribution except in the very, very long term, and mainly through existing player attrition.

The point is that there’s nearly no way to systematize things without causing an ugly mess, which is why the annoying loopholes in the old system were actually functional — as a kind of “safety valve” for the system itself being trash. Now we have a very similar system but without the old workarounds.

DHawk.2687:

They did not ruin mantras, they fixed a bug making them perform different than intended

Anything can be a “feature” or a “bug” if you handwave a little.

Working in software, I can tell you that “works as designed” or “works as intended” is pretty much a nice way of saying “this kinda sucks but it’s not worth our while to make it better.”

When you roll out a change that makes something more unpleasant to use, you really can’t hide behind “works as intended.” Because nobody cares. The flow and user interface of the old-style mantras is sooooooo much worse than the new ones. They really needed to find another way to balance them besides “make Mantras annoying again.”

Tspatula.9086:

No, what they did, however successful for them, is a large part of the ruining of WvW for a huge percentage of other players. That is not sustainable.

That’s a conversation that needed to happen two years ago. Now all that other stuff is dead and gone.

Look at T1/T2/T3 NA. It’s been stable and playable for months, until the big YB move. (Stable in this case is a good thing because — for example — TC and Mag can’t really fight each other productively; it’d be a tedious matchup for both sides involved. Also each “tier” managed to carve out an identity. They play differently and want to play differently.)

Tspatula.9086:

If you are on a full server and you want to play with new friends, or old friends new to the game, you have to choose between not playing with them or transferring.

In practice, this mostly means “Don’t bother getting your friends into the game.” Which is kind of a reality anyway, given the hoops you need to jump through to actually enjoy it.

Tspatula.9086:

Remember, the population balance is a problem, at this point everyone is affected one way or the other by it.

In actuality, though, it’s mainly a problem within tiers, and at the super-low-end where there just aren’t enough players to sustain any action.

~

These three servers are all “Medium” under the new system.

http://i.imgur.com/AfhCh8F.png

http://i.imgur.com/8woSPRx.png

So, basically the only difference so far is that it’s harder for “top-tier” WvW servers to pick up more, which is mostly something they do to try to balance out off-hours coverage.

I’m willing to wait and see, but the new system has no actual mechanism for dealing with coverage gaps or population imbalance within the “lower” tiers.

Atoss.1056:

LoL at all the ppl crying “I can’t bring my friends to my xxxx T1 servur, qq” – if you care so much to play with your friends why don’t you go to lower ranked one and play with them there?

I think the answer to that is obvious: you have dozens of friends you’ve made playing WvW for three years now, but on the rare occasion an RL friends picks up the game (likely made more common when HoT comes out), you want to play side-by-side with them, too.

The thing is, for that newbie? Being able to play with their friends is quite likely the difference between whether they get into WvW or just ignore it.

Y’all need to remember that the “full” servers aren’t just “bandwagons.” They’re communities that have managed to sustain themselves and grow in the face of massive player attrition throughout the game. Much as I like to snark about rival servers just buying guilds or whatever, the reality is that, through a combination of factors including both good leadership and blind luck, every higher-tier server has managed to cultivate a community that straight-up works better, for more people, than the servers languishing down in the lower tiers (which, honestly, seem to drive a lot of the discussion around here). Wanting to see them undone is pretty much rooting for the death of the working part of the WvW community.

Balancing coverage matters but so far this change looks like it’s just locking some servers in a bubble and hoping that attrition screws them a bit. (You don’t actually need to make this change to funnel the — hypothetical, at this point — influx of new players to the right place. Note that even before the patch it was already impossible for newbies to join JQ/BG/TC without waiting weeks and having someone explicitly instruct them on how to find “gaps” where they could join.) That’s not even addressing 5% of what’s wrong with population and coverage in WvW.

PowerBottom.5796:

Powerblock for example, doesn’t get used that often anymore, because why would I need a longer recast on an enemy skill when I can just insta-stun him out of stealth and gank him off the map instead?

Power Block was never used for the cooldown effect itself.

People just didn’t take it. They took (the much more accessible) Halting Strike. And what was that? Damage on interrupt. That’s the good part of Power Block and always will be.

This patch took the most elegant and fun thing about the new mesmer and wholesale gutted it instead of really looking for a balance fix.

Now (with the exception of IP baseline, which is still nice, and good, and necessary) we’re playing the same old buggy class with some OP gimmicks slapped on top.

Pre-patch, Mirror Blade was:

• Normal: 3 bounces
• With Illusionary Elasticity trait (4 pts in Illusions): 4 bounces

After 6/23, it was:

• Normal: 4 bounces
• Illusionary Elasticity trait removed (“baselined”)

Now, after 7/28, it is:

• Normal: 3 bounces

Xanctus The Dragonslayer.2318:

Well and I was so proud about my mantra mesmer. Well back to the drawing board I guess.

Honestly, I think the build’s still playable. The problem is that it “feels” icky now. Mantras have gone from being clunky to having one of the most pleasant “flows” of anything in the game back to being their old clunky selves. ‘Cept now we’ve all seen the alternative and they are monstrously, horrifically clunky in our eyes instead.

phokus.8934:

Anyone else notice that Power Lock now has an 5 second ICD?

Err, it did before.

Or do you mean the Halting Strike damage on Power Block?

It seems to be inconsistent. I’ve gotten it to happen and then I changed my bar around and it didn’t happen. Who the heck knows. :/

It’s amazing how three years into the existence of this game, they still can’t get the “trait acts as a copy of a skill” thing to work right. :/

SlimChance.6593:

Re quoting for emphasis.

Reducing MoD just hurts other lockdown builds that don’t use CS.

You want reduce the daze duration, then do it for all control effects: all fears/knockback/knockdowns/push/pulls/etc get a reduction as well.

What other lockdown builds that don’t rely on CS, though?

Are they, by chance, lockdown builds that are running Chaotic Interruption? In that case, the Immobilize duration kinda covers that gap already.

MoD is really good. I love it. It’s a beautiful skill. The least important thing about it for an interrupt build (but the most important for a 1-2-3 stun-and-burst build) is the daze duration. That’s where you can apply a targeted nerf without turning the whole skill to garbage.

Things they should have done instead, by me:

• Reduce Mantra of Distraction duration to 1/4 sec, like Headshot. Now it’s not nearly as much of an insta-cast on-demand snare but you can still use CS with Chaos Storm and Diversion.
• Change The Pledge to a static 20% reduction.
• Make it so that the cooldown of the last mantra charge you used applies to recasting the skill, if it has already recharged “underneath.” So MoD has a recharge of at least 5 seconds between each activation.
• Reduce Mirror Blade damage by 10% instead of cutting bounces.
• Change Chaotic Dampening to a flat 20% instead of the crappy thing it is now.
• Raise Mantra of Recovery cooldown gently (start with 12 s or 15 s) if you think it’s too much healing.
• More glass butterflies.

Kitta.3657:

Mantras are still perfectly viable, they were legit broken with the previous recharge bug. You could so easily spam mantras and not die; that’s not how I want the class to be played, that’s not skillful.

I kinda feel like if we’re gonna talk about “spamming” mantras, we gotta address the elephant in the room, which is MoD+CS. Which got a minor nerf with the recharge change but they’re even cutting the cooldown so you can spam it more than you used to before June’s patch.

MoR is mostly something that gets spammed because lots of builds spam conditions (blind, immobilize, burning). It was quite powerful with the old setup but it was, in fact, quite reasonable for a pure conditrash build to out-spam you in 1-on-1. Far from immunity to conditions.

Seriously, it’s embarrassing that they won’t actually address the root problem of the “Mantras” build — which was the ability to stun-and-burst easily on a low cooldown. There were a number of ways to address that (e.g. changing CS ICD or changing MoD duration).

I kinda feel like we’re back to Anet’s typical approach, which is to nerf all the side stuff in a build until it’s “fair” because the core gimmick is still there and just as busted as ever, but the rest of the class mechanics now suck. Which leaves you with one not-so-OP-anymore gimmick build and nothing else.

I’m surprised they didn’t change Confounding Suggestions in any way (the fix is not a stealth nerf; it’s something else).

Shrubsy.9720:

Does reducing mirror blade to three bounces really even reduce burst damage in a 1v1 situation? Isn’t bounce number 4 just going to be bouncing back to yourself anyway? Of course, when bouncing between enemies it would reduce damage.

No, that’s the third hit of the blade on your opponent.
0. Them
1. You
2. Them
3. You
4. (now gone) Them

Mirror Blade: Reduced number of bounces from 4 to 3.
…
Harmonious Mantras: Reduced the damage bonus per stack of this trait from 4% to 3%.
…
No mention of PU or condition application (other than Blind).

Obviously PvP tears have more weight than WvW tears.

I think Perplexity honestly isn’t that big of a deal for a condi mesmer. You have so many other sources of bursty Confusion anyway. I’d consider Traveler better for many situations.

~

Runes of the Undead and Runs of Scavenging are both very cheap and give you a nice fat Condition Damage bonus. (I’d say Undead is probably better if you’re doing Rabid gear, but either one is strong with Dire gear.)

Runes of Balthazar are another cheap rune set that lets you turn heals into big bursts of burn. You can see them in the old OsiCat PU mantra condi build. These days I’d consider using Balthazar runes with traited Mirror as well.

Implicitly when something is dismissed as “anecdotal,” it’s really because it’s a bad anecdote.

That’s what people are saying here: not just that it’s a limited sample but that it’s a poor choice of sample. Since it’s a single hotjoin screenshot on what’s probably a mesmer daily day, with one not-very-balanced team dunking on another, on a map that a lot of players struggle with and where it’s easy to get snowballed if the enemy team is more coordinated than yours.

I mean, even assuming MoR is straight-up better than Ether Feast now… okay, so what?

Ether Feast used to be the go-to heal for nearly every serious PvP build. MoR is strong now, if you trait for it heavily. That’s reasonable. It’s not like it’s suddenly wrong that more competitive builds might take something other than Ether Feast.

Actually, I rather like how mesmer healing breaks down now:

• You have a healing skill that you can buff to be highly useful with a considerable trait investment.
• You have a healing skill that covers the basic “big burst heal to win back some initiative in a fight” niche with minimal trait investment, perfect for the most aggressive builds.
• You have a healing skill that lets you trade your skill slot for more phantasms, more or less. Strong role-player in PvE.
• You have a healing skill that lets you trade some raw healing power for reflection. Which used to be pretty much garbage but is playable now.

MoR is one of the strongest when you invest traits into it. It’s pretty clunky and terrible if you don’t.

Inspiration, despite being my favorite trait line, is far from a “no-brainer” for mesmer builds.

If I had to go rebalance things…

1. Reduce MoD duration to 1/4 sec (like Headshot). Now it’s a real interrupt. I thought about this a while and I prefer this to straight-up nerfing Confounding Suggestions because I think being able to trait for Diversion to stun a target reliably is fine.

2. Reduce PU duration, but make the boons better again.

3. Reduce Blind duration on Blinding Dissipation (make it more of a momentary attack-stopper) and make sure it doesn’t go through evade/invlun.

0. Ignore all the cries about MoR because pure condition builds deserve to have a spec that just wipes the floor with them (and because, let’s be honest, there’s practically no amount of cleansing that will actually nullify all of a good condition build’s output).

Xenon.4537:

Is there any way you could reformat this idea into concise bullet points?

If I had to summarize the OP:

• Healing Power kinda sucks by itself.
• So combine it with Boon Duration. 500 points of “Concentration” (new Healing Power) stat = +15% boon duration. (So you could get about +45% if you maxed out – similar to old boon-duration builds.)
• Now your Healing Power character has more real “support” than just restoring some hp. Also you can be tankier with the improved Prot and Regen.

Now, I’m not much of a PvE player, but between playing with friends and writing my LFGs correctly, I’ve never had a problem with “elitists” or “berserker meta” or “class snobbery” or whatever.

Recently, I’ve had fun and successful Fractal runs with all sorts of party comps and experience levels and they’ve turned out pretty great. Including a no-melee mostly-inexperienced group that ranged their way through Fractals.

And, in general, it seems like the specialization patch has made it easier to do good damage while also bringing other things to the table, so you really can’t lay your gripes at the feet of the new build system.

Worst I’ve ever experienced was pick-up groups where people were total crap about indicating their desire to fight or skip a particular encounter beforehand. That’s an L2P communications issue and not a game-design thing (beyond the fact that a lot of encounters are more rewarding when skipped).

(Full disclosure: 99% playing mesmer, mostly zerk, with Traveler runes. Because that’s my WvW gear.)

StickerHappy.8052:

Ahmm this is also happens in unranked and ranked. I do no get why people see the Hotjoin only part of the argument.

Last time I was on a mesmer-mesmer-mesmer! team in Unranked, we got rolled pretty hard. Because about 0.75 of us could really hold a point. (Hurray for anecdata.)

Even in the burst-and-burn meta, being able to pull off a strong burst isn’t everything.

Hotjoin is still awful?

Thanks. Good to know.

SlayerSixx.5763:

adozu.6398:

that’s just being salty you know, is there any good reason why the “it should work on everyone or on no one” approach is invalid when it comes to necro?

That logic, in and of itself is flawed. I suppose mesmers should throw up a thread on why power block doesnt do over half of its tooltip on theives. You know why mesmers don’t make a thread like that anymore? Because the answer from every person would more or less be “because theives work differently”. I’m sure if you want to apply that logic, you should out fighting to make sure theives finally suffer a CD increase on their weapon skills when interrupted by a power blocker now.

Actually, those threads totally happened.

The reason folks dropped it is because Power Block got merged with Halting Strike and had Weakness added to it. Giving you some value against everyone (burst damage and Weakness are both great against thieves). That and what interrupt builds really needed to play well against thieves was Illusionary Persona, which they now have.

The only reason it hoses all of your utilities is that you went all minions with your utilities. That’s sorta the risk you take. Like a turret engie going all turrets and not having a stun break.

“Dailies” means “stand around giving each other points without actually playing PvP.”

This is an annoying side effect of PvP rewards actually being pretty good now.

Just avoid those servers like the plague. I recommend Unranked.

I’d throw in Mirror of Anguish. Doing something once every 60 seconds seem rather weak, but there are lots of times it can save you from a burst by interrupting stunning someone right after their opener.

Daniel Handler.4816:

I much rather have an enhanced aoe capability, than a 1v1 dueling capability that doesn’t extend to PVE at all.

I’m not a majority-PvE player, but I’ve been doing a lot of PvE stuff this week on account of needing some swag and it being golem week anyway…

Post-patch mesmer can shatter in PvE! Like, well. It’s actually significantly more AoE action than we had before (against trash mobs).

Against things that aren’t trash mobs? I honestly haven’t found myself pining for massive AoE yet. Just relying on cleaves and reflects has been pretty good for me so far.

Also, I’ve been enjoying the ability to share Distortion with my buddies soooooo much. Got a really clutch res off with it yesterday. I’m actually having fun in PvE now, since it’s easier to make a PvE build that has some cool addons instead of just going all reflects and a pile of static damage boosters.

It’s not quite that simple.

Burst rules the roost right now (including condi burst with fat stacks of burning in that) and could stand to be tuned down a bit.

BUT if you reduce damage across the board, you enable more perma-bunker-type builds that you just have to wale and wale and wale on to get anywhere against. These are some of the most boring fights because often at least one player is literally just doing a rotation.

If you reduce burst damage but not sustained damage, then all you’re doing is putting more emphasis on auto-attacks, thereby generally devaluing timing and dodging in favor of more by-the-numbers attrition.

So, I dunno, maybe just give everyone like 3k hp so they don’t die quite as fast and call it a day? :/

1. You can, infact, predict an instant cast, since it relies on positioning, clone setup, &c. I mean, you’ve never seen someone dodge a shatter before?
2. It’s not the biggest deal in the grand scheme of things, but the big annoyance of BD going through dodge is that it stops you from counter-attacking effectively even if you just avoided a shatter (which is often the best time to jump on a mesmer).

data.4093:

ASP.8093:

BD needs a fix. I’m pretty sure it’s just an outright bug.

It isn’t a bug. I haven’t tested all the AoE blinds available but I know several blinds go through evade. If they overhaul blinding dissipation they need to fix other blinds too. Part of the problem with the forums is that many of you are focused in the wrong direction, 1 thing gets spread around as truth and everyone latches onto it. You shouldn’t be complaining that it can’t be blocked or dodged, it’s the frequency of the blinds that is important. Another issue is that mesmers never had this powerful trait in the past, it’s something new to complain about. People aren’t screaming about thief blinds being undodgeable, thief always had good blind uptime so no one seems to notice.

As a side note why would you want to block the blind on shatter over the shatter itself? If a mesmer goes for f1/f2/f3 I’d much rather block the incoming shatter/clones than the blind. The only time you want to block the blind is if you’re using a skill that blocks for X seconds instead of X attacks.

I don’t like that it goes through dodge because it makes it that much harder to counter-attack after a failed shatter.

You’re right that being a separate proc makes it kinda ugly for one-shot block effects, though. I’d assume just triggering right “after” the actual shatter would address that. Or making the trait actually modify the shatter effect coming out of the mesmer herself (the “IP” part of the shatter) directly.

It’s good condition removal, good sustain in general (Restorative Illusions and Restorative Mantras add up over time), it’s got many of our reflect traits, and both Mental Defense and Temporal Enchanter are solid even without trying to be any kind of “group support” build.

I play it because being able to clear conditions for daaaaays is, in my mind, stronger than other benefits like obscene stealth uptime or being able to ream people with Chaotic Interruption — not because that’s how you fight condition builds but because that’s how you fight immob spam.

On top of that, you get really good incidental group support, by being able to share Power Cleanse or protect an ally in a clutch moment with Distortion.

I wish Anet would make an account on every single one of the WvW server community sites and just lurk there a bunch, getting a sense of the what the dedicated WvW population is like and what they’re up talking about when it’s not directed at devs.

Mesmers could burst you like this pre-patch. https://youtu.be/-ry_FW5oowE?t=8m55s
Thieves can burst you like this, pre-patch and post-patch. https://youtu.be/Jq6DxxFyNIg?t=2m24s
Mediguards can burst you like this, pre-patch and post-patch. https://youtu.be/Wrf5BcAX_JM?t=11s

This is what happens when you play zerker anything in WvW roaming: live by the burst, die by the burst.

If you want to complain that zerker ranger sucks in WvW roaming, take it to the ranger forum, perhaps? (N.B. JOY makes extensive use of zerker rangers in WvW havoc. But running solo you are very vulnerable to CC spam, thief-style burst, or condi overload.)

If you want to have a discussion about mesmers’ CC or survivability or stealth or sustain, please find a video where you don’t get caught with your pants down. Because right now this discussion looks like:
1. People telling you that you kinda sucked during those 5 seconds of video that you deleted.
2. You just throwing random complaints at the wall waiting to see what sticks.

WilnerGW.3275:

Maybe i didnt made myself clear till now: The problem is not only the DAMAGE itself. Its how mesmers do insane damage with GREAT survivability/desingages.

This is an argument someone could make, yes. However, your video is just you getting dunked on by Mirror-Blade-in-the-back and the only defensive skill anyone uses is a Distortion to secure the stomp.

Umm, you deleted the first version of the video, which includes you mousing over his food (which is where that Precision buff screenshot also came from).

So, /shrug.

BD needs a fix. I’m pretty sure it’s just an outright bug.

In general, I think Blind’s duration is excessive. With 3-second Blinds being pretty standard, you don’t have to worry about timing blind too well if you’re generally bouncing in and out of reach and evading a lot. Reducing the duration slightly would make Blind more like a soft interrupt. I’m not, like, yelling for that to happen, though, because I think it’s a change that might put D/P thieves in a bad place. But I think the rather long duration is a significant contributor to the “feel bad” factor.

WilnerGW.3275:

Plus i droped her HP from like 80% to only 20%, while my HP dropped from 100% to 0%.

I’ve fought that OPP dude you were shooting at a couple of times. He’s condi PU. Pretty sure he’s either full Dire or Dire+Rabid (+ who knows maybe some Apothecary or something, WvW is weird) mix. You… you are not.

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

The only thing it shows is the stupid amount of power creep this game has now.

Shrug. It’s the same as a pre-patch video. Replace the human mez with an asura and it could be a scene out of half a dozen of Pi’s videos posted here, for instance. Burst is higher across the board but WvW has been home to 2900+ power 225% crit damage glass cannons for a long, long time now.

tier1_roaming.jpg

Hot Boy.7138:

It’s not a learn to play issue. You can’t use the skill if there are targets in front of you that has retaliation or it will do more damage to you than to them. That’s a fact. There’s no way of getting around that until you strip the boon or wait for it to expire. Well of course you weigh the pros and cons of if it is worth it doing damage to them at the expense of yourself. But it remains that if the targets in front of you has retaliation you won’t use it. It’s common to end up n situations where you need to use it for evade, but there’s no difference between evading it and using it cause you will take the same amount of damage. Now, I deselect the target and try to face and use it, similar to how Eles would use ride the lightning to escape from their target. I find it needlessly inconvenient.

You can shatter the boon off while Frenzied. You can activate Frenzy to soak a big hit and then break out of it early. You can, like you said, turn around and take a swing at the air.

I feel like complaining about retal vs. Frenzy is like complaining about reflect vs. Rapid Fire. It’s a great skill and it’s in no way made useless by retal.

I kinda agree that sword needs better ways to chase. Right now iLeap is still pretty bad at actually stopping anyone who decides to run away.

Stuff like this, though…

Blurred Frenzy needs to give invulnerability instead of evades like it used to. Half of the time you can’t use it because you’ll do more damage to yourself than to the target because of retaliation.

This is pure “l2p” territory. Yes, there are times you’ll retal-bomb yourself with Blurred Frenzy, especially if you’re not paying attention. But it’s an amazingly good defensive skill for its low cooldown. You can facetank all kinds of nasty combos with a pretty minimal resource investment.

PvP right now is pretty fast and kinda unforgiving. I find myself enjoying it a lot, though.

Compared to GW2 at release, the PvP rewards are a lot better and easier to use. It’s actually a pretty good way to unlock skins nowadays.

I like to mix PvP and WvW. I’m not sure I’d recommend the game to someone who only wanted to play PvP. But since you own it already, there’s really no downside to giving it a try.

Pretty sure thieves, mesmers, guardians, engies will all be able to stomp a rev on their first attempt. Which makes their downed state less reliable than thief, mesmer, or ele downed state.

It’s “baselined” now. Everything that Elasticity affected got an extra bounce for free.

Try GS 2 or Staff 1 without any traits and it’ll be just like Illusionary Elasticity before.

Same thing happened to Illusionary Persona, Blink range, one of the 15% damage phantasm traits, and the "600 armor while casting mantras" thing, btw.