Guild Wars 2

It has the upside of porting you up on ledges behind you, though.

djmckie.4876:

@Carighan, The problem is that it ISN’T doing as advertised, previous patch notes have stated that a clone should never replace a phantasm, but they do if you already have 3 phantasms up.

Then you misread the patchnotes.
The patchnotes said that if available, Clones will replace a Clone instead of a Phantasm.

As in: Once you got 3 Phantasms, the oldest one will get replaced.

I agree that GS is probably balanced around the damage avoidance of it’s #1 chain. (It’s the same for Mesmer Spear #1 chain)

I don’t see anything to fix here, the clone/phantasm overwriting is working exactly as advertised.

Incidentally the common sentiment is that Mesmer Clones are insanely powerful in PvE because single Champion mobs basically cannot ever kill you, due to constantly switching to the clones instead.

This is especially true if you have the Clone-on-Dodge talent.

Richard Nixon.6573:

The only real problem I’ve ever had with the downed state is #3. For some reason, even when I survive long enough to even activate it, it either doesn’t go off or does so little damage that using the skill hurts me more than if I just auto-attacked. Perhaps it’s because I roll a condition damage mesmer, but why do I get a completely useless skill while power/crit mesmers get all useful ones? :\

You already answered this yourself:
This is because the #1 attack (And by extension the clones created from #2) are much less powerful for a Power/Crit Mesmer than they are for a Power/Condition Mesmer. In turn, #3 is much less useful for the latter (it’s still quite useful, tbh).

I would say Trident.

The Clones created by #3 (and from Mirror Image) stack absurd amounts of Confusion very very quickly.
If I lure enemies into the waters in the middle of the zone, I can easily kill them just by completely overloading them with Confusion, then they blow themselves up in 3-5 seconds.

I’m not quite sure where the Thief comes in, though. With 30 Chaos, I out-stealth a Thief in most situations anyhow.

It’s because they’ve never tried it. Confusion scales very well.

Yeah I was about to say, I thought Elementalists get 1200 range on staves. And probably 900 on scepters, right?

A pet is inherently no different than a DoT. It cannot be dispelled, in return it can be dispatched by attacks.
Balancing these two (vulnerability to damage vs availability of dispelling measures) is where pets balance out versus “just” DoTs).

The fact that pets also add utility abilities is second, because ultimately there is no functional difference between this and the Ranger having them (on a separate command system so that it never interferes with his normal skill use). The F2 skills are commanded, anyhow.

The problem with Ranger pets is simply:
They are bugged.

Look at WoW Hunter pets for an implementation which very closely mirrors an actual living DoT.

Now you could argue: Yes, but aren’t Necro and Mesmer pets even more like living DoTs?
Well, yes and no. Both are. Hunter (or rather, permanent pets) have no DoT-ramp up. They are comparable to classes which have the lion share of their power bound in a single, powerful DoT. Any class which has an autoattack in a MMO (one which runs parallel to the triggered attacks) mirror exactly this concept.
Mesmers especially have living DoTs with a ramp-up time. They are more comparable to classes which need a few attacks to get their DoT damage fully engaged, but then can replace them individually. Affliction Warlocks in WoW work like this, as do most DoT classes in DAoC, and a fair few setups in Rift.

Independent of this, Pets are ultimately external DoTs, however.
Even permanent pets.

As such, their actual damage is trivial to balance – you balance it just like you balance any other DoT.

The only real balance problem is survivability, since it needs to be matched against the “survivability” of a dispellable DoT. Even that is easy, in GW2’s case the complicating factor is the utility in pets (hence their survivability needs to be slightly better).

But, given all that, the big issue is pets simply not attacking or not finding a route to the target. All problems which were solved in other MMOs (which incidentally managed to balance their permanent-pet classes) before.
The design isn’t a problem, the bugs are. Let the pet attack 100% of the time except for when actually physically crossing distance, and we are 10 steps closer to the balance we’re only 8 steps away from.

Can’t find information on previous iterations any where. Where is that from?

I was more talking about Rangers and Warlocks in WoW, Shadow Knights and Necros in EQ1, Necromancers, Sorcerers, Druids, Enchanters, Bonedancers in DAoC.

DaoC is actually not a bad example.
They also had F&F pet classes (Theurgist, Animist). While these were massively powerful for both PvE and PvP, they were for a very different reason than their pets or their general class power. They were required due to an arbitrary mechanic in PvE (they had to later add Call of a Thousand Storms to make midgard able to keep up in PvE). In contrast the general permanent pet classes were the pinnacle of PvE kill speed (due to focus pet reflection shield damage to facilitate AE grinding of targets), and had superior defence in RvR (this was more noticeable on the Necro than any other petclass), since they never had to expose themselves long enough for a target to become dangerous to them.

So yes, currently, Rangers have some issues.
The concept of a permanent pet, nope, that’s perfectly viable and balanceable.

I don’t know, Elementalists?

^_^

Alright, then I’d put part of the blame on the website. -.-

Because 10 minutes researching the game pre-buy already tells someone that Rangers are full-pet classes. Which makes sense, considering the baseline WoW set with it’s Hunters.

Comparing other racials I would surmise that racial elites aren’t intended to be on-par or better than class elites.

In rare cases they currently hold up well, but I would suspect (given the overwhelming number of undertuned racial elites) that these will get nerfed soon enough (Hounds for example).

I use Staff + Scepter/Torch for all game modes right now (though the trait setup in sPvP is ofc different), and I find Champions pretty easy to solo.

Staff alone can keep you alive indefinitely. You take a whole to bring the Champion down, but you’re never in any noticeable danger.

Well power is a fickle thing. Look at Shamans in modern WoW, in MoP so far one spec is nearly at the pinnacle of potential damage, and it’s outscaling the others.

But, just one expansion past, both Shaman DPS specs were near the bottom of damage.

Further in the past, Shamans did really low DPS, but doing raids without at least 1 – better 2 – Shamans was nearly impossible as your raid as a whole would be doing a fraction of their damage.

Further in the past, Shamans needed to be stacked (we personally used 8 in a 25man raid), the more the merrier, as the strongest buff in the game could be chained between multiple Shamans.

What I’m trying to say is:
If you reroll to classes you normally wouldn’t play, based on current balance, you deserve to be annoyed later when balance changes.

The biggest issue really is the range. 900 sounds large at first, but for an ordinary stationary spirit which dies easily, it’s very tiny.

Sure, for the active effect the range can’t be too large (though it needs to be larger than the current one in many cases). But the passive radius should be 1200. If need be, cap it at 5 targets (but then make it 1800 range or something), 3s per application, 3s pulse.

I love how many Rangers seem to assume that Rangers should be Archers.
If they were intended to be, I’d wager they’d be called “Archer”. Incidentally, Warriors are much closer to an actual Archer / Line Infantry class, which I thought was pretty obvious from even but a cursory glance at the wiki. And I stick with my general opinion that people who do not research the games they bug beforehand got exactly zero right to complain about pretty much anything, later.

Anyhow, the big issue is probably the pet bugs. Just as with other classes using pets, Rangers are currently hamstrung by a slew of pathing / lag / obstruction bugs in relation to pets. This is the same for Elementalists, Mesmers, Necros, even all Humans.
Sure, in the case of the Ranger it has a larger impact – due to the permanence of the pet – but the fix will probably be code changes affecting all pets, anyhow. Hence it’s probably not a specific issue.

How come other pet-based classes in other games don’t show this “inherently unbalanceable” problem?

As a Scepter/Torch/Staff Mesmer, I use a mix of Traveller’s gear (for MF) and Carrion (for more HP).

Generally speaking I base Carrion, then see whether I have comfortable error margin to my HP, then go for more Traveller’s.

What if the effect (and type of combo field) changed every 3 seconds, always going through 5 different combo fields?

The thing is that neither TW nor MI show players that they made them lose the fight.
Sure, looking at the “fight” (as in, who wins the BG / Keep / Tower / whatever), both of them (and probably all of a character’s racials) have a much larger effect on combat, but players can tell themselves that they stood a more fair fighting chance than against Moa.

Moa “snipes” a single player. Meaningless on a strategic level, sometimes powerful on a tactical level, sometimes crippling on an engagement level.

IMO, it could be worse. I like how the nature of Moa makes everyone cry about it, instead of about my strong Elites. :P
It’s not something unique to Moa, Mesmers or GW2 either. Back in WoW Rogue-Stunlock was universally whined about, despite it having extremely little impact on who would win a BG. And the WoW-PvP players at least had the argument that you could get ganked while doing PvE, hence the 1v1 performance was actually meaningful.

I don’t quite follow why we’d need to remove Confusion from our #1.
It’s powerful, yes, but it’s hardly more damaging than other classes’ #1. Look at Engineer for a good example of where this fits in. Yes, we have clones also applying Confusion stacks but in return, whoever downed us doesn’t actually suffer confusion damage, they’re using the Finisher instead.

As for #2 and #3, they’re fine with me.

I have an issue with our Drowning bar in that it’s boring. It’s the same as the Downed bar, booooring.

That’s exactly my point why the damage is so low.
Ofc there are edge cases (stationary bosses with no PBAEs, players who aren’t paying attention, chained Immobilize on players) where the Warden can do it’s full damage, and then it’s very high.

I suspect the “high damage” is however balanced around the fact that more often than not, players are smart enough to realize this thing isn’t moving and has a tiny attack range.

I mostly use Power / Malice / Vitality.
Seems to go well, I hate pure glass cannon setups because it’s so easy to lose large amounts of DPS uptime.

The problem with the Mage might be that his theoretical damage is actually very high.

His attack chains. Have a fast-attacking target get hit, adding Confusion, then have the projectile jump onto the 3 friendly targets in front of him, adding retaliation. Now have that target cleave onto the three with their melee attacks.
That’s a lot more damage than other phantasms can add (since the damage isn’t limited by the Mage’s cadence at all).

The problem is: This situation is extremely rare.

It was deactivated out of combat as a reaction to pretty widespread player feedback (during beta) that the constant audio quips were highly annoying. They were. :P

Ofc, we figured they’d disable the audio out of combat. Not the entire signet. -.-

Daisai.5879:

Then i suggest you play a mesmer and go to a dummy and test it out for yourself.
A warden which is a defensive skill does twice the damage of a berserker.

Ah see, there you’re already making the mistake:
You equalize “Elitist Jerks DPS” with actual damage output of a skill. Which might work in a formulaic game like WoW, but DPS Metres aren’t really a useful metric in GW2 due to the rather dynamic nature of combat.

Or in short:

• Warden deals high damage per attack against a stationary target.
• Warden is stationary throughout the summon.
• A lot of situations in this game aren’t stationary.
• Summing up all situations in all contexts, I’d wager that only PMage can rival PWarden in how low the damage gets.

Sure, in that ideal (= dummy, or dummy-like dungeon boss with no AE and so cleave attacks at all – which are those exactly, of the ~90 dungeon bosses? :P ) situation Warden hits harder. In the other 9999/10000 situation, it can barely even attack. Average them all out => Warden does extremely low damage.

Strill.2591:

Don’t be stupid. In WvW you’re surrounded by safe zones to retreat to while in SPVP you have to fight it out. The only defense you need in WvW is to decoy>Distortion. By the time it’s over you’ve made it back into a tower or behind friendly lines.

Not only that, you also have “virtual” safe zones due to the player- and zerg-movements. If you are chased by 3 players, and you get your zerg between you and them, you are effectively in a safe “cone”, shielded by your zerg. The 3 players have to stay far enough away, so as long as you stay close but behind the zerg, you can’t really be sniped.

What if Confusion had effectively unlimited duration (generally speaking, talking 30s+ here), but each time it dealt damage, it lost a stack? Or maybe even by health, if target is below X% health after taking damage, all stacks are discarded?

That’s not the problem really, because your “Warden does twice the damage” is beautifully misconstructing the reality of how the two abilities work.

It could still require a target tbh, and be bound to the current target. Only difference is, you say where it appears, and it uses it’s PBAE attack there, too.

It would be differentiated from Bleeding because it does more damage – in return for actually having the target be attacking to do any damage at all.

What is “much uptime”? Are we talking 25% uptime on 10 stacks? Because I consider that too spikey. I’d prefer 50% uptime on 5 stacks then.

That other day, I died from taking damage. Nerf damage.

A moving Warden would make using him for Deflection (or with Trait, Reflection) nearly impossible, since he’d constantly move out of the way. He’s extremely handy the way he is immobile.

Yeah the problem is larger than that, too. #2 on the Scepter is extremely powerful, but OH Sword also provides a nearly identical version, making this much less of a selling point. If #4 Sword was in fact #2 Sword, I think we’d see a little bit more balance between the two.

Why not use Sword/Sword over Sword/Pistol? Much higher damage output.

Wait, I didn’t even notice that. A no-defence Elementalist? Isn’t that basically begging to be killed by any stray projectile flying around?

I wouldn’t swap the Blind and Burn, because – sorry if this seems a stupid reasoning – that’d no longer fit the name of the skill. It’s The Prestige. You trick (Blind), you vanish (Stealth), and then you reappear in a flash (Burn).

What I’d do is make The Prestige have the Burn trigger completely independent of how the Stealth ends. Via debuffing, weapon swap, other skills, whatever. In theory you could trigger Blind and Burn simultaneously if you wanted to. Or, remove the channeled aspect, but I can sort-of understand why that got changed in beta.

As for Phantasmal Mage, I’d give his Confusion substantially more power (3 stacks?), and also make his Retaliation be an AE pulse around the target, not a chaining attack. Further I’d then integrate him with the traits, +ConfusionDuration, Boon/Condition durations, such stuff. Does he already remove conditions when applying Retaliation? If not, that needs fixing, too.

I’d argue that even given PvP, Confusion needs to last substantially longer (+200% ~ +300%), in return for doing less damage.

I want Confusion to be something which the enemy either has to clear, or worry about hot using skills at the most rapid pace. In PvE, I want it to be a semi-reliable sort of reactive damage, not higher in raw damage than Burning or Bleeding, but lasting much longer to make up for the enemy having to attack.

I’d do the following:

sPvP

• Reduce damage dealt by 20%
• Increase duration by 150%.

WvW

• Reduce damage dealt by ~50%
• Increase duration by 200%

PvE

• Reduce damage dealt by ~35% – 40%
• Increase duration by 300%+

I would argue that while I need slightly (~1s) longer to tag AE mobs in PvE – which can ofc cause issues if mobs simply are dead in less than a single second but despite the rampant exaggerations in this thread this happens quite rarely, and Aurora Glade is not such an underpopulated realm :P – I have it much easier to solo Champions or basically any more difficult enemy.

I just never get hit. I don’t care about how to soak damage or heal it, I just don’t get hit. It’s the perfect killing setup for PvE.

Well the trait specifically mentions Clones, AFAIK. And yes it works on Clone death for me.

(1)
A new Illusion will replace the oldest Clone. If one is available.
If none are available (all 3 active Illusions are Phantasms), then the oldest Phantasm is instead replaced.

(1a)
It counts as death or destruction of the Illusion, yes (as does AFAIK the self-destruct when the target dies).

The Mantras are a bit poopy, true.

Conceptually mind you, not talking about power or usefulness here.
I’d potentially replace them with Illusions-like states which have an ongoing effect but an inverse effect when they end.

In other words:

Mantra of Pain
Recite a Mantra of pain and destruction, greatly augmenting your damaging capabilities.
When the Mantra ends the power lashes out against you, damaging you and leaving you weakened.
Lasts 10s, giving you Fury and increasing damage done by 10%. At the end you lose 25% health and suffer Weakness for 5 seconds.

Mantra of Distraction
Recite a Mantra of confusion and distraction, causing any dazeing effect against your current target to double in duration and causing damage whenever the target manages to use an ability.
When the Mantra ends you suffer part of it’s effects yourself.
Lasts 15s, causing double daze duration and keeping up 3 stacks of Confusion. At the end of the Mantra you suffer 3 stacks of Confusion for 10 seconds.

Mantra of Concentration
Recite a Mantra, granting you Stability and increased movement speed.
When the Mantra ends or the Stability is lost, you are crippled and cannot benefit from Swiftness.
Lasts 20 seconds, granting Swiftness and Stability. If the Stability is lost in any way or the effect ends you are crippled for 10 seconds and cannot benefit from Swiftness for those 10 seconds, even if Crippled is cured.

Mantra of Resolve
Recite a Mantra, granting you partial immunity from Conditions.
When the Mantra ends, you cannot be afflicted by boons for a limited amount of time.
Lasts 20 seconds. While the Mantra lasts, any Condition lasts only half it’s normal duration, but it is stored. When the Mantra ends, you are “immune” to boons for ~15s.

Mantra of Recovery
Recite a Mantra, granting you rapid healing .
When the Mantra ends or your health reaches maximum, you take increased damage for a short amount of time.
Lasts 10 seconds, granting you Regeneration and healing some HP every second. If your health reaches maximum or the Mantra ends, suffer 20 stacks of Vulnerability for 5 seconds.

I usually call out immediately which one the “real” me is.

Then get the CD-reduction traits, but not the other stuff. It’s enough to tag. :P
I have the same issue whenever I go WvW, enemies just die soooo easily. Yes, in theory, given an absolutely clean sterile environment they’d stomp all over me. More often than not their damage train derails on a random Feedback bubble or a shower of crippling arrows, and then they die in 2 hits.

Considering the road back, staying alive is considerable more important (adds meat to your group) than doing high damage. I can easily do 100% more damage by investing 5 seconds more combat time. I lose minutes of damage from dying and running back.

Why not just fix/change Scepter? We already have 3 ranged weapons compared to only one melee, I don’t really see how we’d justify another ranged.