Guild Wars 2

True, if you look at the forum it’s all a cryfest, ingame everyone is just gaming along and there’s tons of Mesmer (and I don’t mean in sPvP, I mean in WvW).

I guess it’s just the vocal minority, then. :P

Interesting. So the Mesmers you PvP with don’t capitalize on AE debuffs in WvW? Or even PvE?

Because that’s nearly the strongest aspect of our Shatter mechanic, the sheer area coverage. It’s not actually pinpoint-strong (my point from above exactly), but it’s overall coverage is quite handy.

Question though: If the class bar abilities aren’t fun to use, why play the class? Seems odd to me, sort of like self-punishment.

Yes I know, and that’s the argument against separating the functionality or even numbers of abilities. The point I was trying to make was simply that code to differentiate how to handle an ability based on sPvP already exists, so there’s probably API calls in place to check for modifiers in real time.

I am against PvE/PvP splits, mind you.

Echo
Elite, 180s CD, instant cast
Your next ability with a cooldown greater than 20 seconds used after Echo will replace Echo with another version of that ability. The cooldown begins immediately, but the copied ability only lasts until Echo’s CD expires.

In other words I can press Echo, use Feedback, then Feedback will go on CD but another Feedback replaces Echo, ready to use, and stays there for 180s (at that point it would flip back to a usable Echo, compare Portal Entre -> Exeunt).

Shattered Memories
Utility, 45s CD, second tier
Next ability used by the target incurs 50% more cooldown or 5 seconds, whichever is longer. Elite skills are partially resistive to this effect, and will only cool down 25% longer.

Phantasmal Skirmisher
Utility, first tier, 45s CD
Summons a Phantasm against your target which will repeatedly withdraw and then harass your enemy with arrows. If the target is not within 750 units of the Phantasm, the arrows cause Cripple.

If 10% movement speed is such a huge difference to you, gobflinger, I’m not sure getting it would satisfy you much. It’s a minor difference tbh (Thiefs are the real winners with their +25% passive).

Plus, we do get a PvE-Traversal niciness in return for not having +10% runspeed, and that is Portal. As soon as you group up – which frankly you should since well, MMOs tend to have this second M in their name :P – then Portal saves oodles of time and frustration, especially with regards to having to re-do sections of jumping puzzles. Plus you can cheaply troll players trying to interact with a Vista with it. Worth the trade IMO.

They are quite good if fully traited. The problem is how weak they are if not traited. Only MoD I see having much use without traits, and that is if you’re traited around interruptions.

The conceptual idea behind Shatter is extremely sound, tbh.

I mean, let’s go back to the original line describing it:
Shatter your illusions, destroying them in return for a powerful effect.

Operative word: powerful

To me this means the extreme of Illusion design would be this:

1. Clones are the ?&? of Mesmer defence. They’d need to be actual copies, dodging around a bit, showing both weapons, attacking at the same speed. They’d lose most defence but have ok health, the idea is to base out defence entirely on enemies “wasting” attacks trying to kill us.
2. Phantasms are the core support skills we have. They should be damage-less, but extremely strong in return (e.g.: Duelist does 8 Projectile Finishers in one salvo). They stick around, but after the initial salvo they drop to 1 health and 0 dodge. In other words, outside of sterile environments they’re single-use, but that use needs to be powerful as hell – though, utility-only. No damage from this (sec on that).
3. Shatters would be insanely powerful. I’m talking 50%+ of my total damage potential being from F1. If our Clones and Phantasms are to be very strong, then by extension the Shatter skills need to be so insanely powerful that they still have a very important use.

In other words, the system would be a see-saw. Clones provide Defence and Phantasms provide Utility, but to provide Damage or Control we need to destroy them. Both sides of the see-saw should be bumped up in power a lot, so that the switch between the two feels very distinct, and the transitions provide both the power (going from fully defensive to massive AE burst damage dropping everyone by 60%-75% of their HP in one attack) and the vulnerability (I’d remove things like Clone on Death, and re-work most of the CDs) of the Mesmer.

Ok, back to earth: That above is what I’d make from the “overall” design of Illusions+Shatters if I am to ignore the current numbers. Given the wording, given the layout, I suspect this was once actually the intention, btw.

Until they realized that this works out meh due to the reliance on rather overpowered burst effects on Shatter. Giving one class intentionally overpowered burst is fine in a vacuum, but tilts the playing field when combined in groups. Especially 2 Mesmers, who’d be able to AE-2-shot an entire group with Shatters, with ~0 defence possible. Individually fine, stacks badly.

Still, I think if we are to long-term evolve the current Illusion/Shatter system, it’d need to surge in power again. Clones need to be more perfect, Phantasms need to provide a lot more offensive/defensive utility, and Shatters need to be a lot stronger.

Alternatively, use Shatters as delivery types, as per what I posted in the other Shatter thread. F1 = single target enemy, F2 = AE enemy, F3 = single target friendly, F4 = self.

Effusion.4831:

That system from gw1 isn’t in gw2 because they don’t want players to have to learn two different sets of “rules.” Yet.

Considering Confusion works differently in sPvP from WvW and PvE, I highly doubt your statement. :P

lollie, that is not lootstealing, that is simply killing an enemy before you even laid hands on it. Comparatively speaking when someone in a FPS snipes an enemy you weren’t even aiming at, did he killsteal that from you?

lollie.5816:

Let’s put it like this: when I play my other classes in DEs I’m very pleased to see mesmers – they give me buffs and don’t take away from my chance to gain lots of loot.

Not that you can kill-/lootsteal in GW2. :P

Exactly that, FlyingK. In the minds of many people crying here, there seems to be exactly 2 states your balance can be in:
- #1
- useless

A Thyme Wrap? Doesn’t sound toooo tasty, really. :S

noot.8641:

it was smart placed carighan.
if no1 can hit me there except the mesmer, isnt it placed good then?

Considering I still need to be able to target you in the mess, it can’t have been that far back. Most players seem content when they are out of direct LoS, and then you can still always hit them with AEs targetted at the side of a decal.
I don’t see iZerker to be that different there. Plus the damage is comparatively low.

Miyakuzi.2964:

Well Kanto since u are oh soo wise. I challenge u to do the mission i mentioned in my first post with your Mesmer. Then do the same thing with an Ele, Necro, Eng… and then compare those two runs.

I think what you are forgetting is that many of us care <nothing> how “easy” or “difficult” (considering this is about tagging, it is difficult to even call it difficult :P ) it is to get gold in a DE, as long as we reliably get gold.

Likewise, as long as I got tons of money, I don’t care whether someone else tags faster or kills a bit faster. So what, let them have their fun, too. It’s not like I lose anything as a result, and I certainly don’t feel like I underperform in PvE in any way.

Or maybe, just build your arrow cart smarter, noot.

We also have multi-attacks on the Sword, a very low-CD chain attack on the GS (which also has a longer CD CAE knockback dealing damage) and on the Focus. We’re not completely helpless in AEing, and that’s before I get to our actual AE tools, which are sadly mostly PvP-only.

Since you mention WArrior Longbow, just use GS and use #2. Quite comparable really.

plasmacutter.2709:

No, they’re not necro minions. They’re much weaker than necro minions. Most of the time their attacks don’t get a chance to fire before they die.

And that’s the point.

Exactly. The point is, we’re not necros!
You can’t compare Phantasms to Minions because you also cannot compare Distortion to Death Shroud or Feedback to Lich Form or anything like that.
They’re two different classes, they can’t be compared in a vacuum at all.

Oh oh!
Can we please get the whiner who argued in the Moa thread that Time Warp is quite easy to counter (unlike Moa, supposedly) in here, and have him and the OP duke it out?

TheCelt.1394:

Because Mesmers need all the help they can get, amirite?

Actually we do.
We are currently extremely frail, and we also have comparatively low damage output.

That is…
We also have a handful of really powerful – actually way overpowered – abilities. However, these are currently everything we have, so they actually appear a lot less overpowered to anyone else than they really are (since we’re not contributing anything besides them, really).

In other words, we need “perfect” clones. If you don’t want my PvP defence to keep being all about the insanely strong Feedback and the rage-inducing Moa Morph, then I need some other form of defence, sorry.

You realize – since you’re also harping on about the CS nerf – that it takes over 3 minutes to actually “lose” a cast?

That’s how crippling the nerf was.

I think the Vulnerability problem is larger than Staff #1.

Some attacks apply 10 stacks of it. Others 1. Others 3. The problem is, Vulnerability, being 1%/stack, is a nonlinear debuff.

Going from 100% to 101% is +1% damage.
Going from 124% to 125% is +0,8% damage. That’s 20% less damage gained for that stack.

Vulnerability needs some re-thinking. It’s stacksize, stacklimit, power and skills applying it all need a game-wide review I think. Just like Confusion might need.

Ok, follow-up:
Got it working.

The problem is, as suspect, that you can only have each account name once. Meaning if my Google account has email address X, the very same mail was used for GW2, linking GW2 overwrites the stores Google Accounts setup, and vice versa.

Renaming the Google account beforehand did the trick.

Yes I’m aware. I need to write down a topic which ones I’d swap and then which ones I’d buff/nerf. Not adding/removing many, but simply shuffling them a bit.

If a spin of iBerserker is 90% of your health, then I feel very sorry for your 2,3k health pool.

Now, I can understand it’s frustrating to lose 10% of your health from an invisible entity.
This bug is well documented and all over the bug report forum, see Invisible Armies.

(edit)
About the crit overcapping, that’s easy to fix, but this is more of a global change: It’s too easy to overcap crit to extreme numbers. And I don’t just mean Phantasms. If you focus on it, it sounds like you get +30% crit and +30% crit damage, right? Well that’s before gear / sigils / runes. If it were what you get from traits, all would be ok.

Hrm, doesn’t work for me.

I go into the Google Authenticator, either scan the QR there or have it sent over from an external QR scanner, and it responds with the “Secret saved” popup.
So far so well, now the number generated on the main screen givekitten-digit numbers for GW2, but, those codes don’t work for Google Accounts any more, ofc. Luckily I have the Google QR secret code saved, so I could easily re-set it to allow me into my Google account, but the point is – I can apparently only have numbers for one of the two at a time.

I suspect if my GW2 mail address were different than my google address, it’d show me 2 codes generated (listed under seperate email addresses) in the main window?
Mail is the same though, so I only see a single number, and once I sync it to GW2, it no longer works for Google. And vice versa. :s

Anyone know how to use the Google Authenticator on Android if I also use it for my actual Google Account? I can’t install the same app twice, and I need it to generate codes for Google, too.

Hrm, immunity to snares might be a nice sPvP specific nerf. It already runs slightly faster, so if it were to be given immunity to Cripple/Immobilize, then players could quite effectively run away when Moad.

Next to that, could you also look into Clones of DWing Mesmers not displaying offhand weapons?

In a tournament the other day, a team ran 2 guardians and 3 mesmers. At the 4v4 teamfight at keep, 2 out of 4 of my teammates were moa’d (the guardian blocked it with his aegis) and they were focused and bursted down via shatter builds before they got out of the bird.

And after that happened you respawned, staggered your non-Moa elites, winning the rest of the 2:30 minutes until the Moa cooldown was up, hence proving that while tactically powerful Moa is absolutely useless strategically? Good.

And if you don’t understand that your sPvP isn’t as important to many out there as you make it out to be, then I don’t know what to say.

So yes, it’s too strong in sPvP. Fair enough, you got more authority on that than I do.
It’s massively too weak in WvW and PvE.

Suggestions?
It needs a substantial buff, but one which at the same time nerfs the sPvP power, right?

Oh ofc, yes.
The problem would be that the game is so young that no “solidified” player opinion exists yet.

Like in WoW, everyone by now knows that Hunter is a newbie class (this evolved out of their autoattack-only setup in Vanilla WoW), that Warriors live from overpowered burst so they are either overpowered or useless, that Paladins are untouchably annoying, that Resto Shamans are overpowered in PvP in return for usually being weak in PvE…
This all took a lot of time to evolve. Sure by now it’s worth balancing for player expectations, but GW2 is highly in flux still.

Terrant.2903:

Just keep in mind that even if 10,000 voices are wrong; when they’re the majority they’re right be virtue of being the majority.

I find this a very… let’s say… american perspective.

In their own little world, they are right, yes. Objectively speaking they’re not, unless the frame of reference is again constructed by the exact same 10000 people who are wrongly agreeing on something (and then they’re right by definition already, not wrong).

As an example, if you stand in front of an oncoming car and state “This car won’t hurt me”, you might be wrong.
If you put 10000 people in front of an oncoming crashing plane, they can all state “This plane crash won’t hurt me”, and I suspect the plane crashing doesn’t care about them being the majority by 10000 : 1 or not, sorry. :P

DW Swords? You could do with a 2H offset for ranged combat, then go 20/20/30/0/0 and focus on on-interrupt and on-clone-death traits. Since you regenerate clones hellishly fast, you can cause a lot of havoc in WvW especially – it’s np if they kill your clones after all – and in instances or smaller fights, you excel at interrupting (Sword #4, GS #5, MoD).

I agree that our current core design has the problem of heterogenous illusions being used by homogenous (1,2,3 charges, with no care what those charges entail) shatters.

One way this could be alleviated would be this:

• Remove all buffs/debuffs/damage from Clones except for Sharper Images (this is necessary for another step, and ofc would require a fair amount of rebalancing with regards to some weapons.
• Categorize Phantasms into Ranged, Melee (Swordsman, Zerger, Mariner, Warden) and Utility (Defender, Disenchanter) types.
• Change Shatters to be a type of shatter-mechanic, not a payload. F1 is single target enemy, F2 is AE enemy, F3 is single target friendly, F4 is selfdefence and ofc happens instantly.
• Then, give each type of payload (Clone / Ranged Phantasm / Melee Phantasm / Utility Phantasm) a specific effect it adds to the shatter. These can be the same for multiple of the payloads.

Ideas:

Clone
Single Attack: Damage
AE Attack: Damage, less than the above ofc.
Single Friendly: Random Boon.
Defensive: 1s Distortion.

Ranged Phantasm
Single Attack: 3 stacks of Vulnerability + Shatter becomes a ranged attack.
AE Attack: 2 stacks of Vulnerability. Shatter again becomes a ranged attack.
Single Friendly: 1 stack of Fury + Shatter becomes ranged.
Defensive: 1 stack of Retaliation + 1 stack of Fury.

Melee Phantasm
Single Attack: 3 stacks of Vulnerability + 1 stack of Bleeding.
AE Attack: 2 stacks of Vulnerability + Burning.
Single Friendly: 1 stack of Regeneration.
Defensive: 1 stack of Regeneration + 1 stack of Protection.

Utility Phantasm
Single Attack: Causes 1 stack of Confusion + 2 stacks of Weakness.
AE Attack: Causes 1 stack of Confusion.
Single Friendly: Heals the target.
Defensive: 1s Reflection.

These would add up according to what you send away.
In other words, have 1 Clone + a Berserker + a Defender, then press F2:

• some Damage
• 2 stacks of Vulnerability
• Burning
• 1 stack of Confusion

To all enemies in the target area, however the illusions still have to run there (no ranged Phantasm in the mix).

What Dastion says is important, btw.

If you spec +1 stealth duration, you’ll also never see a “6s” in the Stealth from Mass Invis.
However I took a stopwatch and timed my various stealth skills with and without the trait, and yes, it works perfectly. And in fact yes, you see “0s” for quite a while on the buff, 0,99…s to be precise. Likewise you won’t see “5s” on the buff without the trait.

I can stopwatch CoF if that makes it more believable?

No, don’t bother. Just use the Warrior.

Hrm, fair point – although then that’d work just as well against other classes, even Warriors are only 16% of players, versus the other 84% of us who frankly, can’t stand them. :P

I would argue that we needed a nerf, but we need bugfixes and – more importantly IMO, actually – we need our traits sorted out. Not only are many too weak (none of our GM traits strike me as something GM worthy, in most cases the same line has much much stronger traits before, sometimes as minors), they are also horribly unsorted, few lines show much cohesion or theming.

prodigy.1023:

Don’t get it wrong I’m not new to rerolling. But I really, really liked mes gameplay. And now it’s all taken from me and I’m sad.

The molehill→mountain is amazing. I doubt even the best PR person for some crazy religious sect could write stuff as outlandishly exaggerated as you can.

Yes, our Phantasm CDs got doubled! You know what? All of them!
And Staff is now useless! Because it got kitten CD improvement on Chaos Armour, ofc! Silly me not to see that!!!
And let’s not forget the camera change! It was listed under general fixes, but this was done specifically to nerf Mesmers! We all know it!!one!eleven!1!1!!

1. Mesmers are inferior to the “top 3” at Orr DE.

?_?

Unfortunately, since there are many other class primaries and few Mesmer primaries, we were singled out for nerfing.

You really believe this? kitten
(This feels like talking to some Creationist-person, they’re just so much into their stuff you can’t even find an angle where to start.)

Oh, one thing: We’re not rare by count:
http://guildwars2viz.com/

Not only are we paired with Engineers, Necros are only minimally ahead, and except Warriors and Rangers no class is noticeably ahead. In fact, even given Warriors, Professions are fairly even – which is surprising for a game featuring “tried&true” classes like Warriors and Rangers.

Small CD increase = kill.

And you wonder why the devs never listen to you. :P

Not at all. Clones cause Bleeds on crit, Torch can cause Burning and the Phantasm uses Condition Damage (granted, this one needs a serious buff), Staff uses Condition Damage so it is the immediately obvious side weapon, Scepter spams clones fast to use more Shatters causing extra Confusion with.
And you can trait for random AE conditions on clone death, which includes Bleeding which scales from Condition Damage.

Mass Invis is so/so.
It has it’s moment (partially due to it’s short CD) where it really shines.
Most of the time it’s meh as a result of the 5-target-limit, however. This prevents the most immediately obvious (and potentially most overpowered) use of momentarily stealthing an entire WvW raid.

Moa Morph makes a won 1v1 fight a securely won one.
It’s greatest use is temporarily turning a 1v2 into a ~1v1, if you then have all your other times up and run a glass-cannon burst build, you can try remove one player, then kill the other.
It’s mostly for sPvP, especially tPvP. Anything larger than 5v5 it tends to lose ~all it’s value, since while it kills a single player, that single player is a drop in the bucket in 100+ player WvW.

Time Warp is… yes, strong. I’d argue it’s the strongest of our Elites since it’s so universal. PvE, it rocks. WvW it rocks, even sPvP, it rocks.
Unlike Moa and MI, it’s never wrong to bring it. The biggest problem of those two, how marginal their use case is, doesn’t exist for Time Warp.
Sure, it has a 5 target at a time limit. But that’s a lot, and it can swap between pulses, giving minimal overlap. And it’s a combo field!

Still can’t see that being a monetary gain. Expansions you can still sell even if the playerbase no longer truly plays actively (see WoW :P ), and the lower player numbers mean you save on hardware.

Ofc, I don’t know their gem shop income. You’re right, it could be the server cost is lower than the income per player, averaged out.

Amber Malachite.2179:

However – the Sylvari are grown – they don’t procreate, so I can see a more unisex outfit for them, but they have the full range of female clothing. (Personally, I can see the Sylvari not having a gender, but that’s just me)

For the Sylvari this is genuinely explained though because the Pale Tree designed them to be like the Humans it encountered. They had two different physiques, so she reflected both.
They don’t actually have a gender in the sense that they feel male or female though. They have the physique, but for them it ends there (there’s some NPC discussions in the newbie zone especially, plus they develop love gender-neutral as a result).

Hrm, I would argue that a game like GW2 has no motivating to intentionally unbalance things to keep you rerolling, Lianna.
In fact, given the lack of monthly income they would need to act exactly opposite for maximum profit:

1. Balance stuff quickitteno an “acceptable” state.
2. Never touch balance again.
3. Game turns stale as a result of lack of flux and hence lack of rerolling.
4. People quit.
5. Less server hardware cost (no monthly payment, so the less people online, the cheaper).

I think our skills are – except the thematically nonfitting Moa Morph – a good selection. Many individual ones need low~medium work, but then so do many skills of most other classes.

Our traits are a quite unique mess, OTOH. Our lines show a vague hint of theme in some cases (Inspiration, Illusions, Chaos), and none in others (Domination, Dueling). Independent of that the actual traits are all over the place, and don’t establish a “skill theme” to go with the spec line.

This is different to other classes like say, Elementalist or Ranger, where each line very clearly focuses on a specific “aspect” of being class X, and then enhances it and adds that theme to other abilities. Example given, the healing effects of an Elementalist Water spec extend to more than pure water mode spam.

We lack this theming, hence our seemingly random builds and lack of diversity.

WvW is absolutely amazing. There’s so many viable builds, and they’re all a ton of fun to play \o/

I agree with Mephisto here, if you’re taking 30+ seconds to kill a mob then that’s not a balance issue. That’s you. At least pick a class suited for low-reaction play, there’s inherently nothing wrong with that (e.g.: in TF2, you can play Engineer, Medic, Pyro or Heavy if you’re aiming is no good, and be an extremely viable party member – if your reactions are bad, you can play Engineer or Spy and contribute a lot). Just don’t try to play a class which just simply doesn’t work out for you, there’s no shame in admitting that.

Problem really comes down to:
You’re noticing “This doesn’t work”. You then from there extrapolate “What’s wrong with it?!”.
Correct question is: “What’s wrong with me?”

The initial levels can be meh, since you lack the traits to really come into power.
Once you are there, Mesmer really rocks. Instances are helped greatly because we can interrupt so incredibly much (plus Feedback – Feeeeeedback).

I have yet to feel that another Caster-class can contribute more than I can in a dungeon – Necros in condition-spam excepted, but then that’s fairly marginalized.