Guild Wars 2

OriOri.8724:

Couldn’t you tell? Its role is to give us the DPS role we’ve been wanting forever /s

Well, indirectly they did. Assuming you have a Warrior, the Spellbreaker provides you with quite Mesmer-y feeling combat which can still produce adequate damage if built that way.

Oh you wanted Mesmer to get a damage spec? Silly you, we got Chronomancers, we provide Quickness and Alacrity and re-share Resistance. What else could you ever want?

Oh a sensible approach to raid buffs/debuffs like an, I don’t know, any other MMORPG? Realistic buffer/debuffer design like DAoC had it? Silly you, we’ll get that with the fifth elite spec in 2023!

(/s of course, in case anyone is confused – I mean, I never expected Mirage to be a damage spec, but even for a dueling centric PvP spec it’s just lame as it is now )

marelooke.9708:

(I mean, I do hope most people figured out that the White Mantle was trying to revive Lazarus, which is all I’ve gleamed from the raid story so far.)

And even that is a stretch the player has to half fill in themselves, because all it amounts to in the raid are one voiced line and two text lines (or something like that).

It’s really entirely unlike WoW, so the OP doesn’t have to worry.

I really wish Phantasms would become a fourth slot of illusion, where you have a single Phantasm in. It ignores shatter commands, however it will disappear when the enemy dies, unless you use a retarget skill (by casting the summon skill again, which also causes it to immediately fire its attack assuming the target was actually swapped).

In return, each Phantasm would need significant buffs ofc (since there’s only a single one now), but that’d be an additional benefit IMO: Less paper-power skills.

There’s very little if any story to the raids, 90%+ you have to add yourself in your head. There’s a bunch of bosses, each with a small amount of context and setting, plus a tiny bit of setting for each wing.

A story mode would be rather useless, IMO. As a result of that. There’s nothing a small block of text cannot explain in a much more concise manner, there’s really not much text needed at all.

Exciton.8942:

The clunky mirror mechanic will require more thoughts. This is probably the most gimmicky and clunky feature of all elite specs.

And they could be really strong, assuming we kept generating them somehow. Say the shatter to mirror was passive, and all Deception skills generated them.

No I did understand it, but the specific content you mention factually never existed. It just felt amazing because it was all new and fresh. The veneer of “your choice matters” was enough at the time, we were all amazed by how amazing the game was.

Nowadays we have less actual choice, but much better systems, but it’s all a wash.

Andaras.9317:

Toughness needs to reduce condition damage as well. There are far too few ways of effectively reducing condition damage

Umm… cleanses? Blocks? Evasion?

I mean, the only difference between direct damage and damage over time in regards to defense is:

Direct damage can be reduced by toughness <→ DoTs can be cleansed

That’s it.

Generally speaking, no.

It rarely happens that a new expansion fully reinvigorates the “new game world”-feeling of starting a new MMORPG. But it’s utterly rare.

By and large, once you “know” a MMORPG, it’s a long-term video game time filler, meaning you’ll analyze it, you optimize it, you abstract from it.

Yeah, I’d also rather want them to rebalance Focus. We have plenty offhands, no reason to add more.

Toeofdoom.6152:

I am curious – people seem to see this spec as very clone dependent… Can’t you just drop infinite horizon and focus on boosting your own ambush?

Not realistically. Even with Scepter, your own Ambush by itself is so weak that I wish it wouldn’t override the autoattack.

Because while it is minimally stronger, it’s so little so that it just doesn’t matter. There’s 0 gameplay difference. You happen to do a tiny bit stronger an autoattack automatically when you dodge.

Eversor.5186:

held back , cause on release it was God mode, and yea energy cost on f’s is stupid I barely used them in pvp

Well, in PvP. Frankly I suspect all 25 remaining sPvP players would be very upset if balance would ignore that game mode :P

I think at the very least, it’d need:

• ~100% more duration on the Mirrors.
• 20% (Scepter) to 200% (Greatsword) more damage on the ambushes.
• Infinite Horizon baseline.

Optionally, but quite necessary, something like this needs to happen:

• F1 and F2 removed for Mirage.
• Those two buttons now summon clones of the current weapon, one a single one on a short CD, the other three on a longer CD.
• F3 and F4 no longer shatter illusions, but in turn also only have the single self-shatter effect.

Boogiepop Void.6473:

This is legitimately bad. It takes what might have been a good change to the system and does just about everything possible to make it bad and useless.

Hrm, I don’t know. I mean I am fairly disappointed with the specific implementation, but I still think it’s by and large a good change.

What I’m getting now: ~75% of the trash drops I would get are now stackable, and can be readily salvaged from that stack.

What I’d prefer to get:

• One stack of unidentified gear per rarity.
• All item drops dropped that way, maybe except Precursors/Exotics/Ascended.
• Otherwise same as now, can identify to play the roulette wheel, or just salvage it for convenience and ease of clearing inventory.

But to be fair, other than not being split by rarity, and ofc that trash drops still exist, I don’t truly have a big problem with it. It certainly helps clear the inventory clutter a lot already.

Refia Montes.3205:

Fix Mantras and make it a Mantra, makes it much better.

You mean make them single charge and actually be worth that one charge again?

GS Ambush just needs a lot of extra damage.

Why is it that other than Scepter, our ambush attacks are generally not much noteworthy compared to the AA they replace, in any case? I mean, ambush! Shouldn’t this slice enemies open? Blow their mind? (literally) Cut them to pieces? Tear them asunder?

Instead it’s this pansy “oh I got hit again” move.

Best I could think of is that they realized during development what a terrible mistake Grace of the Land already was, and didn’t want to repeat it.

Esplen.3940:

The inverse of this is that Alacrity should affect Initiative and Energy Regen.

Of course. It’s bad that it doesn’t. But then, GW2’s combat is so much too spammy that I sometimes think it just all doesn’t matter. Skills are individually paper. And have to be.

What I don’t get is… why not just send 3 bleed-proccing Pistol Phantasms after your target?

Easier to spawn (Chrono and all), more versatile, last, don’t eat dodges and hey, they deal direct damage, too. 15 stacks of bleeding every 5 seconds, plus all the direct damage, plus you’re free to do other things like apply more conditions, CC targets or survive. For extra burst, time a shatter well.

FaboBabo.3581:

And again ; Dont fool me with saying chrono does the same condis / even more Condis then Mirrage.

Mirrage condis LAUGHS about Chrono Condis.

On a target dummy, sure. Try getting those clones to attack anything in real gameplay and you’ll be lucky to get one clone to do what you want, nevermind 2 or 3.

FaboBabo.3581:

Mirrage is selfish and thats a good Thing. If u wanna be a supporter olay chrono and get over it.

You can hardly call it “selfish” if it doesn’t do much more than a Chrono does while also supporting the party.

That’s an overall game problem, even. In an effort to find a use case for >400 skills, the devs had to make lots of skills super-marginal.

Since GW2 also has a limited hot bar, skills can’t be “padded out” with fluff skills such as Ghost Wolf or Astral Recall or raid-cooldowns such as Spirit Link Totem. Skill types which work in WoW to bring the number of usable skills up. Having 10+ super nichey skills isn’t a problem there, you got endless hotbar space.

In GW2, is niche skills such as Time Warp stood against mainstay skills, then obviously no one would take the niche skills, probably not even in the niche scenario (too high of an opportunity cost). So everything was to be narrow, niche, and frankly… weak.

This is also what in turn gave rise to the “spammy” gameplay. Since skills are so weak, anything which is spammable is thrown at you ad absurdum. And gameplay is balanced to take that into account, so that each autoattack barely tickles and each individual stack of bleeding is forgettable.

Can’t really see this change without a step up to GW3 or something, though. Too big of a rework to “fix”. If it’s even something to be fixed, since there’s a healthy dose of personal preference in it, too.

I’d make the F-skills the way to do ambush attacks. Four skills which spawn Mirage Mirrors (instead of having them spawn from some utilities), in different ways.

Refia Montes.3205:

They could always rework Phantasms to stay like Necro minions but I guess that would be too OP.

A thief might die! In PvP! That’s heresy!

If I had to list just the important points:

• Problematic class bar mechanic. Shatter runs opposed to other class concepts, and even as a “sacrifice your other class mechanics for burst”, this only truly works for F4 and very rarely F3 because those are individually strong enough. The rest is only good as part of a slew of spammed abilities.
• Phantasms vs Clones is just a broken design. My favorite solution where would be to make Phantasms be only 1 at a time, a fourth illusion which is separate and ignores shatter commands.
• Too much reliance on a plethora of weird interactions and meshes of partially broken design. Example: SoI, Mantras, Moa, all reflect skills vs projectiles which aren’t reflectable, did I mention Mantras yet?
• Mantras. They deserve their own mention. They were unbalanced but interesting at a single charge, ever since the multi charge thing they’re just inferior “normal” skills.
• Weapons lack oompf to make up for our Phantasm DPS. See above with the idea for them.

Hot Boy.7138:

Mirage is not the solution

I’d go one further:
If Mirage is the solution, I want my problem back please.

As said by others, the important part which might reach the devs is the volume. If page upon page upon page of the forums is all just “Why does the Mirage have no clear concept, no cohesive design and no use case?”, then they might get notified by a community manager that something is making the community angry.

A single thread, even with lots of pages? Easily ignored.

Well yes, it makes 0 sense for Mirage to even have the shatter buttons. Should have used it for a better mechanic instead.

And frankly the Phantasm problem needs a core mesmer solution. Phantasm as a fourth illusion, ignores shatter, only one at a time, buff them. Done.

The idea of the mirrors is great due to the dual-use of evade as both a defensive and an offensive tool. For a Mirage.

However, there are tons of inconsistencies:

• The Ambush skills are (overall) just weak, making the dual-use doubtful.
• Among the ambush skills, there is 1 good, 1 useful and the rest I wish I could disable so I get another auto-attack in.
• Not all deception skills spawn mirrors, making me wonder why they are a skill category if they have no common element.

Far as I can tell all that’d be required is that optionally “Mounts use a fixed camera POV”, right?

Where the camera is locked against a specific point in the center of the ground circle of the mount’kittenbox? Which, as far as I can tell, doesn’t sway with its animations?

Mesmers have been saying for 5 years that Mantras need urgent fixes, never happened. I wouldn’t get your hopes up

Oh, I was going to say the two things are going to be “The scourge’s main mechanic” and “The deadeye’s weapon”. :P

But yeah, remove infinite horizon, substantially improve Ambush skills, and IMO remove the shatter buttons and replace them with the deception skills.

As with the mounts, the animations are gorgeous.

I only got to try Mirage and Holosmith, and for Mirage I feel there’s no cohesive design. The utility skills have no connecting elements which would mark them as a type of skill (not even in their visuals), and overall the spec seemed clunky, with still featuring Phantasms and Shatter skills yet requiring me to use a GM trait and clones to actually deal damage to someone.

rdfaye.4368:

Before everybody gets mad at Anet, perhaps they are looking at solutions and just don’t have something ready at this point. Anet will not make any statement unless they have an answer, one way or the other.

Personally, I LOVE the mounts as they are, and I was very against them before the demo. The camera seems to be a large part of the issue—perhaps a toggle to “Use standard camera when mounted” would work.

That’s my problem here, I understand people want this issue resolved, but if they in any way touch the animations, that’d be a reconsider-my-purchase thing for me. Those animations made me pre-order. They’re that slick and detailed.

That’s actually a part I like. I dislike the overfocus on universally available run speed, as it makes it too expected and too much of an arms race.

Thing to note: During the weekend, reflects on deadeye skills were buggy and frequently you’d fail to reflect them.

On the other hand, revealing the Deadeye does nothing, as they have counter-counter-stealth as their elite.

I just hope they don’t change the animations. Make an option for a camera which only loosely tracks the character/mount (as in, the animation does not move the camera at all), but make it optional and keep the animations exactly the same.

Because frankly if those change, that’s as kitten ing to the expansion as the removal of the amazing shield / well /overload artwork back with HoT was. Don’t ruin the gorgeous work of the animators with half-baked fixes, basically.

Yeah well, no. If anything I feel convinced I’ll just stick to Chrono or base Mesmer, because they are much more well thought out and play better than Mirage did.

If I wanted what Mirage provides now, I’d play Scrapper in PvE. Similarly broken setup.

Ryouzanpaku.1273:

Why bring another condi spec and on the top make it weaker in most of the cases is chrono?

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but yeah. From the lack of a cohesive theme or a lack of cohesive skill design (the type “Deception” has no common element like the wells or signets or so have) over the lack of a unique functionality (mirage cloak is a weaker dodge, which would make sense if it wanted to make up for something like strong ambush skills, but those don’t exist), Mirage feels like it was done by someone who is insanely scared of PvP as a whole.

And hence made every number 40%-50% of what it actually should have been.

Frankly I feel this problem exists since the core Mesmer.

And as such, should be fixed there, too.

What I would do:

• Phantasms ignore shatter commands.
• A Phantasm counts as a “fourth” illusion, you can only have one at a time.
• Rebalance phantasm numbers accordingly.
• Using the same skill on an already-spawned Phantasms (say, casting Phantasmal Duelist while there’s one up already) will make that phantasm re-target and set it’s remaining attack CD to 0 (fires again immediately).
• Signet of the Ether also causes the next phantasm cast after use to be invulnerable for 14 seconds in addition to its current effects.

Honestly the 25% lost runspeed is bad now, but once we have the mounts then out of combat runspeed no longer matters and in-combat superspeed is better anyhow.

Menaka.5092:

As for small scale roaming, it can do some funny stuff, but we already had several good roaming builds for both Mesmer and Chronomancer, so it doesn’t add anything of value there either.

I think that’s actually the best way to summarize the failure of this spec: It tries to (badly) solve a problem which doesn’t actually exist!

General change
Picking up a Mirage Mirror spawns a clone.

False Oasis
Increase the radius of the oasis to 450 (so 900 total diameter). Then, when it ends and the Mesmer is still inside that radius, spawn the mirror at the mesmer instead of in the middle.

Crystal Sands
It’s a bit clunky. I mean it’s the best utility skill, but still weak. I think it’d be fine if it were just 50% more projectiles or something.

Illusionary Ambush
Now fills up to 3 illusions via clones before teleporting, but the extras have a limited lifetime of 5 seconds.. Also leaves a Mirage Mirror where you started.

Mirage Advance
Remove the cast time. Reduce the CD to 20s. Make it leave a Mirage Mirror where you started.

Sand Through Glass
Spawns 3 Mirage Mirrors during the roll backwards, not just one.

Jaunt
Leaves behind a Mirage Mirror each teleport.

In other words, this spec would barrage you with evades and clones. Constantly. No exceptions. It’d give it a theme, which it is sorely missing right now. That’s right, IMO the big problem especially in regards to the skills is that there is no theme.

takatsu.9416:

Another question though what exactly is the elite skill for, aside than the ridiculously short range issue? how exactly does that even synergize with the whole mirage core system? Chrono’s elite skill was a well, a darn nice one.

This is what I mean. Can you tell me the common factor what makes our “Deception” skills a shared skill type? Because I sure as hell cannot :P

I’d at least give them all Mirage Mirror production. That’s something at least.

Axe AA chain
The sound from the traited axes is annoying. Should just be sound-less, IMO. You can still clearly see them.

Axe 2
Way too long a wind-up. There shouldn’t be a delay until the spin attack starts. Also, give it 1/4~1/2s evade, right now there’s a good chance to be dead at the end of the animation.

Axe 3
It should fill up all empty clone slots with axe clones after the teleport and attack. Axe has way too little clone generation as it is.

Ambush skills – Scepter
Increase damage by 200%, remove Infinite Horizon interaction.

Ambush skills – all other
Increase damage by 500%-1000%, remove Infinite Horizon interaction.

I can’t see a use for the spec, considering that all its power is bound in multi-ambush-attacks with clones, and those last at best a single frame in WvW combat and cannot be used near walls.

“But Cari! But Cari! What about roaming?”.. well, I had roaming specs before. Not very ‘elite’, this spec. All it might do is minimally change my trait selection when roaming, and change nothing about my gameplay.

Infinite Horizon
This is a weird band-aid. Assuming 3 clones are up, this makes ambush attacks not hit like a wet noodle.

But, why do they hit for nothing at all to begin with? And why can clones deal damage with them.

Proposal

• Remove Infinite Horizon.
• Remove damage/conditions from clone ambush attacks. They still do them, for looks only.
• Increase ambush damage significantly, from ~3x-4x on the Scepter to 7x-8x on the Greatsword. These attacks hit for ~nothing right now, and seem clearly balanced to strike the enemy 4 times at once.

I think at the very least we’d need something like this:

• All your illusions will now do the ambush, no matter their weapon / type.
• Ambush skills made substantially stronger.

That way it’s a burst high-DPS spec which has a very fragile damage vector because the illusions can trivially be killed. But once they’re up, Mirages could quickly kill a target.

My big worry in regards to damage performance is the contradiction between:

• Clones with Infinite Horizon doing ambush attacks with us. This was sort-of hinted at to be the main “meat” of the spec.
• Phantasms not doing ambush attacks with us, even with Infinite Horizon.
• Shatter working against the rest of our class mechanics, even though this isn’t anything new.

I feel for the Mirage, at the very least we’d need something like Infinite Horizon baseline and every third AA generating a clone with all weapons to be a viable DPS spec.

EvilSardine.9635:

You’re going to get the same responses since the game came out. The PvE players are frightened and literally shake at the thought of having someone send them a duel request.

Ummm… rather, why wouldn’t I just want people to duel? I mean the functionality is in the game for a long time now? I don’t get this thread…

Hrm, neat idea, though I’d do it differently:

Arcane Thievery (45s CD)
Applies Arcane Thievery to yourself for 15 seconds. Every time a condition would be applied to you during that time, it will be delayed by 3 seconds. If you strike an enemy during this team and they have a boon, you will steal that boon and apply the condition to them instead.
Boon stolen per attack: 1
_ Conditions transferred per attack:_ 1

(note that it only delays the conditions, and can only transfer 1 off per attack, hence the long duration)

I agree, every mirror should result in a clone! :o