Guild Wars 2

I think you’ve asked a very interesting question here about both simplification AND balance. Does one really imply the other or otherwise? Is it understanding of a profession as some people believe or some other problems such as User Interface or merely tooltips or even tutorials that should be in the game and are not? All good questions spurned by stating a need for simplification.

I personally don’t think that simplifying the profession would hurt nearly as much as some others might believe, but neither do I think it would really help with the issues people have with Mesmer. In my opinion the easiest solution to make would be to have Shatters instead cause the Illusions up to use an ability with a 1 sec cast time (to allow enemies to time a dodge so it is roughly the same as it is) for the damage ones and .25 cast for Daze (with a small travel time bolt effect, so it too could be dodged if timed well) while remaining instant for Distortion instead of actually destroying the illusions. There are many issues solved by such a change, first the shatter glitch goes away since they aren’t destroyed and can’t be counted twice since you can’t have more than 3 up (they don’t run in to die then so having more than 3 up just wouldn’t happen), and certain traits which are really strong now become a little less strong as well. Deceptive Evasion becomes a little less powerful and encourages an entirely different style of play, Phantasms get stronger by simply not being destroyed, forcing the opponent to destroy them instead, clone death traits get stronger, etc. Things get weaker as well though, psychological warfare for instance, can’t make the enemy afraid of 10 million clones running at them anymore (it’s really only up to about 8 or 9 max using every possible trick and them running away).

It’s at least an approach to fixing the issues, even we don’t like it all, myself included hell I don’t even really like MY idea, but at least it’s an idea and not just a QQ thread or anything like that.

Further, a toggle to turn the feature on and off would be most beneficial, just a keybind toggle would be fine even so it’s not an actual option in the options interface.

Thanks wads, that’s what I thought, glad to hear I’m not crazy.

edit: Crazier*

Xavi I’m saying I’ve never seen the creation dodged ever, and I was googling for everything I could think of for Phantasm creation dodged, dodging phantasms etc, I think it’s a myth at this point.

o.0 I find this interesting, I’ve never had a Phantasmal Berserker’s creation dodged, ever. I think the wording of the patch that made them not summon on invulnerability made many people think that included Evade status (which acts similar to Invulnerability, but it is not the same, it gives the evaded text and not invulnerable text). I mean it, NEVER gotten it evaded before, blinded yes, invulnerable from an ability yes, dodged never happened.

If someone could link me a video of it happening maybe if we can show it can be repeated perhaps then we can learn it’s strengths and weaknesses.

Ryuujin.8236:

Portal
Used to have no limit and 60 second cooldown, now 90 second/5 person limit because of it’s usefulness in sPvP for area control and for moving zergs in WvW.

Portal isn’t limited to 5, it’s 20 down from unlimited, directly in the Patch Notes from Dec 14th and it hasn’t been adjusted since then. Also, it’s number of uses, so it could actually be less if someone ports away with it and then back. Lastly, we had hoped it would be reduced to 5 and it’s cooldown returned or reduced even further, but we know now that won’t change probably, which is unfortunate sadly. . . A different take on the change would be to set up the portal and when the mesmer that made it used it everyone in 600 range of the Mesmer was ported to the other location. (a totally new take on Portal bombing would be to port people from their zerg into yours! muahahahahahahahhaahah)

Necro skills like that don’t belong in this forum. . . there is a whole forum for Necromancers.

KIDDING! Okay, but seriously though, Mesmer receives nerfs each patch pretty much (even if they don’t touch any other professions). That said they STILL feel like they are in a fine spot, and I honestly expect that IF they ever fix the bugs for the professions traits and abilities coupled with fixing bugs that make too much damage happen then the profession will be seen for what it truly is and receive buffs in PvE.

Why is everyone so down on the Mesmer forums today? At any rate, I actually DO have a great time in WvW, whether I’m yanking people off of walls in a siege with my always on focus, or throwing Wardens into the Gate, or destroying Cannons on the walls with Chaos Storm, it’s always a good time. Most the time I actually enjoy being more helpful by distracting 10 to 15 enemies at a time by taking their camps by myself or with a small group. I don’t know what to tell ya Levetty.1279, it sounds like maybe you aren’t in touch with your inner Mesmer. You should try stroking that to life sometime, it gets big and you find yourself happier as you play to have fun rather than just get awesome loots.

/yawn

Thread devolving into Time Warp OP line, suffice it to say, Time Warp isn’t OP, burst damage being so front loaded is OP. Drop Warp and Combo in 2 sec WIN! This isn’t good, but once again, not the TW to blame. . . burst damage that requires no ramp up is the blame. Once you set up a ramp up time on burst that is more than 3 seconds you start getting fights that last 10 to 20 seconds on average. Good players will beat lesser players and great players will still own. . . but at least it’ll be fun to feel like you have a chance for the first 5 to 10 seconds!

At any rate, next ability on the nerfing block should totally be Blurred Frenzy if they really give in to people’s complaints. I’d hate to see it nerfed personally, because I use it so much (remove the auto facing would be fine with me though), but it’s highly likely it’d be the next thing they would hit. That and probably. . . Mind Wrack damage (because people still QQ’ing about the bug that the little .25 sec CD doesn’t really fix).

juno.1840:

Consider that the guardian staff has a lot of other good uses compared to the mesmer focus, and I’d say the Guardian is better than us for swiftness.

This is such a false statement though, Guardian staff isn’t bad. . . but I’d much rather have Sword/Focus on Mesmer > Guardian staff any day. The Focus is such a versatile offhand that having played with it for a few weeks now and really tried it I would definitely rate it over just about any other weapon you can have on a Mesmer, even without traiting for it. A pull effect on a 25 sec CD is lower than what most other professions get for knockback effects coupled with a built in combo to remove conditions on it with Warden + Curtain. Warden is so useful for area denial and repositioning when setting up burst or just pulling them into the Warden locking ’em in place with Sword 3 and then BF their face! Guardian Staff feels lackluster and clunky with slow animations (except auto attack) and weak support.

Now about handling being slow. . . easiest solution I came up with was to drop 30 points in Chaos for Prismatic Understanding and Boon Duration, run Focus all the time and have Blink on my bar. I pretty much never fall behind a zerg, I can catch just about anything that is still in combat running away (sometimes a thief will get away, most times I catch ‘em, same for Eles). I have 15.5 sec out of every 25 sec of swiftness from Focus (62% Swiftness Uptime) and can blink between every other Curtain as needed to catch up, and often pick up a swiftness buff from someone else. Never bothers me in WvW. I run a slightly wonky build I know, but I have great results thus far so I’m not too concerned.

Thanks for the inspiration, tried Mantras again since I had put them down ages back, it’s quite fun. After a few games I realized that I could use Mender’s Purity + Temporal Curtain and Warden for my cleanse effects and didn’t need to run a full suite of Mantras freeing spots for Decoy and Blink for added mobility and deception, all the power of Mantra healing coupled with all the power of the Harmonious Mantras. Runes of Lyssa helped keep my Crit chances high while giving me the final piece of mass Condition Removal and buff to setup a nice little burst when needed.

I started the game playing Mantras and ran a full suite, but it’s really not needed from what I’ve been able to see. Keep the full on Mesmer playstyle and have your mantras too, stealth gives you time to reset the Mantras without interruption making you not need the Mantra Armor trait and you can then utilize Focus for pulling people off points in PvP or for movement in WvW, also to set up burst and to AoE cleanse if they are Necros, focus gives you access to Retaliation if you choose to build more defensive.

Thanks for posting the build, it gave me some really useful ideas.

I actually run with a stealth oriented build myself. You can’t attack. . . but you can use Temporal Curtain/Into the Void to yank people off point with every other stealth you do use. The trait also has a good amount of synergy with the rest of the trait line, and you don’t need to run torch at all, it’s good with only 3 stealth effects. Runes of Lyssa let you get rid of Conditions and you still have one spot for Null Field, anytime you aren’t in stealth can be filled with time getting Chaos Armor while getting in a hit or two here or there. Knocking you off point can be tricky as you have Sword to put you right back on point (granted you need to guess when they would be most likely to use their knockback). Like I said I run Focus to pull them off point and keep them from capping, I use the build to offensively neutralize points and then keep the enemy team busy there for a long time not taking the point but not letting them get it either.

sPvP gives you a ton of good information about lifestealing builds and such. . . For instance, I threw the Sigils of Blood on with a Rampagers Amulet (a little extra vitality couldn’t hurt) with a slightly modified version of my usual build, 0/30/30/5/5 just to see how annoying free healing over time with stealths while it’s heal proc is on CD coupled with Protection from many sources and Chaos Armor works out with Condition damage and clones exploding.

I’m going to say that I should have been doing this all along. The loss of energy sigils to dodge roll more doesn’t really affect this build at all since you’ll be using almost every stealth option outside of torch (Focus or Pistol is just better for displacing people or stunning them). I personally run with Focus and am hooked on the extra 30 sec CD condition removal (Warden+Curtain), along with all the other utility you gain from Focus.

I am tempted to say you could pretty much run lifesteal on any build of Mesmer without negative consequence if you can live without the extra clones on dodge that energy sigils provide (I don’t have them anyhow for WvW so I might throw these or Leeching Sigils on my WvW build). Swapping Leeching or Blood Sigils as needed to get the desired effect, Leeching may actually be better for my build since it’s less reliant on actually getting in there to hit. Keep in mind that the Sigils of Blood appear to be glitched and don’t proc every 2 seconds but instead every 5, so roughly they are the same as Sigils of Leeching with proc on weapon swap. Healing from Sigils of Blood is about half that of Leeching, and procs about 2 times every 10 seconds provided you have uptime on the target.

I was running Staff, Sword/Focus for this build with Runes of Lyssa (both for condition removal since I run Mass Invis and for the Precision for Crit chance). Traits were Deceptive Evasion, Fury on Interrupt (great with Chaos Storm), Sword CDR, Staff CDR, Prismatic Understanding, Debilitating Dissipation, and passive traits for hurting enemies when they kill my few phantasms and Illusionists Celerity.

I build to troll people out of their game, and force them into a mode of playing which they are not familiar. This coupled with attrition play style and displacement often will lead you to be able to counter just about anything 1v1 and allow you to stall and toy with people 1vX for quite some time, maybe make them make mistakes and actually beat them both.

I love the idea, though I have built it much differently it definitely has the ability to work. In PvP it doesn’t work quite as well since you don’t have food and such to power out the extra lifesteal but it was still good when I tried it a long time ago, though admittedly there were better alternatives for PvP purposes. I wasn’t lvl 80 at the time when playing with the idea and have since been sidetracked by many other builds and never got back to it for WvW.

If I get the money to afford a set for this I’ll definitely have to give it a try in WvW, but I’ll also test it again in sPvP.

. . . because it’s so good it has to be nerfed each patch!

Mesmer play styles are exactly the kind I like and the profession calls to that younger me when I first started playing video games; that role playing side that simply loved being the smooth talking, deceptive, confusing and intelligent character.

It’s interesting from a Mesmer’s PoV that perhaps it’s not the duration of stealth that is so much the issue, but how often it can be used. In some games I’ve played I’ve noticed that there is a delay before stealth when you use an ability that is going to make you invisible. This delay allows you to juke with the stealth while at the same time giving the opponent a chance to guess where you are going, as the stealth is right now it’s generally just instant gratification, poof! What if Cloak and Dagger gave you stealth 1 second after using it and gave you one or both of the boons you are lacking for some seconds? Using it from stealth would reveal you and put you back into stealth sometime later, failing to land it would hurt and yet you would still have the chance to hit it again?

These boons wouldn’t be contingent upon landing the ability just activating it, but since the cost of CnD is so high you couldn’t really get more than a few seconds of one of the buffs out of every 15 seconds anyhow so it probably wouldn’t be too strong. However this small bolster to CnD isn’t the only stealth, heal stealth could receive similar love from a trait in a tree, etc etc etc. Burst can be lowered slightly since you have more sustained fighting capability, procs could be added deeper in other trees to give back the burst but on long internal cooldowns or after certain thresholds are met and so on and so on.

There are many ways they could balance these issues, but I for one would like Decoy to make a clone of me after a second or two of having used the ability, that way I run one way then POOF and leave a clone a little bit after having used it with a nice animation to show that I’ve used the Decoy ability. This also forces my rotation for my burst on my Mesmer to shift to using Decoy earlier and may alert an opponent to get ready for some tricks!

Every stealth ability could give secondary effects while requiring a small build it time before it could trigger (almost every one, the non heal utilities probably should have an instant reaction since they are on long cooldowns generally speaking).

I watched the video several times, I could not say whether it’s a macro or not though, I respond pretty crazily fast to things sometimes, especially when I anticipate an attack. Gone so far as to preemptively shatter a Distortion literally a quarter of a second or less before getting jumped on by a Thief out of stealth. (he CnD’d me and I counted a couple seconds and then waited a hair longer then Shattered, right as I did a black cloud appeared behind me and he opened on me again, boy was he kitten called me a cheater and said I was hacking and could see where he was. . . o.0 just timing and a little luck)

Countless is a very good player, I’ve run into him before and so if he’s saying it is a little over the top to be stealthed that much for that long, well I would listen. That said, I too feel that stealth is a little out of control, I too play a mesmer and know that my current build would suffer for a slight nerf to stealth and yet I would STILL like them to nerf it slightly. Not so much it’s duration or breaking instantly, but instead a shimmer on me, or at least numbers popping up when I’m hit with AoE, that would be fine. To compensate they could give a small damge reduction trait while in stealth to allow for being tracked while in stealth, the effect doesn’t completely change and the visual distortion remains for larger scale fights, but doesn’t allow me to remain stealthed to just avoid being detected at all.

Balancing it isn’t as hard as it might seem, just a matter of whether it’s intended to work the way it is currently, which is that when in stealth you cannot be seen at all, nor numbers or anything else to let the opponent know where you “might” be at. (you can still see you’ve been hit while in stealth and dodge roll to avoid them hitting you with their next AoE, juking and still remaining in stealth at that point) Juking isn’t rewarded in the game as much with so many target lock abilities, more skill shots, less target locked abilities. The stronger the ability the less likely it should be target locked, all stuns should be that way; knockdowns, knockbacks, pulls, immobilizes, as well. Blind and cripple are minor effects and not nearly as powerful in PvP as the above and so are fine to be target locked abilities.

TL;DR “It’s not a L2P issue here, he knows what his options are and how to beat it if he really tried, but it’s just funny and sad in it’s current form. Counterplay > L2P imo.”

The glitch does work. . . but you will almost never see it in PvP, the clones are too fragile to last the duration of the cooldown of Leap. Also if you aren’t dodge rolling around and making more clones and such you are probably going to be even more vulnerable thus making this happen in PvP extremely unlikely.

But it does work, and I managed to use it in WvW earlier, but it didn’t feel extremely useful, the duration is just so short.

More than likely they will nerf something anyhow even though it’s mostly glitches and bugs that are causing issues with the profession. While I’d love for Illusions to stick around more that is completely counter intuitive to certain traits. You don’t HAVE to build a shatter build right now, I’ve run several others happily, but right now Shatter builds are just on top because of the Mind Wrack glitch. And no, the glitch definitely isn’t fixed, hence what the glitch really is, and it’s easy to reproduce if you know how to do it, and not related to traits at all.

Finally, one more point that I think should be addressed here, good Mesmer using the clones as a confusion element doesn’t happen because NPC names can just be turned off. It’s better to assume every player is at least as good as you are, and if you wouldn’t be fooled by a clone because it doesn’t have a name over it. . . well neither would your opponent. That said I use clones from dodging when I’m stealthed to get players to waste their cooldowns, which it often does (even when it happens to me) simply because there are so many ways to lose stealth early due to random AoE damage that you’ve done.

I would ask you dirtyshame to really look at the professions and ask questions. . . and if you think about it, you’ll probably find that the reason is more simple then just a certain set of profession skills.

This is indeed an interesting glitch, and when I log in tomorrow I will check to see if I can get the glitch to repeat for me since I run with sword and sword cooldown reduction as well.

I’d take being able to turn all of them off and just move the enemy boon bar to directly below the enemy nameplate. eyes travel no further than on my enemy ftw! Likewise I’d like to be able to have my boon bar removed and placed under my characters feet, scaled so it’s not too big and alt+click any buff puts it at the bottom of the screen with a little tooltip so I know what it does (in case I see something I don’t recognize normally). This doesn’t even require a visual cue that might interfere with someone else’s graphics processing (and would allow me to turn mine down some), as this is would be a client side UI update. That said, being able to turn on or off specific visual boon indicators would be most excellent, and these updates to them that you’ve listed and shown could be quite good, vigor and retaliation don’t show up well for my eyes though.

Heh heh heh, might have just been a visual glitch, tooltips sometimes don’t update correctly until I move into another zone or reload the game.

The bug is that if you generate extra clones while the shattered clones are still en route to their target and then Mind Wrack the new clones when your clones finally connect you’ll have some very ridiculous numbers in addition to getting all your stacks of Might. The might isn’t the issue, it’s the Mind Wrack for 16 to 20k that’s people are upset about, they just blame the might because they don’t know about the bug. This is a known bug (at least among the community) but it hasn’t been fixed yet and has been around for as long as I can remember.

The major difference here however is that where it used to be only a few Mesmers doing it, now everyone is. I don’t play a Shatter build anymore because I can’t keep myself from doing it on accident and it really feels unfair to win a fight because of a glitch to me.

The +% duration to boons does work. . . at least it has for me, Swiftness from Focus is base 12 seconds and I get 15 and 1/2 when I use it. I think the tooltips update with the amount of +% duration. . . dump 30 points into Chaos line then check your durations again?

It’s been stated many times over, fix the bugs, then look at balance. Also the way burst is used currently is an issue, mostly due to the fact that it has no ramp up time, it’s just push the buttons and wham, instant gratification.

I’m reminded of several other games, where you had procs to look for when going for burst, you lined up your cooldowns with a specific proc then went at it. The proc normally involved making something that was slow much much faster, and coupled with some cooldown gave you a huge burst of damage, normally not quite enough to beat someone, but enough to put hurt on them so that if they weren’t at full life they might well die. This element doesn’t work as well here since there is no dedicated healer. . . however some sort of proc or build up until you can pop some good damage would be far preferred over this current, see opponent unload. Is it outside reason to think they could adjust the damage in such a way to allow for even MORE powerful finishing AFTER a certain stimulus has taken place?

Furthermore, is it possible for them to vary the stimuli in such a way that it’s not the same for each profession? In theory: yes. It does, however, need to be something they would want to do in the first place, which at this point they have made no hint towards heading to such sophisticated methods of winning fights whether 1v1 or 1v2 or otherwise.

A simple example might be to give thieves a build up of a secondary resource that builds when they are in combat, at a certain threshold it allows them to do double damage for 5 seconds. Having done such, you could safely reduce their damage by 30% or there about without hugely reducing their damage in PvE. (ensuring of course that the uptime of the buff should be roughly often enough to equate to the same 30% damage lost. . . some math would be needed here but simply numbers I don’t have)

Another example might be that Mesmers Shatter damage gets a huge buff every 3rd Shatter with their normal shatter damage being reduced the rest of the time, to counter balance it their shatter could come off cooldown whenever they get to 3 clones! The burst isn’t as front loaded, doesn’t come quite as often, but allows a shatter mesmer to create situations in which they could shatter 3 to 4 times in a row in quick succession to set up that Burst Shatter.

These could all be based on the flavor of the profession, Warriors could get a cooldown reset on a weapon skill of their choice after having taken so many blows (not condition damage but actual landed attacks)

It’s a rough idea, but a very little tuning could make such an idea easily possible, or these could replace passive bonuses in the trait lines, or even be optional choices there.

Even the the line effect itself isn’t bad, just that it’s connected to a bolt that moves slower then molasses out of a jar. The best way to fix it would be to make it frontal cone AoE instant, but barring that increasing the movespeed of it to Ranger Shortbow auto attack would probably be fine, though I stand by making it frontal cone AoE and reducing the daze (reason for reducing it’s duration is that it would reliably hit many targets for that short duration and interupt everything, which might seem OP if 1 sec on a 12 sec CD, but as only an interrupt for 0.5 sec or 0.25 would make it not feel very OP while performing the same function and not need a longer CD because of it)

Been playing the game since Beta weekend event 2, hooked on Mesmer, loved Shatter before people believed it was good, now it’s too good because of a glitch. The glitch is in the burst damage, which I believe will be resolved soon enough, but it started to make me wonder about burst damage in general.

A hotly debated topic in PvP is whether burst damage of a players entire life total is fair at all. . . many players, myself included believe it is not. It real issue isn’t with the amount of the damage, as I have said many times before, but instead because of when that damage is applied.

The suggestion here is to restructure when that damage is applied. Currently it is generally applied right at the start of a fight by popping a few cooldowns running in and blowing someone up, or putting them low enough on life that they are out of the fight. A few examples where this could be done:

Thief Backstab combo, damage applied higher the longer the player is in combat.

Warrior 100 Blades, damage starts off lower and gets stronger the longer it’s channeled, delink it’s self immobilization, add follow up ability skips to last hit which is itself scaled to number of times you’ve hit (does 10% extra damage for each hit landed).

Mesmer Mind Wrack, bug fixed damage scaling reversed (getting 3 clones up should be a reward not a penalty, probably fixes the bug anyhow) with base damage reduced by about 30% then given back by making it scaled by 3% per condition on the target.

There are tons of ways that can make applying the damage less front loaded than it currently is, and opens the door for much more counterplay, which encourages players to play with strategies and tactics, as opposed to being instantly downed and not getting a chance to even try anything at all.

A good player will wreck a weaker player anyhow even under these circumstances, but at least a weaker player will feel like they have a chance to do something. . . even if it’s to go get help.

TL;DR: Massive reduction to front loaded damage, MASSIVE increase to back loaded damage equates to good counterplay opportunities.

Dee Jay.2460:

GW2 has a balancing issue in the way it’s stats scale.

Both extremes (extreme offense and extreme defense) are highly effective while balanced builds seem to fall off in comparison.

Most MMOs employ some sort of Diminshing Returns in order to encourage people to balance their stats. GW2 does not.

It’s quite mind-boggling really when you think that certain traits and abilities can more than quadruple their output with different builds.

Mug for example, a Thief Tier 1 trait will go from dealing about 700 damage with a Condition/low Power build to critting for over 6000 with glass-cannon builds.

How can you balance a game with such extreme fluctuations within single traits?

Or the fact that there’s already an 80% difference in base HP between a Warrior and an Ele. Add armor to the mix and Warriors can take more than twice as much damage…baseline….before builds are even considered.

GW2 is the only MMO I know that doesn’t apply Diminshing Returns to Critical Strikes chances. That means you can quite easily get upwards of 80% real Crit-Chance.

Then add to the mix how certain stats like Crit-Chance and Crit-Damage, or Condition Damage and Condition Duration, or Toughness and Healing scale off of each other…(and yet some are more available than others) and you have a complete balancing disaster.

Effective builds in Gw2 focus on building around 1 particular gimmeck/strength rather than going for all-rounders.

High burst really needed in many games, but in this PvP where life totals are low, high burst is causing an issue, but really it’s not the burst, it’s the timing of the burst. If it required some build up to get that kind of burst it would be fine, because it gives you time to determine the opponents strategy and come up with a tactical response. The current strategy of coming out of stealth and detonating the opponent, or Stun/Dazy Chain into a huge 16k burst really doesn’t give the opponent a chance to do anything. Mesmer and Thief are centered currently around that huge burst with little counterplay. A Warrior has a huge amount of counterplay options available in a fight with them, and when I’m not playing Shatter-burst-damage-kitten-on-your-face-build on my Mesmer they are more often then not interesting fights, particularly when I’m playing effective stealth Mesmer, the warrior guessing where I’m at is fun times.

TL;DR: Burst should require a ramp up time that occurs DURING combat, not prior to it.

Personally I’ve thought the same on sword once before but I’m pretty sure it should have the particle effect of Guardian Staff auto and daze everyone it hits like that instead of an in line slow moving orb. Near Instant 600 range Daze. . . just for the AoE Interrupt, and so should last no more than half a second instead of it’s 1 sec duration now. That is a tuning change, and not a buff or a nerf for the most part, shorter duration, but far more reliable.

Advent.1387:

its a f1->f3 shatter bug meaning that f3 was acting as an extra mind wrack

That’s not how the bug functions. . . but regardless most of the recent Mesmer QQ is really a by product of this bug and not because the profession is horribly imbalanced.

The post about working on a fix to Mesmer burst damage being too high is hopefully in reference to the 16k shatter burst bug which I was able to replicate easily enough. If they nerf damage or anything else along with that bug it’ll be disaster for Mesmer Shatter builds. . . that said, I’m not sure I mind, not that shatter builds are that hard for me to deal with, but I’m tired of having one build that simply is a must, and you are a noob if you don’t run it. (So says the self proclaimed “pros” in these free tournaments now days)

EsLafiel.4517:

Um sorry but no, that MAYBE getting protection for 3 secs when going stealth does not cut it at all.

Maybe if we had tons of stealth skills, but includen torch we only got 4.

Well easy to see you dont to tanky builds

Actually mostly all I play is Tanky builds in PvP. Simply because Shatter is stupid and most people are too stupid to counter it and that annoys me, Tanky Builds are hard to counter, have life and do some medium damage. As I was saying though, 2 things here, first torch does proc Prismatic Understanding, just it’s duration isn’t extended by a second because that’s kind of bad. Secondly, if you have Prismatic Understanding you also already have Illusionary Membrane, which means when you pop a stealth you get either Aegis (reducing the damage taken from the next hit completely), Protection (33% damage reduction for duration) or Regeneration (Hey look it procs Illusionary Membrane and I get Protection!), look you have a 66% chance of getting protection, and if not protection then Aegis. . . but wait, all the stealths last at least 3 seconds, so it procs again at the end and another chance to get either Protection or Regeneration to proc Protection from Illusionary Membrane. I didn’t make this up, I actually play a Tanky Build, yes it’s not very useful for PvE while tanking a mob, but it’s great for solo’ing champs and being extremely handy for your team with helping them drop aggro in a dungeon via Veil or Mass Invis.

So to recap, they ‘might’ have nerfed it in because they gave yet another source of protection, and the new source ALSO procs the old source often. So yeah. . . try looking at the bigger picture here, and believe me I was as annoyed with the change as you obviously are at first, and for several days after too, but I’ve come to terms with it, this new build they’ve forced me into is infinitely more fun than the old one, far more interactive and less just get 3 phantasms out and stand around and comb my lack of hair (bald Asura).

Best thing I saw in this whole thread was making Portal usable by both teams, oh man that would a great fix, then they could reduce the CD to 30 sec so it’d be great in PvE then too!

Seriously though, let’s do that! I want to have some mind games with Portal. . . one stipulation. . . make it more skill intensive, let’s make the Portal button activate 3 times, with the third press closing both sides of the portal so we can strand the enemy team if they try to use the portal, with a 5 sec delay so it can only be used after the portal has been open a little while.

But we have Portal!

Seriously though, we were told we had some more reliable Swiftness coming in the Dec 14th patch. We got it, more reliable by being completely random, and a 2 sec buff on Focus swiftness duration. That’s as good as we’ll get on Mesmer until next month maybe, Maybe, MAYBE, but then again, maybe not.

Rampagers gear is fine here, a good amount of people will tell you otherwise but with the illusions applying bleeds on crits that extra condition damage is the same damage or more than the extra crit damage.

The issue about the nerf is that they gave us compensation. . . they put Protection in another source further into the same tree. If you are going all out on a build that is going to absorb a good amount of damage then you’ll find that dropping targeting with the stealth abilities quite strong, coupled with instant protection (almost all the time) to stave off their AoE when you do stealth is rather strong. I’ve found I like stealth just for being able to finish casting abilities and the such, and setup and plot my next move.

Actually, 5 points is exactly the problem, if it were deeper in the tree it might not be as heavily relied on, but there again I’m starting to question conventional wisdom more lately, I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth getting at all if you aren’t running a utility clone/phantasm, could the 5 points be better spent elsewhere if we are not? And what would happen if we swapped it with the 15 point trait Illusionary Retribution?. . . Would it still be mandatory or too deep for the other builds? Surely not every build would want it then especially since they would lose more to get it then gain?

Now there you go, it didn’t change with Phantasmal Strength at all. . . just with Discipline. That seems to be the bug indeed. I’ve been able to repeat the effect several times now, I thought it was just related to Phantasmal Strength and kept turning off Strength, but you are right, Discipline is the culprit. Well now that we’ve found out that it’s bad I guess we don’t run Duelist’s Discipline anymore until they fix it huh? = ))

Live servers are the best PTS ever! I think that with any change they should have someone stand in the Mist and methodically try everything to make sure it’s still working the way it was prior to the change.

So how thoroughly did you test this before posting? I have had no issues at all with it in the Mist.

I do not remember ever seeing a thread complaining about the weapon or utility swapping in tournaments, so I can’t agree with the majority here stating that massive QQ caused the change. The change happened and surprised most, if not all, of the community. Perhaps I’m not as active on these forums as others but I watch much of this and have not noticed what many of the players here have noticed, rightly so as I’m not on a team and haven’t tried to be as of yet.

I personally didn’t like the change, but neither do I think it’s unwarranted either, swapping so much each match felt like I wasn’t playing the match very fairly. Granted my opponents could change too but they’d have to know that I had changed a lot first, and because of the misinformation the correct play wasn’t available to them (since I had the advantage of them not knowing). Less is more though, the less options to change things here the more we might value the highly versatile skills and change the way we play more. Also they are more likely to be able to tune and fix the cooldowns of various abilities without having to think about whether people are going to switch back and forth between them during matches.

The game is definitely divided into two parts, with little to no overlap between the two except perhaps skill names and general cooldowns. The issue thus really is. . . does the parts that will make sPvP and tPvP truly come alive come before the majority of the players that would play PvP frequently actually leave?

I feel that they will eventually get all the parts in place, the question will really be, will it be in time to not lose players to some other PvP game? Players for PvP that are hardcore about it cry the need for PvP to sustain the game, and players for PvE that are hardcore cry the need for more content. The game really won’t be sustained by either group, though you do need them in the game, and probably the PvPers more than the PvEers. The reason for this is simply that when PvE content is done it’s simply done, when PvP content is done it can be done again and again, players will stick around to test themselves against everyone over and over again, not really so for PvE players.

I think PvP might die before it’s saved by the developers. . . but it’s fairly easy to reinvigorate it with some cash tournaments held by the developing company, so we will see.

Not really sure but I’ll check it out in the Mists later today for confirmation.

Okay, so for an update, I shifted traits around a bit for various different things slightly. I tampered with a build devoted more towards retaliation with more points in vitality eschewing DE but it was just standing there taking hits for too long. In the end I chose to run 0/25/30/10/5, picking up confusion on clone death and just rolling around nonstop and swapping weapons popping everything and then stealthing to see where I was at.

The ability to apply damage from confusion while blowing clones up and do basically the same damage as retaliation without having to take the hits is quite good. Everything from the other build stayed the same. Turns out you have enough critical chance to keep vigor almost always up, you hit relatively hard with Blurred Frenzy and other such attacks, you can take a beating then stealth and heal to full. I’m completely sold on this build now, it plays like a bunker quite often but with more escapes. Into the Void being on a 25 sec CD is really really strong right now too, it’s a shorter cooldown gtko ability than a Guardian has, so you can anti bunker with this build. You might not ever be able to win the point, but they won’t either.

The build has so many different options and ways to play. It is primarily all about when to use which cooldown and you will go really far, also the CDR on Staff really lets you keep getting Chaos Armor all the time. Give the build a try guys, see what you think.

SemmlerTh.2685:

Now, phantasms need about 5 seconds, until they attack again. With this one trait, the phantasms attacked every two seconds.

This is something many of us made mention of during beta, how we felt that the damage of the phantasms would be better served being lower and having them attack more often instead. Getting the same overall result but having more frequent processes of their utility effects, such as crippling, vulnerability, confusion, retaliation, projectile deflection, and cleansing. 2 to 3 seconds was far too short, 5 to 6 seconds felt a little too long, 3.5 to 4 seconds feels about right, so instead of a 20% reduction to the phantasm attack speeds something like 30 to 40% probably would be perfect. They don’t read this stuff though, and don’t like tipping the boat much. . . maybe this is where they are headed though by continually nerfing phantasms, so they can buff something like Haste. I would be alright with that, just wish they’d let us have some idea where they are going with it all.

Well once again I can’t understand the difference, right after the patch I was slapping a champion in PvE around for kicks and totally didn’t have an issue with them dealinkittenage or them not holding aggro, but then again I mostly create them when dodge rolling backwards with Deceptive Evasion.

Simply put, it would be way too strong. However, to everyone that thinks clones are pretty weak, try a heavy stealth build that just dumps clones everywhere to get one shot and blow up. Been running clone factory with random condition and confusion on clone death, it’s tons of fun I gotta say.

Current build is running 68% chance to crit with 19k health, Phantasmal Fury (so they have 88% crit chance), nearly 2.2k armor, and like 757 Condition Damage. It doesn’t kill fast, but it really is annoying to play against and every time they think they have you pinned down you disappear.

PU is indeed absolutely amazing now.

Definitely feels like a 30 point trait now, changes the way you play a Mesmer substantially, and makes the nerf to Illusionary Membrane totally okay in my opinion. I won’t lie that I was absolutely annoyed with that change initially.

The attack animations I can understand. . . but maybe it’s because I play an Asura (because they have the best animations period! go /dance!) that I am not actually bothered by the animations at all. Firstly, I play a Mesmer as my main (which I’ve shelved primarily until they fix the tPvP other than to test the update to Prismatic Understanding), so once again I’m familiar with the Asura Mesmer animations. . . maybe you should play one for a bit so you understand your opponent better?

Seriously though, try disabling all Nameplates other than player names, the illusions names will disappear and you’ll only see the real one unless your mouse pointer is over one of the illusions or it’s directly in the middle of your screen. Also you’ll see the red nameplate over an enemy so you should be able to tell just by nameplates where they are at (to ensure you notice if one of them is reviving someone). This really shouldn’t be an issue for as long as these games types of games have been around, I’m really surprised by the number of people who still have issues with these things.

These are excellent observations and ones I immediately went to look at, new builds might come out of merely improving the 30 point traits, they have a ton of work to do on many of them though. Imbued Diversion vs Illusionary Persona for instance. . . needs some work to make Imbued Diversion much better without making it too strong.

So I have been disillusioned with the loss of Illusionary Membrane really wrecking many of the builds I enjoyed running in free tPvP matches (not that we can do those right now anyways) so I decided I would test the new Prismatic Understanding. I played with it a little bit with several of the stealths to get a stronger understanding of how useful the extra protection source could be, and while random it proved to be quite strong, giving protection or aegis was a strong addition to the list and many times even when it gave regeneration it proc’d the protection from Illusionary Membrane.

This gave me a thought, how strong could stealth be in a bunker build. The two ideas seem to oppose each other, and I believe I may have even made that point elsewhere, and yet. . . the survival you gain while being able to just force people to deal with you. There is something to be gained here I feel.

I’m currently messing around with a 0/20/30/10/10 build.

• Picking up Deceptive Evasion, Blade Training, Illusionary Defense, Chaotic Dampening, Prismatic Understanding, Glamour Mastery, and Confusing Cry.
• Running Soldier’s Amulet with Sword/Focus and Staff.
• Utilities are Decoy, Veil, Null Field
• Elite is Mass Invisibility
• Runes of Lyssa
• Sigils of Energy and a your choice

This has yielded a build that can almost always have up the 9% damage reduction, protection whenever I need it with any of the stealth abilities, disruption from Into the Void with Focus, a rooted Phantasm that might be able to be used to deflect projectiles occasionally (almost never happens). Permanent Vigor, Glamours on lower CD for more usages of Veil and Null Field (which also means more Chaos Armors and more Protection).

In sum I’m pretty sure they nerfed the protection from Illusionary Membrane simply because they forsaw a way to get permanent Protection outside of combat with both regeneration and new Prismatic Understanding.

I suggest people try the build and get a feel for the new Prismatic Understanding if you liked a build that can take some damage and have a lot of ways of messing with opponents.