We tested 5 man sub squad dps.
On large hit box 2 ele as dps was the winner by so far no other option makes sense.
In small hitbox double ele and 1 ele 1 guard and 1 ele 1 rev were roughly equal with the rev perhaps being slightly ahead due to more consistent buff uptime.
The worst was 1 ele 1 thief which was noticeably worse than any of the others which was surprising. My guess is because thief doesn’t help with might or fury. It would be worth trying rev plus thief and no ele on a small hit box but we didn’t think of it.
Seems to me like it’s simplest to just use double ele then. With a bit of build swapping between encounters it’s either best dps or within margin of error of best. That way you don’t have to muck about with swapping characters or whatever to avoid losing dps on big hitboxes.
For pug groups ele-rev might be more reliable just because you never know if the other people have any idea how to play their classes, so that helps with boon upkeep.
Ele-thief will be low because of the alacrity dps loss for thief. If they just made initiative regen affected by chill and alacrity, this would be easily fixed.
One additional thought, I recall Venomshare condie thief being at least potentially competitive in dps with other builds a few months back. Since venom cooldowns do benefit from alacrity, did you test out that build?
Looks like a solid build for a small roaming comp. You’d probably be better off with 1 of that + a support tempest to diversify your boons a bit though.
Now, no self-respecting group with 15 or more people would do anything but straight steamroll a 5-man group, but that comp sounds extremely well suited to engagements with ~10 people per side top end.
Anyway, ramifications of that stacking behavior.
- Time warp isn’t garbage. Yay! I mean, it’s still not great due to the stacking behavior, but at least it doesn’t actively inhibit you from stacking quickness.
- You can pretty reliably avoid wasting quickness by simply checking your duration and sharing only when below 24 seconds. While this isn’t fool-proof (you can still waste the smaller shield 5 stacks and time warp stacks), it’s more than good enough to provide permanent quickness.
- Mimic is handy, but not required. Mimic lets you get another 2×6s duration stacks every rotation, which is a larger boost than anything else really. It also lets you get another easy proc on distortion. However, it’s still possible to maintain permanent uptime on quickness without it.
I’ll probably take mimic on Wing 1 bosses, since you don’t really need anything else for them. Wing 2 obviously is going to force feedback to be prioritized over mimic, and then Wing 3 is a bit split. Mimic is totally unnecessary on KC because you really only need quickness for a solid ~20 seconds when burning statues, then another 15 seconds at burn time. It could be nice on Xera though, so I may take it there.
Primary Xera will be a huge pain to keep concentration up while tanking, since it’s so easy to get dumpstered by her frenzy if you don’t have a mitigation skill available. I usually swap between BF and shield blocks, but I can’t reliably do that if I’m swapping weapons all the time to maintain the concentration buff. It’s not so much an issue on other bosses though, they’re not really as intensive as Xera is.
Insofar as the quickness stacking behavior, I actually did a lot more testing, and after going through some very odd behavior I believe I’ve determined the actual mechanic. So quickness stacks up to 5 times, but at any given point in time, 1 of these stacks is “active”, meaning that it is being consumed. This stack appears to have overwrite protection, but the 4 “inactive” stacks can still be overwritten. Here’s how I tested to get this theory:
Test 1: 2 chronomancers, 4 time warps, SoI after the time warps.
4 time warps should nearly instantly cap you out at 5 stacks, but popping SoI still increased duration. Popping SoI even multiple times increased duration, but each usage only increased it by a few seconds, not a full 6.
Test 2: 1 chronomancer. Time warp, trait soi, well of action, mimic soi, soi, end cs, trait soi, well of action, mimic soi, soi.
This rotation provides 8 hits of 6s quickness in a pretty short time window. When performing this rotation rapidly, it’s very easy to see that both of the last 2 soi uses (the mimic soi and final soi) fail to apply any quickness. In fact, they don’t even refresh the little countdown-bar thing.
These are reconciled by the behavior I mentioned above. In the quad-time warp scenario, there were ample 2s stacks that could be overwritten for a smaller duration boost when using SoI. In the 2nd test however, every stack that wasn’t the active stack had a solid 6s duration. When you replace a 6s stack with another 6s stack, you’ll obviously see no change in duration. If the active stack got replaced, you would push the total duration back up to a flat 30s every time, but that didn’t happen.
So something you’re completely neglecting is the new 5-stack cap. Using time warp will actually make it incredibly difficult to stack quickness properly. You have to actually walk step by step through the rotation and make sure that you don’t overcap the quickness. If you hit an overcap, the skill will COMPLETELY FAIL TO APPLY QUICKNESS.
I did test that, thank you for noting that Xyonon.
We got off easy on this patch let it go
Nerf missed us, hit thief/rev/guard/necro instead. Instead, now double chrono is required.
Honestly I’m impressed. It’s sorta ironic that the nerf removing thief/rev/guard from the meta is actually a nerf to mesmer, not to those classes specifically.
RIP rev, necro and mesmer. 2015-2016 a year of not being complete garbage for once.
Well ironically mesmers will be even MORE in demand because you will now need 2 per raid! Most groups won’t want to give up the quickness. So as someone said, this patch basically made bringing a rev pointless.
I doubt we’ll even bring 1, if one is bad now, why would we bring 2, dps will be too low.
You’re not bringing mes for their personal dps. You’re bringing them for their buffs, alacrity, quickness, boon share and invuls. Hence why they will always be needed. Now that they have been nerfed, the demand and need for those things has not gone away, people will now need TWO mesmers to cover what one used to be able to do.
Not only does this take up a space of another dps, it will also be a pain in lfg to get 2 mes. It’s like back to the old GW1 days – lf monk waits.
obviously, what i mean is you lose a dps spot to provide the same buffs as before, therefore overall partywide dps is lower
Sure, but it’ll be even LOWER if you don’t bring double chrono, since you lose quickness and alacrity.
Just to get this straight, since SoI only transfer one stack now does it prioritise the latest stack or highest duration stack? Or just completely random?
It doesn’t transfer at all. It just applies a stack of a set duration.
I’ve been playing with the Golem for a very long time today and there is absolutely no need for any commander gear whatsoever. In fact, it’s more important than ever to not use commander gear and optimize your DpS as Chrono, now that there are two of us in each party.
After trying various builds and combinations of traitlines and utilities,I came to the conclusion that – while Inspiration became an absolute must – you can still swap Illusions (yes Illusions is not mandatory) and Domination freely, weither you need more Alacrity or personal dps / invuln share.
So what I came up with over these few hours is this build I’m probably gonna use in Raids from now on:
If you struggle to keep up your personal Alacrity for some reason, you can swap Calamity to Recall. If you still lack Alacrity, you should probably play Warrior again. :P
Thoughts and inputs, or issues I might have overlooked?
Greez!
Well, one thing you’ve overlooked is that bountiful utility food is prohibitively expensive, so I’d recommend getting a bit more boon duration from a few pieces of commanders to avoid needing that.
One thing that full commander’s will allow is that you can ditch the sigil of concentration and still be at 94% duration if you slip a doubloon in somewhere. While the rotation is possible to pull off with constant weapon swapping, it’s going to be extremely difficult to do that WHILE tanking, especially vs something like xera where mitigation is very important.
(edited by Fay.2357)
The questions people will really want to have answered are:
What amount of boon duration will we need, 100%?
What gear (stats, runes and sigils) will I need?
What comp will become “meta”?
What is the rotation?
Boon duration: 100%
Gear: Whatever you want as long as it reaches 100% boon duration.
Comp: Mirror comp mes/ps warr/druid/2x dps
Rotation: See my earlier post.
So do we or don’t we need chrono runes anymore? If not then getting to 100% isn’t going to be too bad as there’s some decent options out there which aren’t stupid expensive. If you need chrono runes then you need to go nearly full commanders.
What exactly do you think chrono runes are going to provide anymore? They’re 1s of personal quickness that we can’t share. Why on earth would they be useful?
The questions people will really want to have answered are:
What amount of boon duration will we need, 100%?
What gear (stats, runes and sigils) will I need?
What comp will become “meta”?
What is the rotation?
Boon duration: 100%
Gear: Whatever you want as long as it reaches 100% boon duration.
Comp: Mirror comp mes/ps warr/druid/2x dps
Rotation: See my earlier post.
Insofar as WvW groups go, the comp and strategy that I run with in my group appears to still be intact. It has been impacted both positively and negatively in some ways by this change, but we should still be capable of nearly permanent uptime of most boons. I’m still working on a detailed guide/video guide for it, so I’ll refrain from stating it explicitly until I’m more confident about my explanation. Suffice to say I don’t use veil though.
I don’t feel that this rotation will significantly more difficult to pull off than the old rotation. It’ll be a little tighter, but that’s not a huge deal overall.
The real stinker of this update is how it affects the groups themselves. My raid group is strong and mature. We’re able to swap to a mirror comp without any difficulties thanks to our experience in the raids and the competence of the players. We’ll still see a small dps loss from this change (as will everyone), but that won’t be a problem for clearing fights.
Now consider a much weaker and newer group. Not only are they only clearing some bosses by the skin of their teeth, they’re also less comfortable swapping classes, so maybe the won’t be able to transition smoothly into a mirror comp. This group will suffer significant dps losses because of this update, and all of a sudden they’ll be failing at bosses they once completed. They’ve been effectively set back months of practice all because Anet didn’t properly consider the ramifications of this change.
This total rotation is on a 57.5 second cooldown. This provides permanent quickness to a 5 man group. In order to buffer this up a bit, you can drop time warp inside the CS rotation. This will mostly be overwritten by the longer 6 second stacks, but it will fill up the gaps a bit and extend the overall duration slightly.
Afaik Quickness can’t be overwritten, it simply won’t get applied. So I would drop TW out of the rotation for good if you are playing with 2 Chronos, to prevent blocking your long Quickness stacks. Or am I wrong about this? SoI used to pop up “Immune” if it would overcap for instance.
I also didn’t notice much of a difference by using the SoI trait or not. If we have to play Double-Chrono, we probably should go with Domination to maximize our damage. This said, how about the extended rotation?
And what about encounters like Matthias where you need Feedback? Smells a bit doomy to me :/
Nice post, curious on something, people are saying SOI will give you the buffs on active, but will it also spread them? So is SOI a 3s group quickness base now? If so wouldn’t you get some trait quickness in the initial setup for CS?
SoI only grants your allies a fixed duration of those boons you already got on yourself. It won’t buff you or give you all boons.
I’ll test the overwriting later to make sure that’s how it works.
If you can’t take mimic, like on Matthias, you’ll lose about 12 seconds of quickness in the total rotation. However, there’s a couple things to keep in mind.
SoI is on a ~23 second cooldown when traiting illusions over domination. This means that there’s enough wiggle room in this rotation for at least 1 additional trait SoI proc per rotation. Additionally, the setup SoI proc will generate quickness on rotation startup past the first one, generating an additional 6 seconds. If you and the other chrono in your party are really on top of things, you could even throw a shield 5 through yourselves for the first startup to get that proc there too, since shield 5 will already hit everyone.
Lastly, feedback isn’t strictly required on Matthias. It’s the easiest way to do it, but you can use temporal curtain or pWarden as well. With 2 mesmers in a group, you should be able to cover reflects without problems even if you don’t take feedback.
100% boon duration, using mimic and well of action.
CS ->shield 5, mimic SoI, well of action, SoI, CS end
This applies 5 stacks of quickness with a total duration of 21 seconds. Illusionary inspiration isn’t here because that’ll proc before you get into CS for at least the first time. The shield 5 stacks last 3 seconds each, so they’re shorter than the rest. The first shield 5 stack will wear off by the end of CS, and the second stack will simply get pushed out later in the combo. For this reason, I’ve not counted that second stack in the total duration.
Well of Action, mimic SoI, SoI
This applies 3 more stacks of quickness with a total duration of 18 seconds. By the time you execute this, the first shield 5 stack will have worn off and well of action will replace it. The first mimic will replace the low duration 3s stack from the return of shield 5. However, this puts us back at 5 stacks. Therefor, it’s imperative that the 2nd usage of SoI is delayed by at least 6 seconds from the time you first used mimic SoI inside of CS. This will likely already be the case, but it’s something to be aware of.
Ok, so that’s the initial combo. With a bit of timing precision, we’ve applied 39 total seconds of quickness. Now, we fast-forward 24 seconds to the next combo split. 24 seconds will consume 4 of your quickness stacks, leaving you with 1 when you star the combo.
Shield 5, SoI trait, SoI, well of action
This combo applies 5 more stacks of quickness with a total duration of 24 seconds. Since the previous last stack should fall off during this combo, all 5 of these stacks should apply unhindered. This brings us up to a total quickness duration of 63 seconds.
This total rotation is on a 57.5 second cooldown. This provides permanent quickness to a 5 man group. In order to buffer this up a bit, you can drop time warp inside the CS rotation. This will mostly be overwritten by the longer 6 second stacks, but it will fill up the gaps a bit and extend the overall duration slightly.
Nice post, curious on something, people are saying SOI will give you the buffs on active, but will it also spread them? So is SOI a 3s group quickness base now? If so wouldn’t you get some trait quickness in the initial setup for CS?
It doesn’t just give all buffs. It gives buffs that you currently have active. This means that in the initial setup, you won’t get quickness unless you got lucky from a random SoI proc giving it to you.
in short this balance change certainly won over the legendary smiters boon .
Wow ,skills team ,you guys are making history here.
Did you not read my analysis at all, or are you just clueless about smiter’s boon?
Smiter’s boon was purposefully nerfed into the ground. The justification given was that they simply couldn’t figure out how to balance it, so they effectively removed it from the game with a nerf.
This change to SoI makes it more difficult, but still very realistic, to hit 100% uptime on quickness for a 5-man group. What part of that says ‘nerfed so hard it no longer will be used’?
100% boon duration, using mimic and well of action.
CS ->shield 5, mimic SoI, well of action, SoI, CS end
This applies 5 stacks of quickness with a total duration of 21 seconds. Illusionary inspiration isn’t here because that’ll proc before you get into CS for at least the first time. The shield 5 stacks last 3 seconds each, so they’re shorter than the rest. The first shield 5 stack will wear off by the end of CS, and the second stack will simply get pushed out later in the combo. For this reason, I’ve not counted that second stack in the total duration.
Well of Action, mimic SoI, SoI
This applies 3 more stacks of quickness with a total duration of 18 seconds. By the time you execute this, the first shield 5 stack will have worn off and well of action will replace it. The first mimic will replace the low duration 3s stack from the return of shield 5. However, this puts us back at 5 stacks. Therefor, it’s imperative that the 2nd usage of SoI is delayed by at least 6 seconds from the time you first used mimic SoI inside of CS. This will likely already be the case, but it’s something to be aware of.
Ok, so that’s the initial combo. With a bit of timing precision, we’ve applied 39 total seconds of quickness. Now, we fast-forward 24 seconds to the next combo split. 24 seconds will consume 4 of your quickness stacks, leaving you with 1 when you star the combo.
Shield 5, SoI trait, SoI, well of action
This combo applies 5 more stacks of quickness with a total duration of 24 seconds. Since the previous last stack should fall off during this combo, all 5 of these stacks should apply unhindered. This brings us up to a total quickness duration of 63 seconds.
This total rotation is on a 57.5 second cooldown. This provides permanent quickness to a 5 man group. In order to buffer this up a bit, you can drop time warp inside the CS rotation. This will mostly be overwritten by the longer 6 second stacks, but it will fill up the gaps a bit and extend the overall duration slightly.
Nice post, curious on something, people are saying SOI will give you the buffs on active, but will it also spread them? So is SOI a 3s group quickness base now? If so wouldn’t you get some trait quickness in the initial setup for CS?
It doesn’t just give all buffs. It gives buffs that you currently have active. This means that in the initial setup, you won’t get quickness unless you got lucky from a random SoI proc giving it to you.
100% boon duration, using mimic and well of action.
CS →shield 5, mimic SoI, well of action, SoI, CS end
This applies 5 stacks of quickness with a total duration of 21 seconds. Illusionary inspiration isn’t here because that’ll proc before you get into CS for at least the first time. The shield 5 stacks last 3 seconds each, so they’re shorter than the rest. The first shield 5 stack will wear off by the end of CS, and the second stack will simply get pushed out later in the combo. For this reason, I’ve not counted that second stack in the total duration.
Well of Action, mimic SoI, SoI
This applies 3 more stacks of quickness with a total duration of 18 seconds. By the time you execute this, the first shield 5 stack will have worn off and well of action will replace it. The first mimic will replace the low duration 3s stack from the return of shield 5. However, this puts us back at 5 stacks. Therefor, it’s imperative that the 2nd usage of SoI is delayed by at least 6 seconds from the time you first used mimic SoI inside of CS. This will likely already be the case, but it’s something to be aware of.
Ok, so that’s the initial combo. With a bit of timing precision, we’ve applied 39 total seconds of quickness. Now, we fast-forward 24 seconds to the next combo split. 24 seconds will consume 4 of your quickness stacks, leaving you with 1 when you star the combo.
Shield 5, SoI trait, SoI, well of action
This combo applies 5 more stacks of quickness with a total duration of 24 seconds. Since the previous last stack should fall off during this combo, all 5 of these stacks should apply unhindered. This brings us up to a total quickness duration of 63 seconds.
This total rotation is on a 57.5 second cooldown. This provides permanent quickness to a 5 man group. In order to buffer this up a bit, you can drop time warp inside the CS rotation. This will mostly be overwritten by the longer 6 second stacks, but it will fill up the gaps a bit and extend the overall duration slightly.
Ok, mathing in progress.
I can’t be ingame right now, can someone post the base durations of the SoI boons, as well as whether the active applies boons to you as well?
I would like to return to at most 6 illusions + clones in the field. Now can only be a maximum of 3 assets. Not like the update.
Return to? That implies we were ever there to begin with…
Mantras need absolutely no changes. The fact we can get 3 insta stuns, 3 insta damage, 3 decent insta heals, etc is insane. The payment for that is paid for before the fight, and then again guaranteed success at minimum once during combat. (Channel during stealth/distortion)
Also how many opponents have the ability to actually reliably interrupt us?
Thief is the ONLY reliable class in today’s current meta.
Whiiiich is why we see people running the heal mantra, damage mantra, and stab mantra all the time, right?
Oh wait, that doesn’t actually happen…
The technology just isn’t there…
Is it on the table, though?
Hard to say, it’s a pretty cluttered table.
You start the post with “I hate how blink works and I hate how powerful it is”. You continue with “how it can be changed without making it useless”. You end with “how can we make it optional without making it useless.”
So let parse this. You think blink is too powerful. You think blink should be changed. You want to avoid making it useless.
Call me crazy, but that sounds an awful lot like the start of a nerf discussion. Seems a bit odd to be berating people about something that’s so blatantly obvious in your post. If you truly didn’t write that post with blink nerfs in mind, that’s one hell of a lot of Freudian slips, if you know what I mean…
Edit: Just to make this even more abundantly clear.
If you wanted a discussion about how to bring other utilities up to the level of blink, you would be using language like “blink is one of few utilities enough strong enough to be guaranteed a spot on the bar, how can we buff other utilities to level that out?” The discussion wouldn’t be about blink, it would be about other utilities with blink simply providing the point of comparison. Instead, you started with the literal title of “Why I Hate Blink”, continued with complaining about blink, posted a long list of other teleport skills for some reason, and then cry foul that we think this is a nerf thread?
Give me a break.
(edited by Fay.2357)
In any discussion of mantras, it’s extremely important to remember that not all mantras are unused junk heaps. Therefor, blanket changes like adding stability to the channel are uncalled for. A more productive conversation involves looking specifically at the differences between used and unused mantras.
The most commonly used mantra is probably the daze mantra. This mantra has an appropriately powerful effect to balance the drawbacks: instant, on target, aoe daze. Additionally, this effect synergizes perfectly with other Mesmer mechanics for bursting and interrupts, making it a powerful and useful tool in the appropriate builds.
The next most used mantra is the condition removal mantra. It cleanses 2 conditions in aoe around the Mesmer. This, however, is mainly used because we don’t have any other good condition removals. It doesn’t synergize well with any other Mesmer mechanics, and the fact that it’s an aoe cleanse is almost entirely disregarded.
In order to bring this up to an appropriate level, I’d add something that makes you pay attention to the aoe nature of the mantra. Perhaps ‘gain increased damage for each condition removed by this mantra (1% damage per stack, 5s duration)’. This gives you direct benefits if you use the mantra to cleanse your allies, and boosts the mesmer’s sustained dps capabilities in a fight.
The last 3 mantras are stinkers. I’ll start with mantra of pain.
MoP does okish damage. However, it’s just ultimately hard to use effectively. Increase the radius and make this into a GtAoE to add usability. This allows us to unload aoe damage without having to wrestle with the abysmal targeting system in this game. This would make it a capable damage dealing tool in WvW groups, PvE events, and would maintain the (extremely niche) use of it as a burst tool for PvP.
The heal mantra is ultimately just underwhelming. Ether feast heals just as much but without the nasty channel. Mirror does the mirror thing. The signet is obviously useful for the phantasm recharges, and the heal well is an aoe heal that cleanses as provides alacrity too (when traited). The heal mantra is simply outclassed in every way. It doesn’t have additional utility, it doesn’t heal more, and it has the massive mantra drawbacks.
To fix this, it needs to have something that it’s best at. I think the most appropriate thing would be raw healing. Since powerful base heals are a bit unbalanced, provide this by massively boosting the scaling coefficient for this skill. If specced for healing power, this mantra should provide massive bursts of healing.
Lastly, the stability mantra. This one is also extremely rarely used. The stunbreak is handy, but we have other stunbreaks. The stability is mostly an afterthought. Fixing this is easy: make the stunbreak aoe, probably alongside increasing the cooldown back up to 20 seconds or whatever it was.
Mantras are mechanically cool concepts, and the fact that some of them work well proves that a balance between risk and reward is possible to find without massive conceptual changes. I feel that these suggestions would mostly provide that balance.
Blink is mainly the top choice because of how it enables movement. Most other classes have ways to move rapidly, and this lets them pick how they want to accomplish that. There are various leaps, teleports, dashes, or other forms of movement skills that can be chosen from. Mesmer has phase-retreat swapping…and blink.
If you don’t want to be tethered down to a spot, you take blink. If you’re not worried about actually moving at all (see season 1 bunker meta) then you don’t need blink. Nerfing blink would only accomplish making mesmers worse in PvP. You’d still take it, it would just be worse.
How about instead of making garbage quality posts about nerfing things that not even the PvP whiners complain about, you think about what could make our other utilities better to compete with blink?
Meh, I care about survivability just as much as damage so, to each his own.
In PvE? That’s cute…
Hate to say this, but I agree with Azukas. Providing stability to mantras diminishes the basic concept of mantras themselves.
The concept here is risk to channel providing a substantial bonus in the form of powerful instant skills if you succeed at the channel. The risk/reward here is based on balancing the reward so that it’s strong enough to justify the risk. If you diminish/remove the risk, then there’s no room for a useful reward.
The way to fix mantras is to make them actually worth channeling. This could be done through increasing the stack size, providing more traits that interact with them, boosting the raw strength of the skills, or probably other ways that I’m not mentioning.
I’ll be using durability runes, but that’s primarily because I’m lazy and want to use the same set of gear for PvE raids and WvW raids. Leadership are probably better.
Same complaint can be made for every class in the game. It’s not a mesmer problem, it’s an elite spec and HoT problem.
Yeah, you need to wait until tuesday’s balance patch. We can’t really offer any truly relevant advice until then.
It’s worth noting that you’re a bit off-point about what bosses are difficult to tank for. VG is actually one of the hardest bosses to tank due to the fact that you need to move it properly otherwise you’ll wipe/make things much harder for your group. Boss difficulty is very different for the tank with some bosses, primarily VG and Xera.
Yeah, chrono runes are total garbage now. You’ll probably want either a boon duration set (for raiding) or pack runes (for personal play).
I don’t care about whatever label you want to give it, but clearly, Anet thinks getting tons of boons and having them last excessive amounts of time is unintended, hence they fix they are going to make.
This is true. The question is how to actually solve the issue in a reasonable way.
What ever you want to label that as, it still makes no sense to want to hold on tools that relate to unintended effects in the game, then on the other hand cry that the class is hard done by because of ‘no damage’ or ‘too hard to play.’ I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the cycle where a class gets the fixes on broken tools before any dev would consider building it back up. Stacking good fixes on broken tools simply isn’t an option.
It might indeed be a moot point to discuss why SoI should stay the way it is and Facet of Nature has to go just because SoI has been there first. This doesn’t change the fact, though, that SoI is worthless if there are no long duration boons. Changing SoI is an easy fix for WvW. But it doesn’t change the integral underlying issue. SoI isn’t broken. Boon generation is.
The reason why many Mesmers are so annoyed is because we can’t apply boons too well to begin with. SoI gave us a niche and a unique mechanic to provide boons. And it will be taken away.
So far we don’t know if the damage compensation which is being advertised might make up for it. Maybe it will, which would be a nice change for Mesmers which objectively have been at the bottom of the food change in most game modes longer than most other classes during the lifetime of GW2 so far. But it doesn’t change the fact that we will lose something unique to us. And personally, I’m not too optimistic taking the last few class balance patches and the current – I’ll use this term losely – class balance ‘speed’ into consideration.
I think that’s exactly what makes SoI a good target … it’s a niche tool for a class that isn’t particularly well supported for boon distribution in the first place. I’m not sure why it would annoy people to have a nerf on a tool with a poorly supported game mechanic. It’s junk like this that make the tool and not the class, the desirable feature. That’s not a healthy approach for a class to have.
Primarily because it won’t actually fix the problem.
For example, the WvW group I raid with is responding to this change by planning to boost our personal boon duration on gear, along with some small build and rotation changes. As a result we will still have permanent or almost permanent uptime on:
- Quickness
- Swiftness
- Vigor
- Protection
- Retaliation
- Regeneration
- Fury
- Might
We will still be able to burst up to about 15-20 seconds of resistance as well. The only thing that actually gets hit by this nerf is stability stacks, and you can play around that anyway.
So basically, this nerf doesn’t fix the problem at all. Since the massive boon production itself isn’t being impacted, this simply requires us to adjust how we’re playing with those boons to achieve the same result.
You’re right about that too….
The easiest solution would be to simply remove Phantasmal Fury and make phantasms inherit your crit chance rather than your precision u.u
The technology just isn’t there…
Power / condi druid still mvp
It’ll be pretty tough for pubs, though. I have seen maybe 1 out of 20 groups that take sufficiently little damage such that power or condi Druid could be sufficient for keeping everyone alive (even with 2 of them). If that’s expected to get even worse with the healing value adjustments, then I foresee Magi being hands-down the way to go for all groups outside of very confident guilds.
Zerk druid with riceballs and druid runes? Toss in a couple pieces of zealots or a staff if needed.
The nerf to CA healing coefficients is likely to be a lot worse than requiring a small band aid to cover up. The question will be, can your group keep up Scholar bonus with kitten berserker heals, or will you benefit more from Magi.
Yeah, really depends on how hard they slash the base numbers. CA has astonishingly powerful base healing right now, and they could conceivably drop that to something that has zero healing impact without heavy investment.
Hmm what would keep the chronotank from wearing commanders gear and using other methods of boosting its boon duration. We don’t take chrono tank for its dps ANYWAY. This would make it a more reliable tank for new mesmers. And boost its personal quickness generation. I believe up to near 80-90 percent if you commited to boon duration? Odds are if you used food you could hit 100%.
The chrono tank I believe would still be able to maintain perma quickness atleast on the DPSers correct? Which is where the main damage comes from ANYWAY.
See my post ~8 posts above you.
Easy permanent quickness for 5 people if you stick to the rotation.
Having to Mimic-cast SoI makes me barf a little on the inside, but I could see how that would maintain permanent quickness on a 5-person subgroup in spite of a heavy-handed nerf. Worth noting that having to run Mimic over a second well cuts into Alacrity uptimes, though.
Yeah, mimic-SoI is a bit gross, but it works. It actually won’t cut down on alacrity at all for most cases though. The vast majority of alacrity uptime is maintained from the shield phantasm attacks. Dropping well of recall won’t impact uptime at all except in cases where you can’t be near the boss.
Maybe with the damage boost mesmer will have a dps slot as a condi dps. Mesmer have a higher DPS as condi with 100% crit then most people think.
Sorta…but no. See, mesmer is competitive condie dps on paper, but it translates extremely poorly into reality due to how the fights actually work. Lets look at the most extreme example: keep construct.
Fight begins, mesmer puts a phantasm on KC. Oh wait, now you have to kill the first statue. Mesmer puts a phantasm on the statue. Oh wait, that statue is now dead, you have to kill the second statue. Mesmer stands around awkwardly twiddling their thumbs because they ran out of phantasms to use. Oh wait, now you have 15 seconds to burst dps KC. Mesmer slowly puts up a couple phantasms and just barely starts getting their dps going by the time the burn phase ends.
Now, not all bosses are quite as bad as KC. Condie mesmer is actually fairly viable on VG for green circles, and semi-viable on matthias. However, pretty much every other encounter is just absolutely awful for it.
How about Xera and Sloth ? Even if it is just these 3, at least we could see a bit of mesmer DPS, just like you at least see Engi on VG. Being viable in 3 of 7 boss fights is ok i think. (Not counting Trio and Scort )
On Xera it’s miserable. There’s a bunch of adds that you want to be cleaving, it’s totally worthless for clearing shards, and if it gets selected for a platform you can say goodbye to mesmer damage for the next minute and a half.
On Slothy it’s not garbage…well, it’s pretty garbage. Basically it’ll dps Slothy fine, but it has zero capacity for aoe. The whole reason we pull sloth towards the middle on the 2nd/4th shrooms is to yank in and aoe down the slublings, but condie mesmer is totally and completely incapable of doing that. If literally the only thing you need is a single target dpser on Sloth, then it’ll fill that role, but if you ever want pressure on Slubs…no can do.
Easy permanent quickness for 5 people if you stick to the rotation.
Having to Mimic-cast SoI makes me barf a little on the inside, but I could see how that would maintain permanent quickness on a 5-person subgroup in spite of a heavy-handed nerf. Worth noting that having to run Mimic over a second well cuts into Alacrity uptimes, though.
Yeah, mimic-SoI is a bit gross, but it works. It actually won’t cut down on alacrity at all for most cases though. The vast majority of alacrity uptime is maintained from the shield phantasm attacks. Dropping well of recall won’t impact uptime at all except in cases where you can’t be near the boss.
Maybe with the damage boost mesmer will have a dps slot as a condi dps. Mesmer have a higher DPS as condi with 100% crit then most people think.
Sorta…but no. See, mesmer is competitive condie dps on paper, but it translates extremely poorly into reality due to how the fights actually work. Lets look at the most extreme example: keep construct.
Fight begins, mesmer puts a phantasm on KC. Oh wait, now you have to kill the first statue. Mesmer puts a phantasm on the statue. Oh wait, that statue is now dead, you have to kill the second statue. Mesmer stands around awkwardly twiddling their thumbs because they ran out of phantasms to use. Oh wait, now you have 15 seconds to burst dps KC. Mesmer slowly puts up a couple phantasms and just barely starts getting their dps going by the time the burn phase ends.
Now, not all bosses are quite as bad as KC. Condie mesmer is actually fairly viable on VG for green circles, and semi-viable on matthias. However, pretty much every other encounter is just absolutely awful for it.
Plenty on reddit saying it is capped to 6s.
Which would make it close to useless in Raids and the Raid Comp would shift to something stale if that happens.
Not really. Lets assume you can only get 6s per SoI usage even at 100% duration. Some quick math.
A full buff rotation is shield 5 (2×3s), well of action (6s), SoI x3 (cast, mimic cast, trait cast) all repeated twice. This means you’ll get 4×3s, 2×6s, 6×6s of quickness in an aoe. This produces 60s of quickness. Halfway through the cooldown of CS, you can do shield 5, well of action, and 2x SoI again for another 24s of quickness. In total this produces 80 seconds of quickness on a ~70 second cooldown.
Easy permanent quickness for 5 people if you stick to the rotation.
ANet may not always do make the best decisions, but they are also not idiots.
I mean…that’s an arguable point.
If you ever wanted to delete your mesmer now would be an excellent time. Same goes with revenant players as well.
Not sure where all this doom and gloom is coming from. Mesmer requirements for raids are about to double…
Better start gearing up those Guardians soon or you’ll be left in the dust :/
…what?
So here’s what’s likely to happen. Boon stacking will be nerfed such that it will be impossible for 1 mesmer + rev to maintain reliable quickness uptime. Therefor, groups will drop the rev and take 2 mesmers instead. This will have the side effect of also nerfing thief, because when both groups have permanent alacrity, thief falls behind ele/necro/non-hammer guardian for dps.
I dislike the Anet balance team as much as the next guy (probably more than the next guy), but I prefer to keep my complaints solidly within the boundaries of reality. You appear to have no such compulsion.
If you ever wanted to delete your mesmer now would be an excellent time. Same goes with revenant players as well.
Not sure where all this doom and gloom is coming from. Mesmer requirements for raids are about to double…
I’m always impressed by how much people will cling to broken mechanics that impede the the future development of a class they love.
You seem to have missed the fact that the number of mesmers used in all raid groups is going to double as a result of these changes. We’re not getting removed from the meta, it’s thieves and revenants that are really getting shafted here.
Add clones to the list. I NEVER want to target a clone. EVER.
I think you’re missing the point of clones…
Well, why not? I mean, mesmer already gets the benefit of these as walking bombs, why should they also mess up my targeting at the same time?
I have always run away from mesmers because I can’t target them. I would not be surprised if they turned out to be a HUGE reason so many people don’t play PvP.
Clones exist to distract from the real Mesmer. If tab didn’t target clones, they would have no point.
Any skilled player has no issues finding and targeting the real Mesmer. I recommend you work on improving to that level.
Seems like they are going after boon share. I’m not surprised nor concerned.
The druid nerf Inc is nice to see tbh
Boonshare is broken beyond belief in WvW. However, nerfing SoI in PvE will lead to either revenants being removed from the meta or revenants and mesmers being removed from the meta.
If ever there was a time to split balance the modes, this is it.
I’ll wait for the actual changes to develop an official position on this. As with most things, this could be implemented in a fashion that is healthy for the game.
As with most things, it probably won’t be.
Still, a broken clock is right twice per day. We’ll see.
For the damage modifiers, it could be cool if they would be applied to illusions. In fact I still think these modifiers should become a stat (called intensity) and be available on gear, food and even have a new boon for it (availability compensated by the fact that it would become additive)… but it would mess so much the balance that I am not sure it would be feasible.
So this already exists. It’s actually called power.
Power is a scaling stat that multiplicatively affects your total damage output. If you replaced every ‘damage increased by x%’ modifier with ‘power increased by x%’, they would function identically and work on our phantasms at the same time.
Not possible unless you find some mob for the Mesmer to arcane thievery a long duration stability from.
The longest base stability duration is ~6 seconds. Boon duration caps at 100%, so the longest you can push that base to is ~12 seconds. Boonsharing an intensity-stacking boon only boosts the stacks, not the duration, so ~12 seconds is the longest possible with that comp.
However.
There is theoretically a way to get longer durations. There is a tempest earth warhorn skill that extends the duration of existing boons by 2 seconds. Let’s say you set up a conga-line of tempests running past a couple players with stability. As each tempest reaches the group, they pop the skill and then continue on to the back of the line. With swiftness, you should be able to get at least 3 tempests past the group per second. This means that they’ll be extending the duration of boons by a net of 5 seconds for every second your tempest conga-line is in action. If you run your tempest conga-line continuously for 12 seconds, you should be able to reach 1 minute of any boon.
I need to try this now.
You claim to be experienced, but that’s not actually the case. You needed mechanics explained, so you’re not experienced. When a group gets someone that lies about their experience level, they kick and block, so you’ll never have a chance to raid with those people again.
Not true, I joined a raid group a week ago for an lfg post with someone who had blocked me in the group. I was able to hear him in voice chat even though I prob couldn’t read what he said in group chat. Its much better to add people as friends that you want to block and add a note next to their name like ‘Known kicker’ rather than blocking them, which basically means you can’t see their lfg posts either. That’s my understanding of it honestly. It’s been this way for months and months. People I block are able to join my dungeon groups when I post, bc they haven’t blocked me in return. So the notion that getting blocked means you can’t join their raid groups again is misinformed i.e, if you have a friend in the same group as someone who’s blocked you, why should that in itself disqualify you from joining the group your friend is in?
Apparently I need to be more explicitly clear…
I’m not talking about technical limitations of the system. I’m talking about realistic interactions with other players. If you lie about your experience level, the group leader (and likely others in the group) will kick you and block you. In the future, attempting to join a party with those people will likely result you in getting kicked instantly as soon as they notice that you’re on their block lists. Make sense?
Add clones to the list. I NEVER want to target a clone. EVER.
I think you’re missing the point of clones…