FCGTAoE: No. When you blink you want to blink to max range, not a tiny bit behind it. This also makes it harder to do things like drop rams at the right distance.
I don’t think I’d ever use Mass Invis instead of Time Warp. Pulling off a full stake while my distortion shatter is still up is >>>>>>>> any possible battle resets.
The slowdown from not using fcgtaoe for blink outweighs the tiny distance change, and with enough use, you will know the distance very precisely even without the icon.
As far as pulling off a stomp, instead of trying to use distortion for the full stomp, just use it for the particularly moment you need. On a necro, you can use shatter 3 instead of distortion. On a warrior, you can use some sort of projectile blocker and not need to distortion, or just watch for the hammer throw and shatter for it. Same with guardians, rangers, and engies, just watch them, and shatter when necessary. While quickness stomps are obviously great, when you drop time warp, people tend to scatter, and so it is often very difficult to get the stomps in the aoe.
The counter to that is, of course, to use time warp as a stomp aid, and only drop it in order to stomp, but I feel that the utility of mass invisibility simply outweighs that, especially in a more drawn out fight.
Edit: Turn off fcgtaoe when dropping seige…except rams, if you drop a ram at the wrong distance you should be shot. Also turn it off for arrow carts/cannons.
I’d like to mention that your failure to merely press F to pick up all the loot bags that drop bugs me enourmously. So many pvp videos have this problem, and then people have the nerve to go and complain that they don’t get enough badges in wvw. JUST PRESS F.
Aside from that, nice playing. You should try out using mass invisibility instead of time warp, because its on a very low cd, and is fantastic for resetting a fight and messing with LoS. Time warp can be great, but more often it gets wasted, and has a massive cooldown. Additionally, try playing with fast cast ground targeting. That will really improve your reaction speed with regards to blink, and slightly with chaos storm.
So scepter is a ranged weapon that you need to use at mele range to get it to do damage? The clones that spawn are still useless? Yea, that doesn’t sound in any way good to me still.
Yep, sounds about right. The attack speed mechanic on the scepter is unbelievably stupid.
No, the problem is that torch is quantitatively far worse than every other possible offhand. The prestige is decent. However, the burn will get removed if you have to dodge roll out of stealth, which removes most of its damage. The phantasm, on the other hand, is completely useless. It is on a very long cooldown, meaning it is useless for shatter fodder. The skill it uses is completely useless, giving 3 stacks of confusion for only 3 seconds, because condition duration has no effect on phantasms.
The torch is horrific, and anyone who uses it simply has not thought their weapon choices through enough. In answer to the op, don’t use the torch, use something better.
Mesmer, dodge once then drop your 2x clones which also stealths you.
Shatter when he pops and off you go..
They are easy to kill
Mirror Image does not stealth you, it just creates two clones, Decoy creates one clone and stealths you.
And a thief can use CnD every 6 seconds to restealth
Blinding powder to grant them blindness miss the shatter and re-stealth
Shadow Refuge to sit in stealth for 10 seconds
Hide in Shadows to remove all conditions grant regen and stealth
All of these abilities will make the clones stop in there tracks and just stand there.
Name one other MMO that a stealth class can teleport on to you while stealthing themselves and deal a player 50-75% of there total lifepool and re-stealth every 6 seconds. I’ll wait…
Perfect world international…..and it sucks. It sucks really bad.
Starting a day with casting half an hour of mantras, no that’s not the lazy way. Mantras are in fact the opposite of lazy. They are time-consuming and pretty much useless most of the time.
I see where you are coming from, but mantras are not fun at all at PvE.
Well, the reason why they are fine in PvE, is because you never actually have to use them, so you just charge them up then completely forget they exist.
I honestly think the badge drop rate is fine, if you use the standard of the gift of battle being the benchmark. At the current drop rate, 500 badges is a quite good amount to be required for a legendary, while not feeling completely over the top.
On the other hand, when using the gift of battle as your standard, you immediately realize that the costs of the armor, weapons, and jewelry are so unbelievably overpriced, it’s inconceivable. The prices on all of these need to be dropped by a factor of 4, at the least, end of story.
As far as actually LOOTING bags go, anyone who doesn’t get 99% of their bags of loot is simply lazy. I can’t say how much it bothers me when I watch wvw videos and I see people walking around without picking up their bags of loot. I have over 1500 kills in wvw, and I have missed maybe 3-4 bags in that time, usually because I got killed suddenly. If you simply press a single button (f), you loot. It’s just that easy. The bags spawn AT YOUR LOCATION, so you should never have an excuse as to why you missed a bag.
You might want to consider slightly reworking this build, since desperate decoy is such a waste of a trait point. This can be easily tweaked into a max damage mantra build. I would go for heal mantra, mantra of pain (damage), mantra of resolve (condition cleanse) and then either mantra of concentration (break stun and stability), or decoy as previously mentioned. Since the build is pvm, you don’t even have to worry about maximum efficiency with mantras using domination 30 traits, you just need the 4% extra damage with dueling 30.
Additionally, you can swap out readied mantras for other utility skills, so if you happen to butt heads with a young karka or something, you can quickly swap out for mimic or feedback. With the 12% extra damage from 3 mantras, and 9% extra damage from illusions, you can just nuke things with greatsword autos and mirror blade, especially in dungeons and whatnot.
The way mimic works is, as people have stated, it absorbs the first projectile attack received. This attack will do full damage do you, and apply any conditions that were attached to it. Taking melee hits before this attack is absorbed will have no effect on mimic. After the first attack is absorbed, all subsequent ranged attacks will be reflected, and all non-ranged attacks will be completely blocked for the duration of the channel. It is an immensely powerful skill if used properly, especially when combined with a lower cooldown on manipulation skills trait.
I’m going for Bolt. Haven’t seen any mesmer with it yet but the effect on all clones must be pretty awesome.
As much as twilight is super duper sexy, mainhand sword is used in literally every single normal viable build, and so is a fantastic choice, though switching the skin back and forth between different stats would get real expensive, real fast.
@carighan: interesting point, and I would be prepared to give anet the benefit of the doubt if it weren’t for the phantasms that don’t work at all.
Aside from the fact that the stated build up there is horrific in many ways, torch is a really bad weapon, and should never be used, ever. The phantasm is 100% useless, and confusion is such a useless condition in pve anyway, you should never attempt to build around it.
And here I will quote from the patch notes: “This trait now works.”
There’s only one problem with this….the trait still is completely broken. I just did a thorough examination of every phantasm save the defender, and I can confidently say that the trait reduces cooldowns by 20% for a grand total of 0 of them. Here are my results:
Untraited Traited Difference Change
Warden 14 12 0.857142857 0.142857143
Berserker 7 6 0.857142857 0.142857143
Warlock 7 5.8 0.828571429 0.171428571
Duelist 7.7 6.5 0.844155844 0.155844156
Mage 7.7 6.5 0.844155844 0.155844156
Disenchanter 4.5 4.5 1 0
Swordsman 4.6 4.6 1 0
Mariner 10 10 1 0
Whaler 12.8 10.8 0.84375 0.15625
Edit: I apologize for the numbers being hard to read, but an excel spreadsheet doesn’t copy and paste well into the forum. The gist of it is, for most of the phantasms, the difference is between 14 and 17% reduction, and the trait completely doesn’t work for the swordsman, disenchanter, and mariner.
The fact that Anet blatantly lied to us in the patch notes about this trait is disturbing. It would have taken any quality assurance tester about 10 minutes to determine that the trait is in no way fixed, and in no way works.
(edited by Pyroatheist.9031)
Forum rules don’t allow petitions unfortunately. That’s why we just have to keep a thread like this one on the front page at all times, and hope that a dev comes by within the next year or two and notices something is wrong.
…What are you going to do with one block? I think I gave at least three different things, with one single block. You can’t dodge forever and there are benefits all around you. A block removes all damage. You usually can hold it instead of having to dodge at precisely the right time, which means a little wider margin for error in order to get no damage whatsoever, plus have endurance regen, if that’s important for later. And even if you don’t end up using the block, the second use of a skill before it stops blocking give you blindness or a daze you can place upon an entire line of enemies.
The only problem with a block in practice, is that multi-hit skills will completely invalidate the effects of the block, while a dodge will often allow you to more effectively avoid that sort of damage or crowd control.
I can’t even count how many times I have fought a thief and get him down to 20% before they burst me down. Then in my downed state I’ll stack the confusion and summon phantasm and get the win.
An encounter like this is as far removed from the original complaint as possible, and having this happen to you simply means you are not particularly experienced at pvping.
The mesmer only has 2 mainhand weapons: The scepter, for mid-range condition damage; The sword, for close range damage. As you can see, the mesmer is obviously missing a weapon,Additionally, while the scepter is our mid-range condition damage weapon, it is completely unacceptable in its current form, and needs to be revamped.
This is just too funny. First of all, two handed weapons no longer matter? Second of all, right now I’m lvl 78 on my mesmer.
I USE SCEPTERS that I make all the time, and PVE IS NOT HARD, EVER!
Mainhand pistol would be fun, but if it’s what’s holding you back, it won’t make you any better at this point.
People say scepter sucks? maybe….but i rock it….
it’s not the game, it’s you.
Being level 78 on your mesmer, you will not have experienced attempting to tag mobs during DEs in orr.
This is how it’s always going to be, huh?
Unless I’ve been 80 for weeks and farming Orr like a bot, I have no idea what I’m talking about?
Whatever. Scepter works becuase I MAKE IT WORK!
It could be any weapon, I would make it work for me.If you see me in Orr, farming like a chinese bot, shoot me in the head, cus farming is not a Fun Game that I would play.
Personally, I don’t farm orr at all, because I think it’s a horrible zone. However, Orr farming IS where the mesmer lack of aoe damage really takes center stage, and as a 78, you won’t have had the dubious privilege of mindless farming DEs in Orr. Mesmers again, have absolutely no problems in any other type of PvE, but where the lack of a main-hand midrange power weapon stands out like a sore thumb is in WvW, and sPvP/tPvP to a lesser extent.
I actually run a build in dungeons and some pvp right now that is 0/0/20/20/30. It is a massively defense focused build with full soldiers (power/vit/tough) on every piece of gear I have, coming out around 1800-1900 toughness and 26000 hp. I won’t go into it much right now, as I’m working on a guide for it that I’ll post soon, but those traits certainly do get some use and utility, that’s for sure. They aren’t a complete bust.
Well ya, I almost never die or not rally. Thing is, I did as well before the Vit and Healing. I mean, I really don’t think I need the extra vit at all. I’m only in the line for the support traits, which is my issue.
But ya, we can tank. Even without the Inspiration line.
The key with my setup is 100% uptime on retaliation, which is where a majority of your PvP damage comes from, and a massive amount of PvE as well, against certain types of mobs.
In a lot of testing vs another guy in sPvP, his kill log was consistently showing 13k-18k damage from retaliation during the fight.
Not to belittle retaliation, but we can keep Chaos Armor up almost 100% without traits, as well as confusion ( which hurts when acted upon, similer to retal) without traits.
Isn’t tanking with retal more of a Guardian thing? Why would a mesmer do this when they can just avoid hits?
Funny you should mention chaos armor, as I additionally have chaos armor up over 50% of the time, and when you combine a multihit combo with both retaliation and chaos armor, it deals impressive damage.
As far as it being a guardian thing, it is a whoever can have retaliation uptime thing. I actually didn’t make the build for retaliation or chaos armor, I built it for raw damage mitigation, as I have a pretty decent protection uptime as well. No class in the game has the same unbelievable damgae mitigation that mesmer does, between protection, illusions, 3% less damage per illusion, phantasmal defender, and evasiveness, so I decided to make it extreme with a bunker build, and it worked fantastically. After the fact, I noticed that I can easily get 100% retaliation uptime, and high chaos armor uptime, without sacrificing anything in the build. Guardians can get 100% retal uptime…but it requires significant sacrifices in utilities and traits.
Edit: I saw you compared retaliation to confusion. Multi-hit attacks such as a flame thrower, or rapid fire from a ranger will trigger 1 hit of confusion, but will take retaliation/chaos armor damage from each distinct hit. There is only 1 mob in the entire game that confusion is a viable damage source on, and that mob is the subject alpha boss in CoE.
It should read like this:
5,754steal 2,826cloak-dagger DISTORTION
No, it should read:
5,754steal 2,826cloak-dagger DISTORTION 11k BackstabThey don’t care if you invu, they can just try again 1sec later, a missed backstab doesnt break stealth…
The whole point is that it is a sneak attack. Once you know they are there, if they can actually land the backstab properly, you are playing mesmer wrong. The stealth doesn’t last very long, and you can start going on the offensive almost immediately. Drop chaos storm for an aegis, use shatter distortion or blurred frenzy, whichever one you hadn’t used yet for another invulnerability, pop to greatsword for a knockback, just dodge roll around, blink away, or anything else really. They will lose their stealth, and then you can go to town on them.
I actually run a build in dungeons and some pvp right now that is 0/0/20/20/30. It is a massively defense focused build with full soldiers (power/vit/tough) on every piece of gear I have, coming out around 1800-1900 toughness and 26000 hp. I won’t go into it much right now, as I’m working on a guide for it that I’ll post soon, but those traits certainly do get some use and utility, that’s for sure. They aren’t a complete bust.
Well ya, I almost never die or not rally. Thing is, I did as well before the Vit and Healing. I mean, I really don’t think I need the extra vit at all. I’m only in the line for the support traits, which is my issue.
But ya, we can tank. Even without the Inspiration line.
The key with my setup is 100% uptime on retaliation, which is where a majority of your PvP damage comes from, and a massive amount of PvE as well, against certain types of mobs.
In a lot of testing vs another guy in sPvP, his kill log was consistently showing 13k-18k damage from retaliation during the fight.
Nero has the right on this one. This combo will certainly kill you….but it is a 1-off attack and easily dodged. If they use devourer venom (most don’t) then you can’t actually dodge it, but when I see the incoming damage, I almost always hit mirror images and immediate distortion, or blurred frenzy.
I’m a full time sceptre user. While I’m all for buffs, as a clone creating confusion tool the sceptre is powerful at what it does. If you look at the clone creating third attack on its own, the spawn rate appears very slow. But if you’re managing your CD’s, traits, utilities, and keeping your auto attack going constantly, slotting in your other skills at the right time, your clone creation rate is constant allowing for a constant stream of shatters to be sent at your target.
I think a lot of this comes down to play styles. I see a lot of mesmer vids/phantasm builds etc where players like to summon and keep their clones on the ground, firing off attacks, doing their DPS, or whatever it is they do. If you want to create a heck of a lot of clones and do a hell of a lot of shatters, then the sceptre is amazing if only because of its clone spawn on 3rd attack. You’ve just got to build it right, and get very good at managing your fight around the 3 attack chain.
Just to give some examples: You want to fire your sceptre #2 skill (for confusion stacks) the moment after the clone is created, and preferably when you’ve got three clones in the works. You can use skills like iMage or temporal curtain in between auto attacks without breaking the chain, so long as you go straight back to #1. You just gotta play smart.
The problem with the chain is that in almost all shatter based builds, you will have clone on dodge roll, as well as a lot of precision for high crit rate. The crits provide you with almost constant vigor uptime, which means lots of dodging. Using a sword, you have a very short cooldown double leap combo finisher clone creator packaged into 1 skill, and you get a lot of vigor+ decent damage from blurred frenzy, though you do lose confusing images. The final result is that from dodge rolls, utilities, and other weaponskills, you have more clones than you know what to do with, certainly more than you can shatter even with maxed shatter rate. The clone from the scepter autoattack simply isn’t needed, and you’re left with a sub-standard attack chain that is both slow, and does low damage.
If you’re really hellbent on healing, I’d suggest running Water/Flock/Dwayna runes with restorative mantras and Mantra of Healing+Mantra of Pain.
You can pile on AoE heals using that, but it takes some getting used to.
Ya….after looking more into that Mantra healing thread, I see the wisdom of your words. Truth is though, that I was more hellbent on reflecting things 3x as many ways as I can now.
But to do this, I have to commit 20 trait pts in Vit and Heals, 20 points I can’t use anywhere else, even though it’d be a Good Idea to do so.Ok, so let’s say you’ve given up the dream to be a GS spanker, a Sw/Pistol phant spammer.
Let’s say that you just want to reflect things with your focus, cus it Might Be Neat and Stuff.
That’s all good cus you put 20! trait points into a line that :
Grants retaliation to phantasms….great cus I hear they migh grant regen to allies.
Gives 20% more hp to phantasms….great cus I hear they might grant regen to allies.
Phantasms grant regen to allies….only they don’t. Just kidding, unless you are on top of them every other Sunday.
AND THEN, you can get some sketchy reflection skills. THAT NO ONE WILL EVER GET OR USE!
Why would they? 20 trait points down the toilet.
Make it work!
I actually run a build in dungeons and some pvp right now that is 0/0/20/20/30. It is a massively defense focused build with full soldiers (power/vit/tough) on every piece of gear I have, coming out around 1800-1900 toughness and 26000 hp. I won’t go into it much right now, as I’m working on a guide for it that I’ll post soon, but those traits certainly do get some use and utility, that’s for sure. They aren’t a complete bust.
Sword clones use all 3 parts of the chain. If you need heavy boon stripping utility, you can spawn sword clones and let them go to work. The only other weapon we have with an autoattack chain is scepter, and it is evident that the clones only use the first part of that chain.
The reason that confusion was removed was because by stacking 3 clones, you could easily obtain upwards of 10-15 constant confusion stacks on a target, and this was not a tenable position to have a weapon in.
The major problem with the scepter autoattack is that the speed is directly related to your distance from the target. You will not start the next part of the chain until the projectile generated actually reaches the target. This means that standing next to your target provides a significantly higher attack speed than standing at 900 range. Why this was done, I have no idea. They could have easily made the mechanic like the guardian scepter attack. Regardless of why, either the attack speed needs to be uncoupled from the projectile impact, or the speed of the projectile needs to be MASSIVELY increased.
To me, the mesmer gives off far more of a professional illusionist vibe, as opposed to the sort of street performance/vaudville action that you hint at with the throwing knives.
Thanks to TheComet and Pryoatheist for there insight.
Concerning the iDuelist: while I love the pistol and the duelist, remember that this is a build ultimately centered on reflections from a focus. Even though an iDuelist may do well in spreading that regen, this build leaves little to no pts for precision, and ultimately won’t use the duelist.
And on that note, all I can add is that I’m using Staff main, Scepter/Focus alt. I have no problems setting up iWardens or iWarlocks quickly. (most of the harder mobs don’t move alot, and with a tiny distraction, wardens can last a long time), but I’m just not seeing any regen ANYWHERE off of any of them. Granted, I haven’t tried clicking one yet to see if its on but…..
I have np setting up phantasms and keeping them up, and I’m just not seeing any regen on me, anywhere around them, so how could I expect a party to trust in it? I don’t think it works, or should work better. Otherwise, I’ll just get a couple swords and a pistol and stop trying to support a party with a mesmer.
I can say that the aoe effect is somewhat limited. You will absolutely never get the regen from a warden that you have dropped on some mob at range. The iWarlock is more of a possibility. Remember, however, that the first pulse will occur at 10 seconds in, and I personally almost never let my phantasms live that long, with the exception of wardens occasionally. One last note is that as I had mentioned, the aoe regen is NOT applied to the phantasm itself. The only way you can tell if the regen is going is by standing next to the phantasm and looking at your buffs.
The mesmer only has 2 mainhand weapons: The scepter, for mid-range condition damage; The sword, for close range damage. As you can see, the mesmer is obviously missing a weapon,Additionally, while the scepter is our mid-range condition damage weapon, it is completely unacceptable in its current form, and needs to be revamped.
This is just too funny. First of all, two handed weapons no longer matter? Second of all, right now I’m lvl 78 on my mesmer.
I USE SCEPTERS that I make all the time, and PVE IS NOT HARD, EVER!
Mainhand pistol would be fun, but if it’s what’s holding you back, it won’t make you any better at this point.
People say scepter sucks? maybe….but i rock it….
it’s not the game, it’s you.
Being level 78 on your mesmer, you will not have experienced attempting to tag mobs during DEs in orr. The best you can do is go full glass cannon and pop an iBerserker in the center of the cluster, but even that just got screwed up thanks to the most recent bug that they introduced with that phantasm.
That being said, PvE is generally easy enough that you can use whatever weaponset you choose and do quite fine. The problem is more for PvP. If you actually read my analysis, which I suspect you didn’t, you would see the obvious lack of a mid-range power based weapon. This is an issue in WvW, as many people choose to run staff for defense and large utility, and then focus for again, the enormous utility in WvW, but are left with only the scepter or sword as choices. The sword is melee, and greatly reduces your fighting capability, and the scepter is really bad in a power build.
The problems with the scepter are that the autoattack chain is unacceptably slow due to its projectile hit mechanic, and additionally that it will destroy damaging phantasms when it summons a clone. The clone summon isn’t even fast enough to be worthwhile in a shatter build, as you will having far more clones produced from dodge rolls and nearly permanent vigor uptime. Confusing images and the block are okay, but only for condition damage builds.
As for the problem being me, I happen to be highly experienced with mesmer, in almost every build possible, having done sPvP extensively, open world PvE, and dungeon PvE extensively as well. You might have noticed that I dropped a massive amount of knowledge and analysis in your other thread, and I can assure you that I am in every imaginable way better and more experienced at playing, building, and analyzing mesmer than you are.
I have done extensive testing with phantasmal healing, and I can tell you exactly how it works.
For this trait, there are two types of phantasms: The pistol phantasm, and everything else. The pistol works properly, and everything else is borked.
With the pistol phantasm, the first aoe regen is applied 3 seconds after summoning, lasts 3 seconds, and is reapplied every 3 seconds. If you have phantasmal fury, giving your phantasms fury, the duelists will have both the fury and the aoe regen. With vengeful images, giving phantasms retal, the duelist will have both retal and aoe regen. With vengeful images AND phantasmal fury, you will only get the fury, but the aoe regen remains the same.
With all other phantasms, the effects are far worse. The vengeful images and phantasmal fury interaction works the same, where fury overwrites retal. However, with phantasmal healing, there is another reaction. The fury or retal buff lasts 10 seconds. After those 10 seconds, the fury or retal buff will go away, never to return. You will get a pulse of aoe regen at this point, 10 seconds after summoning. The regen duration is 5 seconds, and will be refreshed every 10 seconds, for a total of 50% uptime.
I can’t speak to the range of the regen pulse, as this is not something I have tested. Something to note is that with illusionary membrane, you recieve 2 seconds of protection every time regen is applied. With 2 pistol phantasms, this is 100% uptime on protection, but all the other phantasms are far worse, due to the 10 second refresh rate on the buff.
Edit: Something else to mention is that the aoe regen does not apply to the phantasm that generates it, only targets within the aoe radius. Additionally, I actually read your initial post, and if party healing and utility is what you are looking for, I recommend exploring a healing mantra build. The thread discussing that build can be found here :https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Healing-Mesmer-viable-Sure-is/first#post743860
(edited by Pyroatheist.9031)
It’d be overkill. You only want one cus it’s “cool”, but you don’t want to roll a thief.
It won’t make you any better.
Or any happier.
Or any cooler.
You are incorrect. Allow me to paste an analysis that I have made before as to why mainhand pistol is necessary.
If you compare the mesmer weaponset to the other casting class, necromancer, you can clearly see that mesmer is missing a weapon. Ele’s have the capability of doing either condition damage or power damage with any weapon, so they are irrelevant for this discussion.
Necromancers have 3 mainhand weapons: The dagger, for close range damage; The scepter, for mid-range condition damage; The axe, for mid-range power damage. These 3 weapons are the basic makeup of the different builds possible with a mainhand weapon.
Now you look at mesmer. The mesmer only has 2 mainhand weapons: The scepter, for mid-range condition damage; The sword, for close range damage. As you can see, the mesmer is obviously missing a weapon, and this is where mainhand pistol should be introduced. Why the ArenaNet decided to neglect to include this essential part of our weaponset, I can’t say. I can say, however, that this absolutely needs to be fixed.
Additionally, while the scepter is our mid-range condition damage weapon, it is completely unacceptable in its current form, and needs to be revamped.
I edited it. The clone is a pulsing AoE and the autoattack chain ends with a conal AoE. We’re a duelist class so it’s very unlikely that we’ll get an incredibly AoE focused weapon.
I took another look at your ideas. Your autoattack chain is nice, but has a problem. In the second attack, it has a ranged cripple stacking on an autoattack. No other class in the game is able to permanently stack cripples at range like that. The only cripple stacking currently comes from the third attack of an autoattack chain, either from a thief or a ranger, and I feel that permanent ranged cripples would not be well received. Other than that, your autoattack chain is pretty nice.
I think that deltanium’s cloning attack is a bit more interesting, with regards to combo setup possibilities and whatnot, but as I mentioned before, it may be difficult to code a ground targeted clone ability, and your idea is also quite interesting, essentially my original one but with an added aura from the clone.
I think your third ability just seems a little boring. It could use some spicing up. A ranged blurred frenzy is all well and good, but blurred frenzy sees massive use and utility because it is a 2 second distortion on an 8 second cooldown, and your ability has nothing besides somewhat lackluster ranged damage.
Here’s my take on mh pistol:
1. 3 part autoattack that stacks weakness(questionable)
2. Single target blind with a clone spawned right next to you
3. Targeted AOE “rain of illusionary bullets.” Seriously, we need this. our only aoe like it is chaos storm, and that’s not known for damage. think of the ranger’s rain of arrows, but it stacks confusion, or something instead.
For the aoe, take a look at the idea I proposed in the initial post. It seems a little bit more ‘mesmery’ than a simple bullet rain, and doesn’t have a duration, and so doesn’t need someone to stand in it to take full damage. Additionally, I want to stay away from any sort of damaging conditions associated with pistol, because it should be a power based weapon, not a condition damage based weapon, and putting confusion onto the aoe is counterproductive in that regard.
I think it’s weird that we can have dual swords but not dual pistols.
Skill 1:Phase shot>Phase lock>Phase burst: First is basic damage, second cripples, third shoots three projectiles with each one inflicting vulnerability.
Skill 2: Fatiguing facade- Jump behind your target leaving a clone behind that releases 2 pulses, first pulse inflicts 3 stacks of vulnerability and second pulse inflicts 3 stacks of weakness. There’s a short delay between pulses
Skill 3: The Gauntlet- Fire a bullet that hits a foe 8 times (slightly weaker, ranged version of blurred frenzy)
The primary focus of this is to get stacks of vulnerability and weakness and then wail on them with your phantasms. Skill 2 adds some mobility to the Mesmer.
Weakness stacks duration, not intensity. The only problem with this build is again, it lacks sufficient aoe capacity, and I mainhand pistol is the only place we can now get that capability.
The reason most people in pvp go for the clone instead of the person is very simple: Most people in pvp are very stupid. Anyone who goes for the clone instead of the person immediately gives themself away as an idiot, because the real mesmer has a BIG RED ARROW over their head. Additionaly, as was mentioned, the destealth happens a second later, athough when I use the downed skill, I immediately start spamming my 1 so that the destealth lag is as small as possible.
Allies are also stupid most of the time. The real mesmer has a blue logo, the clone a grey/white logo. Simple and straightforward.
In conclusion, the only thing wrong with our downed state is the big red kill arrow, since clones are supposed to be actually identical. As far as allies go, the problem is not with the downed state, the problem is with your allies. When I go into a pug group, the first thing I do is tell them how to revive a mesmer, because I always assume that they are entirely clueless, and usually I am correct.
@catqeer: The reason mesmer needs mainhand pistol…and not shields…is because we lack a mid-range power weapon. This needs to be fixed.
@detltanium: Having pistol with an emphasis on projectile finishers is fine, but the basic focus of the pistol needs to be power damage, as opposed to condition damage like the scepter.
I like the autoattack idea, as well as the clone generator. We don’t currently have any ground targeted clone summons, so this could be an interesting mechanic. On the other hand….we don’t currently have any ground targeted clone summons, and I don’t know how difficult it would be from a coding standpoint.
I’m a little iffy on your suppressing fire idea. I feel like mesmer needs at least 1 weapon that is able to do viable aoe damage at range, and while your suppressing fire idea is interesting, it doesn’t seem to provide the aoe capability that really is necessary.
Yep, another one. I really don’t think we should let this issue go away, as I believe that mesmer’s really need the mainhand pistol to feel like a complete class. Here is my take on the 3 skills it should contain.
1: Normal spam attack. Should be single target, but have some sort of effect tacked on, not quite sure what.
2: AoE attack: Clusterbullet/halo shot/ring shot. Shoots a bullet at a target. On impact, the bullet releases a ring of 5(more/less) bullets from the initial target that then explode on impact for whatever they hit. Visualize one of those svanir ice towers that send out the ring of exploding ice shards.
3: Clone generator: Reverse. Moves you behind the target at a distance of 900, leaving a clone at your initial condition.
Thoughts/suggetsions?
This is actually incorrect. I went through the other forums, precisely to see what was going on, and if the response was as bad as it is for mesmers. This is what I found:
Elementalist: As bad or worse than mesmers. They had a massive mechanic completely removed, with no warning.
The way I’m reading the patch notes and the trait description, this seems like it was an actual bug that got fixed, rather than a straight-up skill nerf, that caused another bug. The only spell that the trait casts which has an actual blast finisher is Churning Earth, and considering they said it won’t cast ‘unintentional’ finishers, I see a possibility of that finisher actually being added back in per the normal spell.
The way I figure it, it’s somewhat similar to the iZerker being fixed for requiring LoS, yet the ‘bouncing attack’ fix causing a bug that reduced it’s damage considerably. The LoS for that did, IMO, need to be fixed, due to the way the phantasm spawns (right next to the target, compared to near the player). The devs already said they’re looking into bringing the damage back up to par.
It’s one thing to fix a bug in a skill or trait, and have said fix cause other bugs – like the iZerker damage, and possibly the lack of an intentional blast finisher. However, it’s a whole other can of worms to alter literally the biggest mechanic of a class – illusion generation – without a significant amount of testing. Since there’s only 2 devs working on skill changes, from what I understand, I seriously doubt they alone could properly test a major mechanic change.
If you examine the huge thread on this, the “unintentional blast finishers” had become an adjusted part of the game and the expected behavior from the elementalist community.
The pvp community was not moaning or crying to the heavens about it, and people who brought elementalists as support in pve were using strategies for encounters which utilized this behavior.
It might have been a bug, but it was hardly “game-breaking”, and they could have instead corrected the tooltip and accepted it as “the new normal”
As for what they did to our iZerker and particularly our phantasms, I’m starting to wonder if their original balance team “walked” and these guys are fresh on the job from something more mundane like email services development, because it reflects a fundamental and glaring lack of understanding about how our phantasms work (hint, their damage is only HALF their function, and not even the most important half in group play!)
Happiness is a subjective thing. It’s generally much easier to start from a lower position and go to a higher one than to over-compensate then “take away” what was already there.
Also, in the case of mesmer vs other classes: It’s one thing to exclude the ground effects, turbo, or internal trim of the car, it’s another to take 4 of 6 gears from the transmission and say “you’ll be fine!”
You have a good point here. The ele nerf was doubly strange because not a single person EVER complained about the blast finishers, it was a balanced and well made mechanic that everyone liked. With phantasms, there at least was massive moaning, as much as it was uncalled for.
This is actually incorrect. I went through the other forums, precisely to see what was going on, and if the response was as bad as it is for mesmers. This is what I found:
Elementalist: As bad or worse than mesmers. They had a massive mechanic completely removed, with no warning.
Engineer: Pissed that nothing was fixed effectively, but nothing was particularly made worse.
Guardian: Almost nothing about the patch. Not surprising, as there was nothing particularly notable in it for guardians.
Necromancer: Again, not a whole lot about the patch, a few small threads about bug fixes. The necromancer was a very positive patch, as bugs were fixed and nothing nerfed, but it is just a drop in the bucket as far as necro bugs go.
Ranger: This was actually the most telling section. The atmosphere was subdued and defeatist. They weren’t pissed about the patch, they were just warning other people not to make rangers, and lamenting about how they wish their class was viable.
Thief: Other than a few whine threads from people that didn’t actually understand what the patch notes said, nothing. I think they were all just massively relieved that backstab didn’t get nerfed.
Warrior: This was the most amusing one. They were annoyed that none of their bugs got fixed. The funny thing is that everyone was annoyed about the same 2 bugs that didn’t seem to be very large, and they were whining about it, with someone mentioning every now and then that they should be thankful they didn’t get nerfed.
So, as a whole, only the elementalist forum has gone up in flames over this patch the same way the mesmer forum has, and for good reason. Although mesmers had the fewest changes…they were almost certainly the worst, or at least tied with the ele one. Everyone may be somewhat sad, but certain classes got completely destroyed, and others not so much.
The only downside to this setup is that bleeds from the sharper images traitline are not affected by condition duration modifiers, only bleeds applied from you are.
And i have no clue Gall, at armor of earth it also used to say the protection and stability lasted 11 seconds and then armor of earth stopped after 8 seconds, removing the boons.
They fixed that. It was in the patch notes.
And by fixed, you mean nerfed the actual skills instead of putting them where the tooltip said they were supposed to be.
I’m definitely getting far fewer hits per swirl on the berserker, and each of the hits do seem to be hitting for less. I was easily hitting 3-4k per swirl per mob of the berserker, and now it often hits for 1-1.5k, which is really unacceptable.
I cannot stand to tolerate playing my Mesmer (over 1100+ hours clocked)
I agree with everything said in this thread. I just have a simple question. 1100 hours WAT. Did you misplace a decimal or something?
It is blatantly obvious that the rebalancing devs have absolutely no idea what they are doing. They obviously thought that taking a 9 second, 1 stack confusion and changing it to a 3 second, 3 stack confusion is essentially the same, and possibly a buff since 1 attack during that time will result in the same damage as 3 attacks in the previous time.
However, what they fail to consider is that you will rarely actually get an attack in those 3 seconds, which means that overall, this change makes the iMage go from worthless to …..still worthless. AKA business as usual over here.
Also, just so you know, don’t do this…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaGw1DOzQhE
That is not what happens with dagger storm. I don’t entirely know what happened in that video, but feedback is the best tool in the game to instantly shut down a dagger storm.
Wiki says that quip gives your duelist chaos gun, the precursor. To me it looks a lot like Ilya. I can’t tell if its the same skin.
Your phantasm already has quip, llya, lyss its the same skin.
No it doesn’t. The skin is the same between the chaos gun, ilya, and lyss. Quip is the legendary pistol, and has a completely different skin.
Among other things, spear 4 is absolutely horrific. While it is a long-range gapcloser with a cripple, it also disables you when you reach the target. I would never ever use it against anything that might hit me, because you are simply so unbelievably vulnerable after the pull. A move like that should be disabling them, not you.
If we get a new weapon at some point, what we are missing is a two handed melee option. Yeah, I want to chase you down with my army of tiny little sledge hammer wielding illusions.
Daggers is a nice idea, I just prefer a second melee option to a fourth ranged one.
Actually, you are incorrect. The weapon we are missing is a main-hand power based weapon. The casting classes in this game do not have a 2-handed melee option, nor should they.
Incorrect? It’s a thread about wishful thinking, nothing more. There is no right or wrong.
Your opinion vs mine. We don’t have a 2 handed melee weapon. I say it’s missing and I want it. You say we shouldn’t have it. Based on the fact no other scholar has one? No thee scholar uses GS, that’s no reason we should not.
We have only one melee weapon. Adding a second main hand melee would be rather similar more similar to sword (using same offhands) than a new two hander. I would be happier with a new melee option just because we have plenty of ranged ones already.
If you’re looking for a midrange weapon that shines with power, great sword. 1 is best at long range, good at midrange. 2,3, and 5 are midrange. We don’t need another midrange power weapon.
The reason why it’s not an opinion is found by comparing the mesmer to the other caster in this game with weapon choices. Ele doesn’t count due to having multiple viable builds for every weapon. Necro has, for Main-Hand weapon choices, short range, mid-range condition, and mid-range power. This only makes sense, as those are the three possible builds one can make with a main-hand weapon. Mesmers are missing mid-range power, and it is quite a glaring hole.
If we get a new weapon at some point, what we are missing is a two handed melee option. Yeah, I want to chase you down with my army of tiny little sledge hammer wielding illusions.
Daggers is a nice idea, I just prefer a second melee option to a fourth ranged one.
Actually, you are incorrect. The weapon we are missing is a main-hand power based weapon. The casting classes in this game do not have a 2-handed melee option, nor should they.
While the dagger idea is cool, it would replace main-hand pistol as the necessary power based mid-range weapon. I honestly don’t care whether mesmers receive pistol as the mid-range power weapon, or daggers, but one or the other must be added. Personally, I feel that main-hand pistol fits mesmer better than daggers, but that is inconsequential with regards to the need for this mid-range power weapon.
If you compare the mesmer weaponset to the other casting class, necromancer, you can clearly see that mesmer is missing a weapon. Ele’s have the capability of doing either condition damage or power damage with any weapon, so they are irrelevant for this discussion.
Necromancers have 3 mainhand weapons: The dagger, for close range damage; The scepter, for mid-range condition damage; The axe, for mid-range power damage. These 3 weapons are the basic makeup of the different builds possible with a mainhand weapon.
Now you look at mesmer. The mesmer only has 2 mainhand weapons: The scepter, for mid-range condition damage; The sword, for close range damage. As you can see, the mesmer is obviously missing a weapon, and this is where mainhand pistol should be introduced. Why the ArenaNet decided to neglect to include this essential part of our weaponset, I can’t say. I can say, however, that this absolutely needs to be fixed.
Additionally, while the scepter is our mid-range condition damage weapon, it is completely unacceptable in its current form, and needs to be revamped.
Hey guys, new mesmer here….
I’m confused =( I traited for mantra heals yet do not see any healing when casting them…..unless of course it’s the #6 slot one. Don’t know if I am doing something wrong or am bugged….any help is appreciated!
It heals on the charge, not the use.