Guild Wars 2

Winds this is true, but thieves really can’t offer the utility and support Mesmers can. Thieves are meant to be the most swift class, so I think trying to match a Mesmer up to a Thief’s speed is a bit unfair to the Thief. Speed is their thing. Other classes don’t try to harp on the Mesmer’s ability to make clones and be annoying, so don’t harp on Thieves for their class strengths.

To the OP: the swiftness on the Focus was buffed. Signet of Inspiration now works out of combat and may grant swiftness. Chaos storm may grant swiftness. We also arguably have the best in-combat offensive movement, as Geiir said (I’d argue we’re tied for in-combat mobility with Thieves).

Give us any more awesomeness and we become just too stinking amazing and we break the game.

<3 Mesmers

Some suggestions for early game PvE:

1) Try using one handed sword, and maybe offhand focus or sword, if you don’t mind changing your weapon scheme. This will give you a little splash damage, since sword attacks may hit more than one enemy. Blurred Frenzy (the sword main hand #2) makes you invulnerable for 2 1/2 seconds, which is soooo useful. This may very well help your dying problem a bit. Sword offhand gives you a block, which is useful for some survivability, and also the Phantasmal Swordsman, which is the single highest sustained DPS for the Mesmer. Focus offhand gives the Temporal Curtain, which gives swiftness (so good for leveling!) and also can be activated to pull enemies towards you. If you combine this with your sword #3 you can immobilize a large group of mobs for some good splash with Blurred Frenzy.

2) Definitely practice utilizing your clones. For example, if a big veteran is about to unleash a projectile, you can use Phase Retreat (Staff #2) to blink back and create a clone. The clone will then take the full attack for you (and probably die, but in this situation, consider the clone to be like a free aegis for that attack). Use your clones to block projectiles, and try to shatter them fairly frequently, since they’ll die very quickly anyway.

3) Some helpful utility skills (which you should be able to unlock pretty quickly) decoy (soooo good in “oh kitten” situations), Phantasmal Defender (it’s not bad at very low levels, but quickly starts to suck, so don’t get attached).

4) Take advantage of Chaos armor. Mesmers get a lot of access to ethereal fields, and also have several leap finishers. Leaping into or out of an ethereal field gives chaos armor, which always grants protections, which reduces damage by 33%. This can increase your survivability by heaps.

I remember really hating the early levels, and even now that I’m 80 PvEing on my Mesmer is sometimes very frustrating.

Good luck and if you have any more questions feel free to ask.

I like all of your suggestions. Hopefully Anet keeps working to improve immersion.

I definitely do not like that idea. I think that this block mechanic should only be incorporated for the skills that already block.

While I haven’t done the end game content yet, I do think that some of the combat could be a lot more dynamic overall, concerning big bosses, and by big I actually mean physically large.

It’s funny that combat between players is very engaging and exciting, yet when you have to fight a big foe, all he usually does is roar or do other fairly generic attacks.

I like the idea of that.

I didn’t get any WXP for successfully defending my Dolyak against two thieves because they got away without me killing them. I then felt compelled to escort the Dolyak to the tower it was going to, which took several minutes. I received no reward for this.

It was very disappointing. I know that I saved that Dolyak from getting destroyed by those thieves, yet I got nothing for it.

I do find a lot of intrinsic value in just helping out my team, but since I’m just getting back into WvW, I wanted to start small and re-learn the ropes before I dived into the zerg. Due to this mechanic, I feel like I would be better off with the zerg, instead of doing these smaller tasks.

Almost all classes get blocks though. I’m pretty sure the OP is specifically talking about block skills, not shields specifically.

So for example, my Mesmer has two ways to “block” without a shield: with a scepter or sword.

I think this is an amazing idea, and so much better than the current living story content. I think that this type of thing would really get players going back to experience all the different events that they themselves might trigger.

Right now we get absolutely nothing tangible for doing it. Of course I realize it has to be done sometimes, but why not allow us to get world exp for doing it, even if it were just a small amount.

It sucks that we don’t get exp or anything out of doing it anymore, though I understand why. A lot of people were avoiding all the real WvW and just escorting Dolyaks for money/glory/exp. But if all we got for doing it were World exp, most people wouldn’t just come in to take advantage of it, but people who actually want to participate in WvW would be able to do something even when there’s no action on the map.

Like I would love to help build up the garrison, but I don’t have the money. The main way I can contribute to my WvW when things are quiet is to escort Dolyaks or… do nothing. =/

I wouldn’t mind the idea of one or two champion defenders who are super ultra bunker types. I would of course assume that they couldn’t actually kill the invaders, only defend nearly indefinitely.

I wouldn’t mind walking into more epic battles. I would also like to see this one champion defender periodically use an ability to revive the dead guys, instead of having it just happen like you suggested. I think this would really increase the chance of walking in on a fight instead of a funeral.

I honestly think people are overreacting. I’m glad there are some more positive people in this thread. (in before poopy heads come).

Torment is only going to be on a few skills, and just like any other condition, I assume you’d have to spec into it to make it devastating. As it is, I think it’ll just be an annoyance, and another way to make condition builds more viable, which is needed on classes like Mesmer and Thief.

I don’t think this will make them somehow more overpowered; I think it’ll just help with diversity. For example I just joined a guild yesterday and was asking about the popular Mesmer builds. The fairly unanimous response was that there were two viable Mesmer builds. TWO builds that are viable. I do think my guild mates were a little nearsighted with this proclamation, but the point still stands that some diversity would be very welcome.

I agree with everything Coopziana has said thus far. NPCs are just the right strength, because it only takes one or two heroes to turn the tide in most events. I also agree that NPCs should only get rezzed when someone actually revives them. It isn’t very realistic when they all pop back to life just because you killed the last of the attackers. While this game obviously isn’t going for realism, I think a little touch of it in this case would make the game more captivating and interactive.

Now that being said… a lot of humanoid monsters have a class, so to speak, and they’ll use a limited number of skills from that class. I would like to see our friendly generic NPCs do something besides auto attack. Even if the strength of those abilities was toned way down, they look very pathetic when fighting. They just kind of stand there until they die. For peasant types I understand this, but for soldiers, make them like a warrior or something and let them each have a few of the warrior skills to use, so they do something.

Great idea. Just brilliant. I really want to see a lot of the Achievement panels cleaned up because it’s all so messy right now. It’s hard to find and follow your progress on Achievements. This is definitely an idea worth implementing.

I love keeping all my nice lore items, and I would never delete my holiday items, such as the newest journal by Majory Delaqua. But do I want these items to take up space in my bank/inventory? No. Please allow us some sort of “trophy collectible” thing where we can keep our unique holiday items and fashion.

I would buy more fashion from the gem store if it wasn’t going to just sit in my bank and take up space because I don’t want to wear it right now…

Thank you for your intelligence, Tribble. You managed to post before I got to it.

Why do you dislike mounts?

Goorman.7916:

@Temariah, you do not know what you are talking about. Balancing the game is not about making skills “equally powerful” ( which washes out everything interesting from the system), it is about giving players interesting and powerful skills and counter skills to defend yourself from these powerful skills. If the developers had the option to give skills resource cost, they would have had opportunity to support the balance.Now they do not have it.
Look at successfull game called dota2. Almost every hero has something overpowered built into him, but that is what makes dota2 fun and interesting to play/watch.
Micromanaging resources is not an “inhibition” mechanic, it is a tool to give players choice how to spend their resource/what skills to use.Without this “inhibition” there is nothing in the game but spamfest.

And btw, i named activation time as a resource only because wiki states it is. I personally do not consider activation time a resource. So GW2 has 1-1.5 resources(CD/initiative), GW1 has 6.

@Kaizz, does it make the game fun, because you do not have to think what skills to use and can just spam all of them whenever you want?

To address your points, in order of absurdity.

Dota 2 is balanced relatively well, yes. But no heroes are absurdly OP. Watch a few pro games and you will see that every single thing you may think is OP in a pub match is incredibly easily countered by skill. Let’s take Ursa for a moment. He owns in pubs because no one tries to counter him via things like Shadow Demon’s Demonic Purge or Gyrocopter’s Call Down or Razor’s Static Link, all of which go through magic immunity and severely nerf Ursa. Pros know these simple little tricks and will use them if you ever actually see Ursa in a pro game. Also, Dota 2 is such a different game because of the way the heroes are created. Each hero is relatively niche, which means that it is easy to counter, but also easy to be victim to its powers if you don’t counter it or balance it some way. GW2 intentionally defies this type of niche role, even going as far as making it so that every player can do everything moderately well (yes some classes are better at some things). Please don’t try to use references that you yourself are not in touch with. It makes you seem a little uneducated.

Anyone in GW2 who just spams skills without thinking is probably a pretty low tier player. The idea that you can just spam skills is true, yes, but the effectiveness of it is enough to teach most players to find smart skill rotations. For example, as a Mesmer, I can use my Sword #3 to cripple/immobilize, then use Sword #2 to do some moderate damage, at the cost of rooting myself. This is a very simple example, but you can see how it’s much more effective to immobilize before using your strike that roots you. Without using proper skill rotation, my opponents can very easily just walk out of my sword strikes. The game is built this way intentionally. Very few attacks just do damage, so just spamming random stuff whenever really doesn’t help. Even a lot of the weapon skills offer some great utility, and not taking advantage of that really weakens your character.

In response to your comment about how the design is to not make everything equally powerful, you are correct on a small scale level. Each individual skill should not be equal to every other skill in the game, but it is important to keep a balance on a class basis. Each class should be roughly as good as another, though different. This balance has not quite been reached, though, since some classes are stronger at sPvP, or 1v1s, or dungeon speed runs. But that isn’t due to the fact that there is no resource. It’s much more due to the inherent challenge of balancing.

I think the issue we’re having is that you think the unbalance is caused (for some reason) by a lack of resource management. To me, I see that this is probably not true, and my personal opinion is that managing resources is annoying and just about as silly as rested HP bonuses in Tera.

Bright.9160:

Temariah.9372:

I wouldn’t get bummed out just yet. People say things on the forums all the time, but until he can provide proof it’s really just heresy.

her·e·sy [her-uh-see]
noun, plural her·e·sies.

1. opinion or doctrine at variance with the orthodox or accepted doctrine, especially of a church or religious system.

2. the maintaining of such an opinion or doctrine.

3. Roman Catholic Church . the willful and persistent rejection of any article of faith by a baptized member of the church.

4. any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs, customs, etc.

Do you mean hearsay?

By your own words, heresy works just as well. Any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs, customs, etc. He may well be believing in a notion that is not true and is not established at all, therefore making the 4th definition work just fine.

Regardless of your rudeness, my comment still stands. I would appreciate some sort of evidence of your claim, otherwise we don’t really have any basis for discussion.

I wouldn’t get bummed out just yet. People say things on the forums all the time, but until he can provide proof it’s really just heresy.

Where did they say this? Can you give us a link or something please?

ArcTheFallen.7682:

Er, I think your idea of evade hate destroys the idea of evade.

I agree with you whole-heartedly.

To the OP: Evasion is a very legitimate part of the game. It’s not overpowered or unbalanced at all. You’re the only person I’ve ever heard of who has some dislike of it.

They didn’t want to make resources in this game. They wanted to simultaneously streamline combat to make it “simpler” while also leaving in enough of a skill cap that revolves around balancing your conditions.

I’m not sure where you’re coming from, honestly, because this is much easier with fewer resources. Having a ton of random resources for skills makes it harder to balance, because you not only have to weigh the cost of the skill in terms of resource to determine its power, but you also have to compare that to other skills that use a different resource. So if one skill uses 50 mana and does X damage, but another skill uses 50 energy and does X damage, it’s may still not be balanced because perhaps energy is harder to restore than mana. In this way, they’ve made it easier to balance, and I think they’ve done a great job of it so far.

If you’re going to complain about balance, at least offer some examples of what you think is unbalanced, because there aren’t many skills that are completely unbalanced in all aspects.

Also, micromanaging resources is a bore to me as a player. It’s a silly inhibition mechanic that I hate. I’m so glad mana doesn’t exist.

Whiner. Don’t complain because you got a streak of bad RNG. It’s just silly.

Pretty straightforward suggestion here. Sometimes it’s hard for me to find the specific Achievement I’m looking for so I can track it or get hints on what to do. I think it would be really nice if the Achievement list were more organized.

So you would have things like mini games and jumping puzzles put together under one header, and when you clicked it would break down into mini games (currently called activities) and jumping puzzles. And people would know more easily “oh, activities, this is where I’ll find all the non-combat types of lore/fun things.” And all of our seasonal events could be put under a major header called “Special events” or something like that.

Maybe I’m just a neat freak, but I feel like this simple little change would really tidy up the achievement list and make it easier to find them.

What do you guys think?

DISCLAIMER: Yes, I am one of those poor folk who thinks WPs are rather expensive. Please don’t mock.

So the suggestion is pretty simple: If you are standing in the light of a WP (or near) the cost to teleport to another WP is decreased significantly, maybe by up to 90% of the regular cost.

While this may not be a big change for those who don’t want to even walk to the nearest WP, it would be nice for people like me who don’t really make a lot of money (WvW woes). It would allow us to go just a bit out of the way to save a decent chunk of money. We would still be more inconvenienced than people who don’t mind the fees, but it would be nice.

What are you guys’ thoughts?

TheLaughingMan.4320:

No endgame other than WvW. The players who keep saying, “The game is the endgame!” are just anet parrots and absolutely nuts. Why was GW1 so popular for so many years after it was released? Why did people keep playing even PvE for so many years? Challenging end-game areas, and truly open-ended character building, which took trinity and threw in hybrids and so many different options.

GW2 after you have made a couple chars and leveled to 80, PVE has NOTHING to offer. What, do Orr quest chains over and over? Boring. “Explore”? All the hearts are “kill x” and frankly, if you are saying to play the game itself is the endgame, you have not made more than one character.

GW2 needs a radical change in how character skills are handled, need more freedom and more possibilities with builds, and needs combat to not be just a numbers fest.

They may have one moderator reading this section just to remove posts that are foul rants, but almost nothing anyone has suggested in here has been even close to implemented.

The game is turning into a korean-style cash RNG squeeze while the game is dying. NCSoft and Anet have some financial and structural problems, so this may not change anytime soon. Anet is designing content around the gemstore, rather than the other way around.

Pick up GW1, hope they keep the servers up for a while.

You disgust me. What makes you know what the game needs. Your petty opinion is that of just one person. Posts like this aren’t helpful. This entire thread is hardly helpful.

Polls and actual statistics of what multitudes of people think/want would be much more representative of the game and what it actually needs.

My personal opinion is that the game is quite fun if you try to have fun in it. The world is beautiful, the quests are far more engaging than other quests in other games that I shall not name, and the lore is fascinating.

Once again, this is just my opinion, but I truly think that the people who don’t have fun should consider why they aren’t having fun. Are you not having fun because you’re grinding the same quest chains over and over again? That’s your choice. You can choose to do something else. Many people may argue that there isn’t anything to do, but there truly is, if you look for it. Create a fun RP event within your guild. Do a scavenger hunt. Try to get a Legendary. Try to get the top ranks in WvW. Have you explored all the zones? If you have, did you not enjoy them because you rushed through simply in order to “finish” the zone? This brings to light another thought I’ve had. A lot of people play only to “progress.” They don’t seem to play to have fun. Take the time to look for books to read in Divinity’s Reach. Actually admire the vista when you find it. Don’t just play just to play. Play to enjoy.

Sorry for the wall of text, but it really bothers me when people say that there isn’t much endgame. I won’t say that the whole game is endgame because I’m sure that line has been overused by now, but honestly, even without creating alts, there is so much to do. The reason people don’t do those things is because they may not get tangible rewards for it. But isn’t fun a reward in and of itself?

Clones never overwrite phantasms, so one dodge roll shouldn’t overwrite your oldest phantasm, to my knowledge. Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. Testing in game right after this post to verify.

I do agree that it would be a nice thing to have, but your concern should be much more about shattering phantasms, not overwriting them.

I agree with you most, Nox. I expect more Legendaries to be added in the future, seeing as GS has 3 and other weapons get 1. I assume that there will be awesome and diverse skins so that everyone can find their thing.

Most of the names of Legendaries are steeped in Lore. You can’t really change what they look like. For example the Longbow, Kudzu, is a flower in some other language. Can’t really mess with it without changing the name. Same goes with Bifrost being the bridge that connects Asgard to Midgard in Norse mythology.

If Mesmers are the least loved, but we still get 15 bullet points… that’s pretty legitimate. I think people think that huge nerfs and crazy stuff is going to happen, but honestly the most Anet has truly done as far as nerfs to ANY class are small things. They’re taking their time and they’re being cautious so things stay awesome.

Right now, to my knowledge, Mesmer illusions borrow from the Mesmer’s armor, power, precision, critical damage and healing. Here’s my source for this info: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Illusion

Now, I think most people agree that Mesmer illusions are really strong, but pretty squishy, generally. So I was really trying to think of a selfish solution to my problem with my build that is caused by my phantasms dying too easily. My phantasms do lots of defensive things for me like granting regeneration, or reflecting projectiles. I’m not a damage-based Mesmer, but neither am a bunker Mesmer, just to give some context. So the solution that I thought might be cool is this:

Phantasms and clones borrow all of your stats, but at a reduced percentage. So like, they would still borrow power, precision, crit etc from the Mesmer, but instead of taking ALL the Mesmer’s crit , they would only take maybe 50 of it. Same idea with power and other stats.

What this would do to some of the common builds:
1) your common burst shatter builds (they typically allow the phantasm to do one attack, then shatter it at the end for burst, combined with other skills) would lose some of that initial burst, which is good because this is the really OP build that honestly needs to be toned down.
2) impossible to kill “legion” builds based around phantasm uptime would not have the same sustained damage (power is now converted at a 100% ratio to illusions. I’m suggesting they only get 50% of that, so they would effectively do half their current damage), but they would also borrow vitality, so they would live longer and synergize better with all the traits you can get.
3) The condition Mesmer who loves making illusions crit to stack bleeds would be simultaneously buffed/nerfed. He would not see as many crits, or as high of bleeds, but since illusions would be borrowing his vitality, they would have better survivability and would offer more sustained damage.

I really think this idea might help to tone down some of the ultra powerful shatter burst specs, and also really help poor Mesmers out in PvE where we really need it. The key difference with my suggestion and the way things work right now is that illusions do not borrow our vitality. They die too easily. I am more than willing to sacrifice ~50% illusion damage for a better uptime.

To anyone who will rage and say we can’t nerf Mesmer, think of it this way: your damage won’t necessarily decrease, it’ll just be distributed differently. So instead of all that cheesy burst up front, your illusions will live longer and will give better sustained damage. I don’t think this is a nerf, just a change-up.

To anyone who will rage that we can’t make illusions more tanky for reasons X or Y: realize that this suggestion would nearly half the illusion’s damage. It’ll make it a bit more important to focus down the real Mesmer, which I believe is how things were meant to be with the class anyway.

Please, any opinions or discussion on this are more than welcome.

Almost all links work for me by clicking. This is the first that hasn’t. =P

I know it has a kind of long CD, but blink can be used for movement all the time. The Centaur rune grants swiftness when you heal, for 10 seconds, so pop that in and use mirror, which is on a 15 second CD, and you have 66% swiftness uptime without the focus, if you really hate it.

I don’t think that having that extra swiftness is really so amazing. I mean, as a thief, you have to give up a utility slot for the extra movement… and thieves have some awesome utilities. Sometimes I’m down about it, but I remind myself that these other classes really are giving something up to have that swiftness. They don’t just get it for free as a lot of people whine about.

Thanks a ton for that link. It was ultra helpful. I’ve been wondering why I have 28k HP and my illusions still die just as easily…

Your link didn’t work for me, Kaaji.

CC interrupts your target, so I’m not sure what you mean. If you CC someone who is just running around, you aren’t interrupting anything, but if you CC someone who is doing anything legitimate, yes, it interrupts.

Also, in regards to the OP, I also had similar thoughts about that line, but I didn’t take such a violent approach. Instead I decided to figure out a build that might actually use those traits. I found that it was a confusion/interruption build centered around forcing your opponent do stand idle due to bursting stacks of confusion or interruption of their important abilities. While I won’t say that I loved this build, it was relatively successful. If you’d like to theorycraft, I’d love to do so with you.

I will agree that I think some of these traits (and plenty of traits for all classes, my boyfriend constantly whines about how the warrior trait that reduces weapon swap to 5 seconds doesn’t work) are less useful than others or downright bugged.

Looks like you’re using the same weapon setup I’ve been using all game.
I’ve tried a lot of different builds, but this one has been my favorite for a long time now: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgUQNAW8dlwzipHVzqGaNJiJFDHFeSB0tcoFUSBudhA;ToAA2U3YuRcj9G3NybWEMAZTA

Now let me explain a bit, because I think a lot of this looks a bit… not normal. Between phase retreat and illusionary leap, you have two short CD leap finishers to go with your 4 Ethereal fields. You can basically keep Chaos Armor near constantly in combat. Chaos Armor gives you protection, which reduces damage by 33%. During the small periods of time when you may not have chaos armor for protection, your phantasms provide regeneration, which grants you protection due to traits. Also your rune grants you regeneration, which grants you protection. If you juggle your stuff properly, you will have 100% protection uptime. This is what you need as a short-ranged sword user to get in there and deal damage.

The traits that do not gear toward the constant protection I’ve described are all about damage. The dueling traits allow you to have great clone generation, and the trait that makes illusions bleed on crits is fabulous for warden. I’d argue it’s a must-have for any Focus build. You have a 40% reduced CD for focus skills, which is great cause Warden does so much damage.

Here’s my basic rotation for killing/farming. For PvE you’ll probably want to tag a few things with staff (grab as much as you can, you’ll be fine), lure them close, send your clone to leap at them (don’t swap yet!), summon a warden, then swap so they’re immobilized in your warden whirl. You now have chaos armor and your warden is doing confusion bolts, so even if they get a bit of distance the bolts will still hit them.

I usually group up about… 10 mobs, do this, and they all die within about 5 seconds. It’s great.

Gear is all about precision and power and vitality, since you want to crit so your warden can stack bleeds. Toughness isn’t really a priority since you have constant protection.

I’m the type of very social person who needs to have people to talk to and people to do things with frequently to really enjoy a game. That being said, the guild that I join needs to have activity requirements, because I refuse to be in a pathetic guild with 200 inactives. I also refuse to be in a zerg guild that has no application requirement. I want mature, intelligent, english-speaking guildmates, and that typically requires a thorough interview or application.

In the past I have led my own semi-hardcore guild, and have been very successful in the games in which I have chosen to lead a guild. Because of this I have extremely high standards for guilds and won’t settle for anything less than an extremely active, social, skilled group with a mind toward self improvement and fun in all areas of the game.

I have no problem transferring servers to find a good guild, as the community will be what keeps me playing. I will, however, limit the worlds to NA worlds.

Oh, and if you have a generic, lame, unoriginal, troll guild name, please don’t bother inviting me to join you.

Sorry if I come off as really harsh, but I’ve been looking for a great guild for a while now (since the start of the game) and every guild I’ve joined has been disappointing.

Thank you, Creslin. If a Mesmer is tactically feinting out your dodges, forcing you to use your escapes on other lesser abilities, I think it’s great that you got owned by Moa. That’s how things work. You get rewarded for being patient and tactical.

As a Moa, you can still run, you can still dodge, you can still LoS. You don’t just stand there like a ninny. You run for 10 seconds. In the grand scheme of things, 10 seconds is not a long time.

And in any case, if a Mesmer is using Moa for his elite, he’s really sacrificing the team play with Time Warp. Moa morph can change a small scale battle dramatically. Time Warp can alter a large scale battle dramatically. Ultimately I think you get more mileage out of Time Warp, so if a mesmer is using Moa, they’re really sacrificing a lot, comparatively.

Yes, I have Moa on my bars. How often do I use it? Not even once per day. I’ve used it maybe 5 times since the game came out. I don’t even really care about it that much. If it works, great. If the opponent out-plays me and has another trick up their sleeve to interrupt or avoid… meh, oh well.

It really isn’t the be-all-and-end-all unless you don’t understand how to deal with it.

I love that idea so much Carighan.

Omg. I want it. .

I’m pretty sure Anet has stated that they aren’t going to separately balance PvE and PvP, and I for one am glad. If you have to separately balance one single skill for two different situations, that skill is inherently not balanced. That’s a flaw of the skill, and it also makes it harder to get into the game, and it also creates an even bigger disparity between PvPers and PvEers.

That being said, I think you made a few good points, and a few bad points. I’ll start with the bad so we can end on a happy note.

Moa is not nearly as powerful as people think it is. A good comparison is with 100B. 100B is deadly and can potentially kill you in one simple combo. (Moa Morph can’t even kill you directly, it just gives you a different skill bar) Once you learn how to avoid 100B, or watch for the swirly yellow lines of Frenzy, the skill becomes much less dangerous. Moa Morph is similar in that it is fairly easy to avoid. Difference is, Moa has a MUCH longer CD. Also, after being Moa Morphed you still have every capability to run away, which for some reason, most of the people don’t do?

As someone else already stated, Mesmers honestly cannot spec for respectable condition damage and power. Within a few hits, you should be able to decipher which one they are more into, and react accordingly. If they’re specced for power, get rid of those phantasms as soon as possible, as they’ll be doing the most damage by far. If they’re condition, smartly use condition removal to get rid of your conditions, but only once they reach high amounts of stacks.

Mesmers can rarely, if ever, compare damage to other classes. My boyfriend is a warrior and I can honestly say that his simplest auto attacking does potentially more than most anything I can do short of him standing inside three Phantasmal Warden bubbles. We can amount to some sort of sad burst with a phantasm or two, blurred frenzy, shattering the illusions, and mantra of pain, but all that work will probably still amount to less damage than what a Pistol Whipping thief can get from one round of haste. This leads me to the happy agreement notes.

Yes, we have a lot of defensive abilities. But that’s because our fights are a battle of attrition. Like I stated above, we can’t really burst anything down besides perhaps a glass cannon clothie. I typically play a full support healer in other MMOs, and the Mesmer (oddly) fights like that. We don’t do amazing damage unless we can perfectly manipulate what’s going on. We survive until the other person dies.

Yes, Mesmers are very powerful in 1v1, but I think there are two reasons for this:
1) We’re frustrating to fight, by design. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of our clones and phantasms, and we can summon more pretty easily and quickly, and some of us even spec so that if you do destroy our shinies it’ll give you condtions like cripple or confusion. Now this doesn’t necessarily make us overpowered. It just makes us annoying. But that’s the design of the class. We’re meant to be the masters of mirage and annoyance. In group fights that aspect is hardly noticeable, but in 1v1, it shines. That part won’t change. It’s the focus of the Mesmer. We annoy you. We hex you. We deal pretty good sustained damage. You can’t take that away and still call the class a Mesmer.
2) We are versatile. This means that anyone fighting us has to know a lot of bulk knowledge to make sure that they can counter our stuff. Not only do they need to understand their own skills and their own rotations, but they have to know ours as well, and we have a lot of very unique and crazy skills.

Well that’s my wall of text. Hope it adds something to the discussion.

Well, for me, a big part of dungeon PvE is using my phantasms and clones strategically., not necessarily for damage.

For example, in the Ascolonian Tombs, I used my warden to defend against the archer boss while I rezzed a player. Everyone stopped DPS so that he didn’t go into the phase where he jumps across the gap, so all he could do was shoot at me with either his direct projectile (which was absorbed) or his little AoE, which didn’t do enough damage to keep me from rezzing my ally.

Another example is sending a clone into battle before anything else, which typically causes the mobs to aggro on the clone first. Now given, that poor clone won’t typically last too long, but it’s causes the mobs to clump up around one spot (sans the ranged mobs) and allows your team to unleash their AoE for maximum damage right away.

I think Mesmer has a lot of unique things to bring to the table, but you definitely can find a really boring build where your phantasms do all the work. Chaos Storm is probably one of the best group abilities in the game. Have one of your team mates use a blast finisher inside the storm, so everyone gets chaos armor. It’s a huge benefit. Also, Mesmers can have incredible boon stripping, and sometimes ripping a major boon off of your opponent can really save your team some hurt.

I really enjoyed my Mesmer in my one and only dungeon run through Ascolonian Tombs. xD I died soooo many embarrassing ways, and used arcane thievery to steal some horrible necromancer form from the necro boss, and then could do nothing but summon bone minions that disappeared within ~1 second until I died (lolz), but overall it was really fun.

Tweak your build and find what fits you. Especially test out different weapon sets. Greatsword is surprisingly full of utility, with the crippling phantasm and the might stacking for allies and the direct boon stripping. Try that one out.

I think I’d rather ask Anet to alter the damage listed on tooltips, so that it makes more sense in general, as per what Easymode was saying, than ask them to make this one tooltip make sense within itself.

That being said, it’s nice to see someone actually doing tests on something instead of ranting about how weak an ability is or how OP an ability is without any data on the subject.

So, first of all, have you any coding experience? Have you any game creating experience? Have you ever been on a design team? Have you ever dealt with balance issues in a game?

What right have you to criticize Anet’s design.

I have confounded people in 1v1 duels EXTENSIVELY with clones. My clones are beefed up with all the extra HP, and that’s because I enjoy confusing people with them. In a recent duel with my warrior boyfriend, he LoS’d behind a rock to avoid a shatter. I immediately summoned up a few more clones (I was using staff at the time) and when he came back out from behind the rock, I stood stock still and just auto attacked a few times. He went for one of the clones first. I auto attacked a few more times while he wasted several precious seconds with my clone. (My clones have about 9k HP traited, so it can easily seem like they are too tanky to be a clone).

The point that I’m trying to state is not that everyone sucks and doesn’t know how to play the game, but more that you can’t expect the AI to do something beyond their capacity, when you can easily behave like a clone. If you want clones to be deceptive, they can be, but you have to act like the clone. The clone can’t act like you.

Stuns and breaking stuns are what makes the game so dynamic. This isn’t a game where you just stand still and hit buttons until one of you dies. You need to time your CCs and save your evades. If you’re using two dodges and a stun breaker to break one single stun then you are most certainly overreacting. If I see a warrior frenzy (yellow lines swirl around him for a moment) I know he’s going to bull’s charge me. I wait for the bull’s charge, and when he starts to use his 100 blades I’ll Phase Retreat or blink away. I’m not trying to insert that I’m somehow way better than you, but I’m saying that it’s probably a good idea to use your escapes judiciously. You don’t need to dodge every stun. A lot of them last for a very short amount of time, and honestly you probably only need to break the stun if it’s followed with a high damaging ability. Sometimes warriors will just toss out a bola that immobilizes for 4 seconds, but if I don’t see them follow up with anything, I’ll just chill out. Take a step back and try to think if you really need to waste your stun breaker, because stun breakers have longer cooldowns than the stuns. This is as intended, which supports the idea that you do not need to break every stun. Just use your skills wisely.

Your statement about amulets reminds me of the older arguments about weapons, and how your skills are “chosen for you” by your weapons. Yes, this results in fewer possible skill combination (as compared to GW1) but there are more viable ones. Every single build is strong in a baseline sort of way. In the same sense, every amulet is strong, and none of them suck. If there is an amulet that isn’t in the game, it’s either because it would suck, or it would be too strong compared to the other ones.

Class stats are balanced in ways beyond obvious numbers. So for example, Warriors get more base HP than Guardians because Guardians have much MUCH better healing. I will agree that I wish some of the clothies had higher base power (Necro and Ele come to mind) because they don’t seem to balance out the way that Warrior and Guardian do in terms of HP. Now that being said, I’m glad there are differences because it makes things more dynamic. I think some classes should have less armor and less HP but more power naturally, because that’s what their archetype is.

Random battles are fine the way they are. Here’s why I think this: there is virtually no queue as there might be when you’re waiting for players to join. I mean, random sPvP is meant for practicing and having fun and getting glory, nothing more. It’s so easy to do tPvP that it’s apparent (to me at least) that that’s the real organized “serious” stuff, not just basic sPvP. Also, yes you might join a game where one side has more than the other, but the auto balance system will kick in, and while I find this frustrating sometimes as well, I really think sPvP is just for fun and practice, not serious winning. You can still get tons of points if you lose.

Have you ever heard of a guy called Reyon? He’s part of Team Paradigm, and I hope to see him on the competitive GW2 scene soon. He streams GW2 and plays Necro and thief, and wow… his necro is terrifying. I consider him to be a top tier player (and he deserves the title) but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something from him.

My boyfriend has tried the HB combo against me, and in our serious duels I have never taken more than two swings from the attack, ever. This is because I consciously make sure that I have one stun break or teleport off CD at almost all times while fighting him because I understand that it’s necessary against his class. A lot of the game is knowing the intricacies of the classes, and of your own abilities.

If one disable is wrecking you, then you need to toss in a stun break utility. You need to cover your weaknesses with your build, or people who are geared toward that weakness will always dominate you, and you will always be frustrated.

Rell.8395:

1). Any good mesmers throws down clones or goes invis before actually casting the ultimate. No one’s just going to stand there and cast his spells waiting for you to interrupt it. Not all builds have interrupts.

2). You need a certain degree of survivability or you’re just going to get facerolled before you can do anything.

3). Sure you can practice but who’s stopping the MESMER PLAYERS from practicing?

Re: 1) Stealths only last at most 3 seconds, so if a Mesmer stealths, wait approximately 1 second, then dodge. I actually didn’t focus that tip on interrupting because I find it much harder to time than dodges, because dodging gives you ~1 second of invulnerability. It’s just easier for me, maybe interrupting is easier for you. If so, more power to you. If you really are having a hard time keeping tabs on the Mesmer, then you need to step back for a moment and take a quick glance at the field. Clones do not move if you are in range. The Mesmer will. Clones also only attack about once every 4 second or so (my estimation, I could be off). I find that it’s not hard to find which one is the real Mesmer, and once you do, you should try to put a target on it, and keep it in your sights. Like I said, watch the Mesmer carefully!

Re: 2) Right! That’s exactly what I said. I agree wholeheartedly. Only very slowly reduce your tankiness while adding in damage-oriented things. You want to stop the changes once you reach a point where you’re still tanky enough to survive, but can do adequate damage. I’m pretty sure we’re on the same page. Stop trying to argue. ^^

Re: 3) If the Mesmer is practicing just as hard as you, but started out at a higher level due to previous practicing, I would hope they’d win. But you also have to take into account the law of diminishing returns. So at some point, that Mesmer will come to a relative plateau, at which point you can really catch up to them and lower the discrepancy.

Take everything I am about to say with a grain of salt, as I have only briefly played a thief and do not fully understand their mechanics. /disclaimer

I disagree that your sword attacks should be faster. Here’s why: Sword is a bulkier form of a dagger, for most intents and purposes. So it should be a bit slower, and hopefully a bit heavier hitting. I think it’s good that weapons have a distinct flavor. However, I do think that removing the self root from Pistol Whip would be good, as well as removing the opponent root (stun is a type of root) and changing it to a daze. I’d agree that reducing the damage by 30% might be a bit much, simply because, as mentioned earlier, I think that sword should hit a bit harder than dagger, in a general attack damage way.

As far as changing the backstab mechanics, I propose that instead of giving it baseline damage and removing all potential extra damage, make it so attacking from stealth (in ANY position) also grants the bonus. This would allow for more flexibility in gaining that extra damage, so that it would work better with more builds.

I honestly have never used Haste (maybe I’m a horrible thief. Read the disclaimer. xD) but I don’t think changing it the way you suggested is a good idea. I think that would make thief even MORE of a one trick pony with the backstabby stuff.

Lastly, I don’t agree that steal should allow a shadow return option. As someone mentioned it would really kitten the other shadow return abilities. I think that there are enough awesome ways to buff up your steal mechanic that it doesn’t necessarily need any more baseline bonuses.

Other than that, I would support all the changes suggested.

uMad.5719:

Mesmers Blurred frenzy + mind wrack isnt burst? with Illusionary persona and 3 illusions out. You can do 3-4k from blurred frenzy + 8k mind wrack (if everything crits). So you can do anywhere from 7-12k. every 10 or so seconds.

Warriors can easily get that every 6 seconds with 100 Blades. I think this is an apt comparison because both tactics (shatter+blurred frenzy and 100 Blades) are relatively easy to dodge.

I agree that there are some balance issues, but I think people just prove how much they don’t know when they post while the game is so young.

I think that a lot of the hate I see in this thread is really unnecessary.

Firstly, the game has been out less than a month, so of course there are balance issues that weren’t even perceivable in the relatively lower player base that they were confined to determine metrics from pre-launch. I am very happy with how they’ve been listening to the playerbase as far as balance goes. There was an update a few nights ago that altered Heartseeker into what it was intended to be (a bursty finishing move, not a be-all-and-end-all spam attack) and also touched up a few skills (Rush for Warrior and Mind Stab for Mesmer being a few) that needed some lovin’. This work is on top of general bug fixes, performance issues, and hacked accounts! Give the game some time! You can see that they want the balance as much as we do! They’ve proven it by prioritizing PvP balance way above what would be expected.

Because the game is so new, and because it’s so easy for a new player to hop on a character and dive right into sPvP, it’s really difficult to say what’s OP and what’s UP. I mean, I’m rank 9 (I know it’s not that high) but almost all of my battles have been with my Mesmer. So when I rolled my thief the other day, I was tossed into matchups with the same types of players (~rank 9 players) that I was fighting on my Mesmer, and let’s just say life sucked for a few games. People who saw me during those games were probably thinking (Wow, this type of thief build is UP as hell), but that’s simply not true. The problem was that I just sucked at it. But don’t you guys see that we all suck at everything right now? We haven’t had enough bulk time to not suck yet.

I guess I’m preaching patience and courtesy. Don’t whine, don’t rage, don’t spam, and most certainly don’t demand.

Here are a few tips for trying to avoid frustrating situations like this in the future. I’ve been on both ends of the Mesmer poop train, so I completely understand what it’s like to get shut down COMPLETELY and not even be able to find the right one before you get killed.

Some of this has already been posted, and I apologize, I just wanted to be thorough.

1) Watch the Mesmer, carefully!
Moa Morph does have a 2 second cast time, and it is possible to avoid because of this. The only things a Mesmer has that takes more than a second are the phantasms, I believe. Those are good to dodge, too, because if you dodge, the direct-targeted phantasm won’t be summoned. So if you do see a Mesmer casting for more than about 1 second, mash your dodge key. It will always be a good idea.

2) Reconsider your tanky/healy build.
You can’t outheal anything, directly. Your build may or may not be very powerful. I’ve never played Necro so I can’t make any claims, but I will say that the tanky condition stacking ones are the main types I have problems with as a Mesmer. That being said, focusing too far into your healing and regeneration will probably leave you disappointed because Anet is trying very hard to avoid any type of powerful healing system in which you can facetank damage and outheal it. Now I understand that this may be frustrating to you, considering the build you’ve described, but this is a large part of what keeps GW2 combat dynamic. You have to move and run and dodge and do stuff! You cannot facetank anything, as any class, against any class (or PvE mob). I would suggest splicing in some other offensive capabilities. Don’t completely change your build all at once, pick and prune out the skills or traits that might not be as beneficial as another, and exchange it for something more offensive until you find a balance that leaves you “tanky” enough to survive well, but more capable of doing damage.

3) Practice, practice, practice!
I’m not saying this in a rude way like “L2P you newb!” I’m saying it because specifically Mesmers are one of the hardest classes to play and to fight against. 4 hours of PvP won’t even scratch the surface of Mesmer strategy, especially if you haven’t had the opportunity to really examine their abilities in a controlled environment (dueling with a friend or something).

Now all that being said, a screenshot of the death screen or a short video of the fight (very short from your description) would really be helpful. I would love nothing more than to sit with you and talk about the abilities that did so much damage, because like I said, Necros are honestly one of the toughest classes for me to beat, so I would love to see how to get rid of them!