Guild Wars 2

Exciton.8942:

Mesmer burst has always been strong but is very telegraphed and requires set up. Long stealth duration simply makes it too easy to land these bursts.

Sorry, but that’s not a logical argument. This is nothing new, we’ve always had pretty long duration Stealth available via PU. No matter how much you nerf PU, you will not prevent the current issue people are having.

33% is virtually worthless, and that’s obvious by the admittal that you’d need to change Veil and MI to have any significant benefit from PU at all.

So please, start using your heads when you make balancing suggestions! Balancing is not about making traits worthless to the point where no one takes them. That’s all you’ll achieve with a heavy-handed nerf of PU duration!

The fact is, the buff aspects was further watered down so you have much less chance of having Aegis or Protection. The only thing this new PU has going for it is the duration. Gutting that leaves us with just another worthless GM, which is what Anet was trying to avoid, right?

I personally see no issue with the current duration. Anything you can do to people from Stealth you can do with just MI as well, so maybe the problem is not really PU?

What are you gonna cry about when PU gets nerfed!? Oh maybe we’ll nerf a few other things along the way before we finally focus on the real issue? That being that a burst that instantly takes someone from 100 – 0 in a 1v1 situation is plain stupid. It’s bad design.

This will get clipped eventually, you can rest assured, and it has absolutely nothing to do with PU. So we’ll end up eating a damage nerf right after the self-inflicted gunshot wound that will be PU after devs get done with it. I mean, we’re asking for it, and it won’t prevent them from gutting the burst later.

Without the burst, what is PU? An escape at best! Why can Thieves have it, but we can’t when traited for it? That was obviously the intent with the new PU! They had to have known it would lead to very long Stealth durations! Plain math dictates it! This simply makes PU a defining trait as a GM trait is supposed to be!

The problem is not PU, the problem is being able to instant Stun someone without warning, and then 100-0 them before they have a chance to activate a stun-break and counter your attack.

Contrary to popular belief, people will still do this even if you nerf PU into the ground.

Yeah and with Insp it gets AE doled out to the team. I would have agreed with you before this patch, but I really don’t want them to touch this in fear or them swinging the evil nerf sledgehammer on it.

This has huge team support implications that I suspect we will soon see in action at higher levels of competition. I’ve had a blast with it countering the bursts of Thieves, to buy me time to setup my counter. It’s extremely effective with SoM.

In short, leave “well enough” alone!

I don’t have any issue with reasonable adjustments like 17% on PB, or even if they clipped PU a bit down to 75%. Those are tweaks, certainly not minor, but not huge either.

What I want to know is how an ability was ever conceived that needs a 50%+ nerf. Why did no one figure this out before mathematically? In the case of the Staff trait nerf, how could you possibly not have foreseen the issue with this? It’s plain common sense and basic math.

Even before the patch I noted that these new CD reduction abilities are not a good idea. They’re not only hard to balance, but I fail to see any added value they bring. It’s not exactly skillful to use PR in your CS and follow that up with the CA active in order to maximize the CD reduction. However, when the baseline for abilities is usually 20%, and then you force players to jump through hoops without rewarding them for it…what was gained again? Nothing. It does nothing but create unneeded complexity without reward, and makes a class both tedious and unrewarding to play. Good game design tries to eliminate these situations, rather than create more of them!

With 3% you’re in the territory of where you can potentially gain significant CD reduction by jumping through even more hoops, but obviously Anet feels that puts you back into OP territory as far as CS & CA go. What was the point of this new design then? Just let go of bad design decisions! Go back to flat 20% and don’t add unnecessary complexity & tedium without payoffs!

“More effort with lesser or equal result” has been the mantra Mesmers have complained about for years, and now you’re moving right back into that territory with every heavy-handed nerf you’re making.

Balancing should ideally never involve adjustments of more than 5-25% here or there, and should also ideally be an iterative process of such smaller adjustments over time. (As opposed to knee jerk, which has never ever lead to a balanced game!)

Every time you have to halve something or worse, you should be asking yourselves how the design could have been so bad from the outset, to require such a gutting later. In almost every case, you will not achieve balance, but only ruin abilities, classes, and simply mask the real issue: poor design. (Not to mention you’re wasting precious resources and alienating customers in the process.)

Agree with MailMail, and strongly disagree with OP. We have less builds, but more viable builds overall.

One MailMail didn’t even mention is support builds, which also can go at least 2-3 powerful variants. Also there really never was a Bunker type build for Mesmer, but you can achieve this now with the right gear and Insp/Chaos/X.

All in all it’s way too early to say up to what level of competitiveness these builds can/will reach, but each are very viable in unranked team play and far superior to what was available before the patch.

I have to agree with the OP. Overall, I enjoy the patch too. I don’t like the Sledgehammer approach to balancing either, but I have to say when I read the Engie forum threads about their nerf to Mortar, I started to calm down a bit and realize that perhaps I too am not being as objective as I thought. ;-)

Not even a judgement on Mortar, I have really no idea how OPd it was or wasn’t, but the thread looks identical to our “sky is falling” threads.

Maybe it’s good they use a Sledgehammer first, the only problem is that we have have zero trust in them going back to fix what they clearly broke. It could take months or years, and Mesmers know this better than most.

Still I totally agree with Vieux. The new Mesmer is much more competitive all around. There are more competitive builds all around as well, with support options that are likely to change the meta even.

I know some elitists would like to call this a bad thing for the profession, but that’s just silly. It’s still just as skillful to play as before, only you get more reward for playing well and perhaps slightly less punishment for not being godly yourself, with a godly connection, a godly PC, etc.

Sure that means the skill floor is slightly lower, but the ceiling is at least equal or mabey even higher. We’ll find that out in the coming weeks/months.

Yoseue.4251:

Guys please, we had 2 days of glory. Now ready yourself for 3 years of being behind. It’s tradition!

No really…anyone can see that 2% on staff isn’t enough. It is CONDITIONAL recharge so it should give more recharge than flat recharge when you put effort into it(as you can’t have it up all the time).
Did someone lock Robert in a room so he can’t interfere?

Yep 100% agree on this.

Is math that hard?

We all knew 5% was pretty ridiculous LONG before the patch went live. Just the same, we all know 2% is utterly useless, and in effect a nerf over the flat 20%.

I don’t know why you enjoy POing the Mesmer community so much. It’s not the way to treat customers to be so obtuse that simple math escapes your balancing decisions.

I think emotions and irrationality have been driving the nerfs against Mesmers, not common sense, math, objectivity, etc. This is the definition of Knee Jerk, and will only result in disgruntled players…and will never result in a balanced game.

Get professional please and start balancing in small steps, not giant leaps. You’ve killed off MtD and now the Staff trait. GG!

Yeah it was a Mesmer skill, what do you expect? That other classes can do this AoE is OK, just don’t let the Mesmer actually -you know- stack a trait duration with a Sigil duration! OMG! NO!

What a jip. I’ve never been one to give into conspiracies, but it’s hard to deny that Mesmer nerfs always seem to come in very fast and low, while other far more broken things hang around for months to be “evaluated”.

I’d like to hear the explanation of why CS and SoP do not stack. Surely it’s not because of a single target 3s base duration stun on a kitten CD.

Knee Jerk thanks to the brilliant (lazy) design of Mimic. GG!

My own fault though, I’m the one that posted that crap. :P (Not saying no one else realized this, but I posted about it here several days ago.)

thetarot.8246:

Clearly less than 24 hours is enough time to get a judgement of what needs to be nerfed and what doesn’t. Particularly when ‘the live game enviroment’ is once again filled with newbies using new unfamiliar mechanics and counters.

Bingo! We have a winner!

Crion.8465:

Scepter gets an attack speed buff that should be baseline and a cooldown reduction. At best this is a master trait or it needs a serious buff to make it worthy of grand master. How about all scepter skills inflict 1 stack of confusion? Or increase condition duration? Or something.

Agreed, but they clearly won’t give us more conditions after butchering MtD in the fastest Knee Jerk nerf since the old Power Block.

serenke.4806:

It’s weird how little this was noticed before. I get it, it’s a “support” trait but one that is really powerful.

It was noticed. I was by far not the only one to comment how powerful this would likely be in a group support build. Inspiration in general is really powerful, especially with the improved mantras.

This will be a good counter to the preferred method of picking a single target, locking it down, and then focus-bursting it. An aware Mesmer can really counter this rather brutish, simplistic tactic. Will be nice to see skilled support Mesmers make the enemy team pull their hair out trying to down someone.

Hope they don’t nerf this too.

The Knee Jerk balance season is definitely open! So anything and everything that the standard bearers of the previous meta will deem to be OPd, they will complain about loudly, before actually attempting to counter it. Sadly it seems Anet is listening already…

Simonoly.4352:

Surely it would have been better for Anet to balance conditions across the board before nerfing specific condition application traits?

On one class for one trait by 50%. Agreed. No it’s not the 5k burning that’s the problem, it’s the 2k Torments. lol!

Crion.8465:

I don’t get why its a grand master trait… Considering how slow scepter is normally the attack speed buff should be baseline.

This!

I tried it out a bit and wasn’t sure either if I noticed a difference. The added attack on #3 makes it harder since you’re not used to it going off as fast and ticking as fast, but obviously it’s not worthy of a GM if you can’t really tell the difference. (So I’m guessing you’re probably right that it’s broken.)

I totally agree with Crion, it’s really an insult that we should invest in a GM skill just to fix the broken mechanics of the Scepter. (And now the fix to the broken mechanic appears to be broken! Irony kills.)

Fay.2357:

Sebrent.3625:

Is it really that hard to admit that you reacted far too quickly and harshly? That your words/actions were unwarranted?

Well that’s awkward. Unwarranted and too quickly and harshly indeed.

+1

In this case at least, hindsight was not just 20/20 for one side, but both.

Nothing foolish about making your voice heard! I’m guessing it made the devs at least hold off on the nerf long enough to let us play it. That much I appreciate, but sadly they’re still completely wrong on nerfing MtD! It clearly is not the root of the problem! If there even was one, which IMO there really wasn’t. It was bads who have not adjusted to a patch yet, that MtD wrecked. These same players playing “one trick pony” Power builds have always gotten destroyed by MtD. Guess what, if you don’t bring Condie clear, or your team doesn’t bring adequate cleansing for you, then you will die a horrible death against all Condition burst builds.

Now we’re relegated to a functional single-target Condition build, with very very little AoE pressure. And no, one stack of fairly short duration Confusion here or there from Blinds via Ineptitude doesn’t even come close to make up for the 50% butchering of MtD.

Together they merely produced the kind of burst that Power Shatter always has, and can now deliver with hugely improved defenses instantly. There was nothing wrong with that. Bring adequate cleansing, and you literally still completely shut down an MtD shatter build. (I witnessed this first hand by Eles, Warriors, and Guardians whom I was still completely unable to scratch with MtD re-nerf.)

This was nerfed based on Golem testing. Plain and simple.

Iavra.8510:

Since Ineptitude exists, you don’t really need MtD anyway. And PU was borderline op even before the patch, now it’s just braindead.

Read it on the Internet so it must be true!

Yeah because PU really adds to your damage output as a MtD Shatter Mesmer! wait a sec!! lol!

Ineptitude! Please! lol!

Messiah is right. This is all at the hands of people who don’t want to spec out of their “Pew Pew Power” bursting builds in order to deal with Condition builds. If you faced a class with half way decent condition cleansing last night, before this nerf, you’d know that this was far from OPd.

I fought Engies, Warriors, Ele’s, and Guardians whom all almost completely managed to ignore MtD damage. It was literally no difference to before this patch, because whether 8 stacks of Torment or 6, if they get cleansed easily and frequently, it doesn’t really matter. It will do near zero damage. Once I started facing competent teams with classes that could AE cleanse for their team, I quickly realized MtD was still just as flawed as always.

I went and played a tankier P-Shatter, and had a much better time. I was downing Thieves so fast it was making their heads spin, rarely had that with MtD minutes prior. Always longer, drawn-out fights, that occasionally resulted in victory. The only time MtD was shining was when playing against scrub teams where we wont by a landslide anyway, and I could proudly look at decent damage numbers popping up from Confusion and Torment.

I saw much more consistent AE mayhem from my P-Shatter build, and had plenty of defense to boot. The literally only reason to play MtD Shatter of Power, aside for having a thing for Conditions maybe, was being more tanky and thus having more time to react.

This is no longer the case! The AE Blind on shatter is huge defense alone, add traited staff and/or PU, 100% stun on CD, or even going with Insp. and you’re golden. High damage output, and tanky enough not to get mauled by every Thief that happens to spot you from 3 miles away.

RIP MtD.

We just ate a heavy-handed nerf to MtD already, and here we are orchestrating a self-nerf to PU. GG!

I’m sure Thieves are also working on getting themselves nerfed! oh wait!

lol, for real they already nerfed it? Hillarious knee-jerk stuff once again. I played nearly identical MtD Shatter vs. Power Shatter builds last night for a couple hours each, and I stuck with Power Shatter. I can’t fathom why they would nerf MtD, when Power is still just so much stronger and more reliable.

If you died to it, chances are you weren’t built to deal with Condies and you’ll die an even more horrible death vs. numerous other Condie specced Professions.

Just goes to show they really don’t have a clue. I had a fun time bashing up on newbs with it, no doubt. They all spec for maximum damage and no defense, and then cry to mommy Anet to fix Conditions. It’s just human nature, we hate the gradual inevitable death that we “can not” counter (because we didn’t build for it!) more then the spike damage that kills us before we can even react.

I was fighting an Ele with MtD shatter and it was embarrassing. I couldn’t get him past 90% health while he was eating me alive. Same for a Warrior/Guardian combo, literally couldn’t put a scratch on them, not even close! Hah, OPd for sure! lol!

Whatever. I guess we’ll be seeing a lot more knee jerk nerfs at the hands of loudly whining newbs.

One stack of Torment per Illusion on MtD not only kills the trait itself, but buries the entire concept of a Condition Shatter Mesmer.

Note I didn’t say Condition Mesmer! Single target you can still do great…too bad that pigeonholes you into 1v1 or roaming, and makes you pretty useless to a team. GG Anet! You’ll still be hard countered by the above professions, and yet have absolutely negligible AE damage output.

It’s too early to tell where the chips will fall, because a lot of stuff has changed and you can’t expect the old way to work in a new system. For example, I ran a Dom/Duel/Insp build last night with the pDefender off block, and found it to be remarkably decent in adding an illusion to my shatters when I needed it most. It’s completely passive and it protects you and your illusions for a split moment before it gets shattered.

I had good luck vs. Thieves with this using F3 to stun, into MB+MS for first Clone, then BF and they’d whiff into that to create the pDefender, and popping iLeap I’d get the third out very rapidly and MW without using a Dodge. (You won’t need to dodge anything, because of Blind on shatter.)

All in all you shouldn’t need to Dodge nearly as much thanks to that Blind. With Insp I just wanted the counter to Condies along with self-heal on shatter (which they “nerfed” so you no longer get a double heal with IP, but I guess this was to be expected), and the pDefender can be really nice defense in 1v1, and a free added Illusion.

Also played PU Condie Shatter and Power Shatter, both work really well.

As usual, MtD still has issues facing competent teams (Warrior+Guardian combos I could hardly even dent, same for Ele’s), but partly simply because you run out of illusions and shatters to keep the flow of Torments coming. With Chronomancy that might change a bit. It’s definitely a pretty amazing newb-bashing build in unranked though, it’s almost impossible to kill ya and if ignored for even a moment that Confusion + Torment will eat you alive in a hurry.

So far I like what I’ve seen…

Yeah the whole laying claims to builds is really a bit outdated now, the combinations are much more obvious than before, and so it’s going to be really difficult to claim what basically is obvious.

Mainly you have a set of priorities, and while these definitely do change a little bit from person to person, overall they’re fairly similar and the choices in each line thus become rather obvious.

We’ll see a little more diversity with Elite specs, but overall I think builds will look far more similar than before for any given type of build. Sometimes less is more, because overall I think we’re not losing diversity but mostly gaining by more types of builds becoming more viable. (Not necessarily meta, just more viable! :P)

I’ve been doing pretty well in a sorta tanky power shatter build against Thieves, simply due to CS and the Blind on shatter. It just really gets them where it hurts, their mobility and stealth.

They pop me from stealth and I just F3 them to interrupt their swerve, and like the overconfident nerds they usually are they try to swing at me and just whiff, then get MWd and whiff again. Usually they’re dead or running by that time. So much less stealth and mobility when you have that combo of stuns and blinds.

I won’t claim these were even remotely competent Thieves, but before it didn’t require that to give me a very hard time facing them 1v1 in a power shatter build. I’m sure they’ll adjust and things will get harder, but for now it was a lot of fun not being their punching bag anymore.

Guessing you mean MI as well. ;-)

Doubtful that this was intended. I think some Dev misread the note telling him to make Mantras recharge passively, and he worked on the wrong part of that. ;-)

Excellent. I’m glad they re-evaluated their position on this overly heavy-handed nerf they had in mind.

I really do hate to complain and have been nothing but positive about this patch, so I’m glad they changed their minds at least for now. (I have no problems with balancing OPd stuff, but I strongly believe you’ll kill off Condie Shatter if you nerf MtD that hard.)

Good going Anet! Glad you listened to us!

Yeah I was thinking Knights myself, then take the GS GM and BD to build up Might stacks as you’re tanking. Between Phantasm damage, GS damage (BM+MS) and the occasional shatter spike, I think you can actually still put out pretty decent damage while also being really hard to kill in even 2v1 or worse odds.

I agree with you, with MtD kittened up beyond all recognition, I think my first priority in testing tonight will be on this kind of a of a support/tank build.

Or of course the PU Power Shatter looks like fun too. Taking into consideration the careful way in which MtD was axed, I’m guessing though that PU will of course be nerfed back down to 1s added duration soon, only they will leave the extra buff in. Effectively nerfing it to worse then it was before this patch! Go ANet! )

fluxit.8247:

I dont disagree with anything besides the low blow in the first paragraph.

Sorry, I don’t follow that part. Nothing I said was directed at you. I meant the dev team basing their nerf decision on either the Golem, or the video you referred to of a 1v1 fight. (Which I couldn’t see, it didn’t load up for me.)

That’s not exactly sound evidence there to act upon IMHO. That was not direct at you at all.

The only other low blow was the GM in Illusions. :P

Trigr.6481:

What you don’t seem to understand about it, is even IF you crit, it’s still a 1/3 chance of a stack of confusion still being applied. It’s not a broken trait.

Exactly! It was pretty obviously OPd in the first incarnation where it was a 100% chance to proc on crit, but it was fine after that was lowered to 33%. In fact, I was a bit upset about that because it basically again targeted the wrong issue!

If the problem obviously is (GS) Clones AA’ing for massive Confusion stacks, then why not simply remove the part about Illusions and change it to either Phantasms or even just the Mesmer him/her self?

I was seriously looking forward to having Sword be a potential Condition weapon, by making BF apply multiple stacks of Confusion. I don’t think this is OPd in the least, but would actually create a bit more variety.

It’s really lame and inexcusable that MtD was offered at the altar of lazy balancing, because of numerous other minor adjustments made such as Vulnerability, Confusion, Conditions in general, etc. Basically, all these things will help Engies and Necros, but we get our only viable form of AoE Condition damage output nerfed as a consequence of these individual little changes that obviously synergize to create imbalances. (Obvious, because clearly MtD was balanced before. It’s not the added 2 stacks in melee range that warrant a 50% nerf!)

If this nerf is any indication of Anets balancing process in the next few weeks, we’re going to be drowning in tears on all forums…not just this one.

Diederick.7906:

Mesmer simply can’t be tanky. If you want survivability, you need to get it from blinds, blink, stealth and confusion (as in using clones so people don’t know which character is the real you)

How do you figure that? A Chaos/Insp combo will be extremely tanky. With Staff you can have a very high uptime of Protection, and Insp will give you a bunch of extra healing while cleansing conditions. Throw in Dom and you can get more Distortions from Signets to share with your team even, and still do decent damage.

You can even get a bit of Stability from BD (Chaos), and a ton of reflects via Master of Manipulations.

Sure, you won’t have strong illusion production and will lack the punch of a Power Shatter build, but you’re more geared towards tanking and support, so that’s the trade off you make.

fluxit.8247:

This thread is about the mesmer community’s worries about our ability to stack conditions after the mtd nerf. This streamer used a less than optimal build against Koroshi, a very well known roaming streamer, and was able to stack enough conditions on him to down him a couple of times.

Setting aside that that is a poster child definition of “knee jerk” balancing, due to a ludicrously small sample size that you’re basing the adjustment on…

Let’s just assume you’re right. So instead of achieving balance here via careful tweaking of new abilities, we take a chainsaw to a trait that has never been deemed viable before? A 50% nerf is not exactly a “small and careful adjustment” it can easily end up making that trait completely worthless. (And in the opinion of many that have actually played with MtD for a while, it will do exactly that.)

If something that clearly wasn’t overpowered before, in fact quite the opposite, how then does it make sense to target this trait, rather than the many other new variables in the equation? I’ll tell you why! Because it’s an easy target for lazy people who really don’t care how it works out in the end. Anyone else would have thought up a different, more careful approach, than to whack something into oblivion with a giant nerf-bat.

Again, the most entertaining part is that this comes after the removal of the +50% damage bonus to Torment damage on moving targets for traited Scepter! lol! That kinda reminds me of the title of a new GM trait in Illusions.

A single stack of Torment per shatter is just plain bad as long as CoF remains on double the CD as MW. It literally kills the concept of a Condition Shatter build in one fell swoop. (Especially considering how bad CoF is compared to MW.)

Oh I’m certain we’ll still have single target Condition builds that will rock other classes pants off in 1v1…but so what? We’ve always had this with PU/Condie builds. The problem is that our ability to pump out viable AoE condition damage to even remotely compete with Power-Shatter, is gone. Added to that, Power Shatter has gained a lot of survivability, making the entire reason to go Condie Shatter much less desireable than before already. Now, with lacking AoE damage output, there really isn’t much of a reason to go for Conditions on a Mesmer, with the same old exception as before to solo roam and 1v1.

So I guess they balance Mesmers around 1v1 performance, but not anyone else. Got it!

As Nike said, this is a useless debate until we actually know, and have experienced, the mechanics involved. From the sounds of the recent video on skill changes, F5’s duration will be shortened in order to avoid making it possible to pop too many abilities. In turn, this short duration and/or general mechanics of the rift itself, may make it relatively impractical to attempt to destroy it as you’re wasting time/effort only for the Mesmer to be pulled back anyway either by his own actions or the abilities time simply running out.

Who knows? Too many variables to know, but saying Chrono is stronger than other lines at this point is pure speculation. I would argue it looks pretty weak actually, when taken in the context of actually making a viable build with it that isn’t centered around the “one trick pony” that F5 is doomed to be due to it’s long CD.

Such trickery is often way too easy to counter by a competent team, and after that it’s on a prohibitively long CD. So in the end, Chrono may turn out to be just one more “newb bashing” build, of which Mesmers have enough. (Highly effective against inexperienced players, and almost entirely ineffective against experienced players in organized teams.)

So the IP going baseline basically becomes a nerf to existing MtD Mesmers. WTG Anet!

However, the problem with all of this really isn’t about what this does to Condition focused Mesmer builds that were never competitive or popular to begin with, but the simple fact that once again Power Shatter becomes the very clear winner as build choice.

At best we’ll see Power Interrupt and Support builds emerge as secondary options, but due to the nature of Interrupts and the fact that support Mesmers will have to fight for a role that hasn’t been defined (yet at least), I doubt these will be remotely competitive to the much boosted Power-Shatter builds. (Of which there will be variants I’m sure, such as incorporating Interrupts and/or support with P-Shatter.)

I don’t really like the removal of Confusing Combatants either. It’s yet another direct nerf to Condition damage builds, which after the complete neutering of MtD will just exacerbate the ineffectiveness of building for Conditions. The GM Chaos trait BD will give you AoE Fury on F3, you can get Fury off SoInsp & CI, not to mention off the Pack Runes since you no longer need Centaur or Travelers. Also remember, the Torch Phantasm now gives Fury! So this trait will be pretty useless for Torch users in general.

It doesn’t help Condition builds at all either, since we no longer have anything that procs Conditions on Crit reliably! (Sharper Images only works on our illusions and Fury doesn’t pass on to Clones.) So this is yet another straight up nerf to Condition builds.

Very disappointed in Anet over this knee-jerk stuff at the last moment.

As for the Confusion update, there is no magic here! We know the formula, and we know it won’t be a significant difference to the current one. You’re just trading a good portion of the burst potential, for a relatively weak DoT so you gain somewhat reliable damage at the cost of burst. Here is to skilled play, SPAM AWAY it won’t hurt anymore!!!

And no, not even Inception with DE (clearly a must have once again!) and it’s “Blind on Shatter”, will make up for the loss of 50% nerf to MtD. (An already underperforming trait in the current game!)

I’m not going to take my toys and go home. I just won’t be speccing for Conditions on my Mesmer, and at the slim chance that Condition builds on other classes become OPd, I will just spec into Inspiration which will basically ensure nearly complete immunity to Conditions.

The main problem with this nerf is that they once again just broke our optimism and trust in their balance process. I now have no doubts that Chronomancy will be nerfed into near uselessness, and it quite frankly is already not looking that strong outside of the 1-trick-pony F5. If it can’t replace Dueling & DE, it will have a hard time finding room in a Power Shatter build…which will still be meta for Mesmers with MtD nerfed into the ground.

Very odd. It seemingly makes no sense at all. I mean we know what MtD was like with 1 stack, and no one was interested. It got boosted to 2 stacks, and now a small niche group of Mesmers started playing and defending it…but overall, it was clearly inferior to P-shatter.

Now we finally were looking at real potential for Condie shatter to finally rival P-shatter, and before we can even play it for ourselves they nerf it by 50%. Sorry, but their math just doesn’t add up. They should know how much the boosts added up to, it’s not hard to calculate. Then based on that information, they should be adjusting with care, not hacking away at an ability with a machete and expect balance.

I mean, really? Didn’t we see a 50% boost to Torment damage for moving targets on Malicious Sorcery only a few weeks ago? And now this huge nerf? Going a bit in extremes here aren’t we? I have to side with Fay, this knee-jerk stuff just doesn’t look very professional.

Ineptitude is nice and all, but Confusion is not magically going to turn out to be a strong Condition, certainly not based on what we’ve seen so far. Like a poor bleed with a nerfed “on activate” effect. Again, our mostly ~3s of Confusion durations just aren’t up to competing with 10s Burns, Bleeds, etc.

Phoenix.7928:

Oh I don’t know, they’re all pretty useful and have several synergies. Illusionary Inspiration for example is a killer with Blurred Inscriptions.

Agreed, among the most exciting boosts have come to the prospect of viable support builds. The above combo and really the entire Inspiration line and it’s various synergies are just amazing for support.

I think after all the dust settles on various Power, Condie, and Lockdown shatter builds, we will see the emergence of very powerful support oriented Mesmer builds. Glamours look fantastic with the GM tait, boon-sharing on a whole new level, Distortion sharing & synergies with Signets, etc.

I hope that the “heal allies on healing yourself” trait has better scaling with Healing Power. Not that I expect big things, but it would be nice to have something outside of Regen worth scaling with HP.

Yeah as I stated in another thread, I fully expect we’re going to see various (and reasonable) limitations put on F5…similar to Mimic. “No Elite’s” would also likely be on the list of things to change. It just kinda defeats the purpose of powerful Elites with long CDs to have an ability that resets the CD almost instantly. It would either mean nerfs to the Elite’s (or them being weak to begin with), or excluding them from F5.

I think the CD on Mimic is warranted. Every profession naturally has some utilities that are much stronger and/or more useful than others, especially in combination with some builds. So having the option to have one re-charge almost instantly is worth the long CD on Mimic. (You end up keeping the normal CD on that utility, which is really the more important part. If it set the CD of that ability to 90s, then I’d consider it pretty worthless.)

- If you were to make a Power PU build now, you wouldn’t have to get Torch anymore, as you can double up on Decoy + MI for plenty of stealth & escapes.

- Double 1200 range Blink is a blessing for basically any build and grants us mobility that rivals that of Thieves, Warriors, and Eles.

- In a traited Glamour build a double NF will be pretty amazing for your team, especially when coupled with the new TW.

As stated above, a double SoD with the new CS trait and a Paralyzation Sigil will mean two kitten stun in quick succession. There will be a lot of tears over this one! Draw out a stun break with an F3 shatter, then SoD…if they break out again, SoD again and dump him. Buh bye! This in organized team play is a death sentence times two. Then add Moa to the mix and it’s even worthwhile to trait the Sigils for a build heavily focused around CCing enemies to be focus-ganked by your DPSers. (Pistol #5, SoDx2, Moa, and Confounding Suggestions. Ouch!)

Double MI could potentially allow for enough illusion generation in some specialized builds that don’t involve Dueling/DE. It could be enough to make Chronomancy work as an illusion factory (between F5 and Mimic and the 2 traits to generate illusions), or perhaps even some without either Dueling or Chrono. Dunno maybe a very tanky & supportive build, but one that can put out a solid damage spike via 2x MI + Phantasms. (Insp/Chaos/Dom)

Lots of neat possibilities for Mimic and the new system in general.

Also I remember hearing something about them still tweaking the duration F5, so I think we can expect there to be some nerfs that will prevent the above multi-Moa type of thing.

It’s going to be very difficult to balance F5 between being useful/cool and not being OPd. They will either have to straight up exclude certain abilities, or find some other imaginative ways to exclude at the very least all Elite’s. In fact maybe that’ll be it, that you can only affect your utilities 1-9 abilities with F5.

We’ll see soon enough I suppose, but first off I’m looking forward to tomorrow!

^^ I sense a bit of sarcasm there… :P

Technically I guess I agree, but I still think Chronomancy is pretty cool.

I do wonder what that “special extra” is that Anet promised the classes that only get an OH rather than a 2h or MH. I’m guessing they feel it’s already been revealed, but personally I haven’t seen anything that I attributed to that statement. I expected there would be something special about Shield that would make up for the missing button-abilities the 2h get.

If you have to target Clones to tell whether they’re the real Mesmer by the buffs/effects on them, then you’ve already been amply fooled! That wasted time, possibly wasted attacks, is already a major advantage.

It’s not intended to be such a fool-proof deception that you literally have to attack each one to find out if it blows up or not to tell if it’s the real Mesmer. That would be really entertaining from a Mesmer PoV, and thematically also really cool, but in reality it’s rather sickly OPd.

The deception definitely works now enough to make people pause and take time to locate the actual Mesmer, mostly by attacks/movements rather then targeting I might add, and it’s only going to get slightly better with Clones inheriting off-hands correctly.

SoH looks great, but so does TW with the AE slow. For on point fights that thing is just about a “we win” button, or rather it will definitely force aware opponents off the point for the duration. Trait that sucker and take NF with it, and you’re also adding a lot of Resistance and boon/condi removal for your team.

But yeah, SoH also looks great and the lowered CD with free condie clear and 1s Distortion is pretty rad too. (Not to mention you can AE share that Distortion with Insp.! Very yummie!)

Yes that was the classic Retaliation tank build that Pyro (Fay) created, and it was both very popular and revolutionary at the time.

I had a blast with it too for a while. It’s weird that Anet keeps nerfing builds that almost entirely rely on your opponent playing stupidly, although in this case perhaps it was a bit unfair. ;-)

As for OPs build, you will be able to build far more tanky builds with the upcoming patch. Sure Retaliation will no longer be something we’ll have a lot of, but in return you can now be truly a semi-competent Bunker/Tank with lots of group utility, and still maintain better damage output then you had before. (And you can choose between Condies or Power to deliver it.)

Insp+Chaos and either Illusions for MtD, or Dom for the GS Might stacking & Phantasm damage. (Or throw in Interrupts if you want.)

With the Insp GM to create a pDefender on block/evade, shatters that heal you and cleanse a condition, Mender Purity to AE cleanse and RM to heal when charging a Mantra…pretty redunkulous! Then add in Chaos for silly amounts of Protection, and the BD GM to gain Stability (not much but helps quite a bit) and boons-on-shatter. (And lots of Might from GS GM.)

Or go with Boon-storm interrupts. Get the amazing new CI in Chaos, combine it with Power Block GM in Dom as well as the hugely buffed FI, and then share it out each time you summon a Phantasm via the Inspiration GM.

You’ll be near unkillable in 2v1 or worse odds, and provide pretty stupid amounts of group utility. (Or take Blurred Inscriptions in Dom, and share a 1s Distortion with your team-mates each time you summon a Phantasm or use a Signet yourself!)

The possibilities for (probably) viable tanky Mesmer builds have gone through the roof. (Although in organized group play, I’m guessing only the heavy-support one will be truly viable. The others are a bit more “selfish” and will lack the DPS output of a more damage-oriented build.)

Anet doesn’t generally consider cross-class comparisons as valid, and I tend to agree with this especially in this case. Engineers have pretty much always had perma-swiftness and for a while now have had a trait to gain 25% passive runspeed.

Forcing a tough choice on them between revealing and what amounts to a QoL thing that they can easily replace with other abilities in the game, still amounts to a slight nerf. It used to be a really low investment to get perma-swiftness and thus was a no-brainer to most builds, but now there is a really hard choice.

For us the change to SoI represents a pretty big boost. Not only do we get at least 50% uptime in Swiftness, but also the CD on the active was drastically lowered.

In short, for Engineers we’re talking about a sizeable nerf being turned into a smaller more palatable nerf.

For Mesmers we’re talking about complaining over a very significant boost.

These are far from being comparable, even if cross class comparisons were valid.

bhagwad.4281:

I’m not sure if this solves the basic problem of shatters destroying our damage dealers. Phantasm builds are based on out-pressuring the opponent over time instead of dealing all of it in one burst. Shattering gives you a short term benefit at the cost of destroying your long term fight prospects.
…

The big difference is that before you were exceptionally foolish in shattering your Phantasms for what was/is generally poor damage. (Except for a death-blow, but even that was risky many times.)

Now you not only can spec for basically equal to Power-Shatter damage, but also gain a lot of other benefits in the process. Shattering 3 Phants will net you -6s on recharges. Shattering will AoE Blind, heal yourself & cure a condie, get you some Might stacks, etc. Most of these things you simply couldn’t get before at all.

In the case of Condie/Phant builds you can shatter for a big AoE Torment & Confusion spike to add to the Bleed, Confusion, and Burning your Duelist & Mage are putting out. So you’re really a Phantasm & Condie Shatter hybrid, and no longer depend on your Phantasms as your primary source of damage.

That is the big change. The old statement that your damage primarily comes from your Phantasms is simply wrong and outdated. The most effective way to play now will be to keep your Phantasms for ~2 attacks max, then shatter them for a big spike, and then resummon. This will be brutally effective…but will really no longer be a Phantasm build in the traditional sense.

We’re all going to be shattering, just like all Ele’s use Attunements, Guardians Virtues, and Warriors Bursting.

The only somewhat saving grace is that condition cleansing for Mesmers is a bit harder to get, although when you spec for it you can do a lot of it. (Insp.) Outside of taking MoR or NF, this The Pledge trait will be the only fairly reliable way to clear condies…which I think will become a much more desirable aspect of a balanced build with all the strong Condition love.

In fact you will probably want MoR + TP, because even MoR alone will not be quite enough in smaller-scale PvP at least where you can’t rely on others to Cleanse for you. (Which will become more rare anyway, since every class will have more shiney new options with HoT, drawing them away from the current meta builds.)

Exciton.8942:

Remember that most current condie based builds already counters most power based builds.
The reason that condie builds are not usually played at high level is because the meta features warrior, ele and guards who all bring a tremendous amount of condie cleanse. I don’t see the condie builds easily turn the table around.

Very true now, but will this stay that way with the new trait system…especially once Elite specializations are in?

If you want the new shinies you have to give something up. If you do not, maybe for a good reason to better support your team, but then you may face the other team with say a Guardian that drops a 25% Vulnerability AoE trap on your team. Lotta good your massive AE condie clearing will do there. ;-)

I think the choices in general will become tougher and more impactful, and I think Condition builds will benefit to some degree. There are also more Conditions to go around now that have to be cleared. (And higher stack counts on top of generally higher damage, which means that even in short durations before being cleansed, they can have much more impact.)

Arshay Duskbrow.1306:

All of which and more we will need to stay even in the bad place Mesmers are currently in vs. the new and vastly improved Thieves, thanks to the devs in their infinite wisdom giving us no reveal tech, giving it instead to Engineers(?!) with Lock On.

And giving us superior access to Stealth instead, allowing us to out stealth Thieves in many cases, while still maintaining a very tanky Power/Condie Shatter build.

Not only can you pummel him with Phantasms while Stealthed, but every time you come out of Stealth you will very likely have either Aegis or Protection or both up. Every time you shatter you will Blind him. You will have a lot more Protection+Regeneration then you have now, provided you go with Staff, and as an MtD you also now have IP for the instant Daze/Invuln to counter bursts with.

It will be a completely different story then the current situation. The worst case scenario is that Thieves still are a very strong counter to Mesmers, but the fight will last easily 2-3 times longer then now; which clearly is a bad thing for Thieves in organized PvP.

Quadox.7834:

Why? That is how it works in game at the moment of speaking, and noone even uses the trait!

I agree with you in principle, but math clearly shows the problem here. It’s the potential CD reduction you can achieve that makes this impossible the balance. The fact that the practical use of this pretty much ensures that this will be a huge nerf to this trait, you can’t ignore the potential to reduce the CD by 45%. (And the impact this has on especially TP.)

It’s just bad design. They created the “tech” to vary their CD reductions in this way, and now they want to use it…even with a prybar (to the face). From a balance perspective it’s just better to stick with flat percentages.

It’s absolutely ridiculous to:

1) Presume PU! Since when it Torch something for only PU builds? I see a lot of standard shatter builds using Torch. It’s absolutely fine without PU and thus it’s not good design to basically make the presumption of PU to balance The Pledge. The variable CD reduction are just bad design that will promote cheesy play. (Duck in stealth virtually 75% of the fight or more, while summoning Phantasms & Clones to do the fighting for you.)

2) Assume that even if you have PU, that you’re going to be in stealth basically permanently while in combat. It’s potentially quite OPd to allow a profession/build that much Stealth time, especially one that has access to pets that can attack without breaking the owners stealth. (This will soon be an indirect nerf to PU, you heard it here first!)

So basically it’s potentially quite OPd when (ab)used effectively, and a huge nerf to the existing Torch trait when used “normally.”

This trait really did take a huge beating between the radical CD reduction nerf and the fact that the pMage no longer cleanses conditions with it’s attack.

I agree with Mikkel for the reasoning on this, but the fact remains they nerfed this trait into near uselessness. I kinda get why, but that doesn’t really excuse the end result.

One reason appears to be that they’re making Condie Cleansing something you really have to trait for, or use a utility, otherwise you will suffer greatly at the hands of the new Condition mechanics. I applaud that effort and hope they carry that over to many/most other classes as well. It’s simply bad design that especially passive cleansing happens on classes that didn’t even spec specifically for it, so they’re not losing anything by completely shutting down an entire play-style.

And I agree that the CD probably won’t be touched simply due to how powerful PU now is. All in all though:

A) no one I know of asked for PU to be boosted (lol!)
B) it doesn’t justify creating yet another useless trait in an overhaul that was designed to eliminate them. It’s just an unduly overnerfed trait now, and needs some form of adjustment.

Although I have to admit, it competed with 2 rather poor abilities. So in a Torch MtD build, especially one with PU traited, I guess I would take it just because the other two options are even worse.

Sad reality, but the Adepts in this line are terrible. In fact, IMHO Illusions overall is going from being the strongest and most popular trait-line to the weakest in one patch. Aside from Ineptitude I don’t think the GMs are that strong, and the Master traits outside of MtD are also only “OK”. It’s mainly the Minors that are desirable, and the good ones really only target either MtD or niche builds.

I think the skill floor on proper dodging has been raised significantly by the nerf to Vigor. This is definitely going to be a key factor in fighting Thieves, who have it much better with Endurance regen then most others.

Sounds like fun though. I hope you share your results and tips & tricks if this all happens. I don’t play Thief and I play too sporadically to make any scheduled events possible.

GL!

I think the easiest way to get the 20% will be to use MoR 3 times, and have the Minor in Illusion proc Power Cleanse each time. That should proc HM 6 times, but capped at 5, so you will have a 20% bonus for about 5s.

Yeah it is a bit silly in that it will mostly be “abused” by spamming Mantra charges to gain the bonus. In the above scenario you lose out on your heal and condie-clears, but you can take IR to at least get heals and cleanses on shattering.

I guess in PvE people will spam other Mantras perhaps to get a quick burst off, but it’ll be fairly impractical in PvP for obvious reasons.

They should just make it something like this:
1) Each equipped Mantra increases the bonus by 4%, 20% cap
2) You get 3-4s of the FULL bonus as per #1, each time you use a Mantra

So the bonus amount is determined just by equipping Mantra traits, but you only get the bonus for actually using a Mantra and then only for a short time. This would allow you to use mostly MoP along with the others on a “per need” basis, but you’d have to equip several Mantras to make that bonus worthwhile. That way you will use the other Mantras when you need them.

I realize that. It means 6s of immunity from the effects of Conditions total, and a total of 14 AoE cleanses (and boonstrips) over the 14s time. The Resistance will help you not to take damage for 6 ticks of the AE cleanse. That’s pretty close to completely shutting down both Boons and Conditions on the point for 14s.

And you’re already in the line that has a Minor that also hits an AoE cleanse for 2 Conditions when you heal yourself. (Another 6x AE cleanse with MoR + HM)

skcamow.3527:

Bottom line, with confounding suggestions to compete with in PvP and empowered illusions in PvE, this trait isn’t going to see the light of day.

Absolutely. Kinda hard to understand how this survived. With the old Frag it made at least a little sense, but now it really just doesn’t serve any purpose at all. Should be 2 stacks of Vuln per illusion shattered (and IP), so you can get 8 stacks of Vuln total on a 3-Clone shatter, and thus a 4% bonus from Frag. (plus 8% from the Vuln!)

That being the best case, I think it is reasonable and needed to remotely compete with the other 2 choices.

MailMail.6534:

Hmm it’s still to be seen, but I’m pretty sure thieves will still counter Mesmer. My hope is that it just won’t be a ridiculously hard counter anymore.

Totally agree. I don’t think that it’ll be Mesmers>Thieves, that was not a notion I was ever defending, but it was:

Thief >>> Mesmer

and may now be closer to:

Thief >= Mesmer

With many caveats of course…