Guild Wars 2

I have to agree. Mind Stab is a love-hate issue for me. I absolutely love the look of it. Nothing makes me feel more awesome than thrusting my sword into the ground and having it come up under someone.

But it has plenty of problems. In PVE it’s not quite so bad other than being inefficient due to the animation timing, but in PVP it’s practically unusable. Coupled with the animation issues with Spatial Surge (awesome ability, terrible syncing between end-of-damage and end-of-animation), it makes me want to not even bother despite the fact that every other ability for the Mesmer greatsword rocks my socks off. Mirror Blade is possibly my favorite ability in the game. The berserker is awesome, and who doesn’t love an AOE knockback?

If the ground-targeted nature of Mind Stab is the price of admission for the rest, that’s fair; I remember the auto-aim beta version, and I could see how that could be too much from a balance perspective, especially with the boon-stripping (although I would gladly trade a little of the damage to have that version back). But the timing needs some looking at. The range of the AOE is also a little wonky, and while I’m not sure how the damage is balanced (i.e., how many targets it expects to hit for damage balance purposes), I hope it’s not balanced as a five-target AOE. To be frank, that’s simply unrealistic in any scenario other than a fifty-man zerg stacked on a gate in WvW.

All that said, excepting the timing issues, I love my greatsword, and I hope it gets some tweaking as soon as feasible.