Guild Wars 2

I also suspect phantasms aren’t inheriting ferocity correctly.

Going to go out on a limb and say this probably has something to do with Power Block.

For those who don’t know, if you throw on Harmonious Mantras, charge a mantra, then switch it out, you keep the 3 charges.

So I think its fairly safe to assume that they were switched around to avoid people using it for extra Distraction charges with Power Block.

That is to say, instead of actually fixing the bug they switched the traits around.

Pyroathiest.4168:

clipnotdone.9634:

“Fixing” it mostly refers to stacking agony on things in fractals, so basically pve nerfs.

As to it actually happening during the patch, who knows, there hasn’t been any definitive word on it.

I thought that was fixed a while ago.

They gave agony stacking bosses AR, still works fine on everything else.

EDIT: Yeah the segmented fractal areas also prevents it from going from fractal to fractal, on the Mossman instability you can still run about one shotting all the mobs though.

Dodge>5>Dodge.
Congratulations you are now out of range of any Mesmer attacks.

Conversely, beak to the face since most Mesmers who use it to try and win a 1v1 are poop.

“Fixing” it mostly refers to stacking agony on things in fractals, so basically pve nerfs.

As to it actually happening during the patch, who knows, there hasn’t been any definitive word on it.

RIP Power based roaming.

Relshdan.6854:

terrible trait unless it stacks per interrupt…..

Even if it did, its still worthless, Mesmers cant really do much with healing power.

I also seem to have gotten the same thing, at first I assumed it was another players inventory that got loaded, then after a second look I came to the conclusion that there was to much stuff for any player to have in their inventory.

Then for the sake of it, I tried to sell an item, which was oddly enough successful.
I didn’t receive the coin for it, which is good, otherwise there would be a few people earning a few free thousand gold from this bug.

I know the horrors is fighting a thief that is cycling Lyssa and Consume Plasma, and in situations like that its very hard to deal with.

It’s an odd situation really, on the one hand, the Lyssa 6 is really strong, but on the other hand, some classes flat out need it for the condition removal.

Unless there is some massive shakeup in the meta, I don’t see a few classes being able to survive at all if Lyssa’s 6 gets nerfed heavily.

It varies wildly depending on what interchanges you get routed through on your way to the server.
If you go through poopy interchanges, you can expect a bunch of lag and packet loss.
You can run into desync issues alot with high ping as well, since the netcode isnt exactly what I’d call great.

I play on US from Australia, normally connecting to a server around Texas Id be expecting around 300, to 400 ping.
In gw1 you can actually check ping and I range from 300 to 3k, which isnt that bad given how the game worked, I’d say I float around the same area, albiet with worse spikes with gw2.

In pve its no big deal, but in spvp you can go from 100% to 0% without the client even reporting damage to you.
So it can range from ‘a mild annoyance’ to ‘completely unplayable’.

Thats certainly an odd correlation to draw, Mesmers aren’t exactly what you would call good, let alone viable in spvp right now.

If I had to take a gander, maybe its that most of the folkes still trying to run a Mes in pvp are the ones that have been with the class since launch and a generally know how to play it well.

Unless we are talking about hotjoin and you are watching people who think clones hit for 10K.

Goodness no.

Not in its current state, not in the current format.

People who don’t know what projectile reflection is.

Especially on Skyhammer.

EDIT:
Also pulling Mesmers that run Mirror of Anguish off on skyhammer is always funny.

The block will still happen but the counter will miss because of blind.

Moa is really more of a ‘Go away from me for 10 seconds’ or ‘noelite4you’ button.
In instances where you get hit by a Moa+Entangling roots combo or something you probably weren’t making it out of that situation anyway.

In a 1v1 situation and you get hit buy it, you can either doge into the 5 skill, then just wait it out since you’ll be out of range of anything the Mesmer can really throw at you or you can run right at them and proceed to peck out their eyes since the skills on it are actually pretty good.

That being said, its still a pretty poor elite outside of countering other elites and trolling, which isnt even as fun as it used to be since it doesn’t work on people in their downed state anymore.

I think this is mostly on the devs at this point.
People keep making threads, inciting discussion, brainstorming and the like but its all generally rather one sided.

If the leaked patch notes are anything to go by, I don’t think the balance team have much of an idea how the class actually works, let alone what kind of role they want it to fill.
Skills seems to just get shifted around randomly, or given largely superficial buffs or nerfs.
Half the time it feels like they are just padding out the changenotes.

Outside of the utility of portal, which in itself thieves have a somewhat passable substitute for, I honestly cant think of any role a Mesmer can take in which they aren’t completely outclassed in by other classes for less trait investment and general effort on the behest of the player.
The fact that the baseline for most skills are quite poor until traited for, and being reliant on squishy illusions that most classes can 1 or 2 shot with low cooldown aoe skills puts the class in a rather silly spot against any kind of skilled player.

This is of course not even going into the myriad of bugged skills and traits.
At this point, it feels like the class needs a complete rework, which will never happen.

Malakin.2809:

Maybe they are waiting for the bug to ripen so it becomes a buff when they fix it: “The skill now works as it should have since day one. Reduced damage and increase cooldown to compensate” :-)

Its funny, because if the leak is anything to go by, exactly that is happening to Null Field and Phantasmal Rouge.

Its already to late, you cant stop it now.

Taken from patch preview thread:

Karl McLain.5604:

Hi again!
As Allie promised, I’m here to update the thread one more time before it returns to the depths. Thanks everyone for participating and having a civil conversation, relevant to the topic. Here’s a few more changes we’ll be including for the next feature build:

Elementalist:
Cleansing Water: This trait no longer has an internal cooldown while in PvP.
Meteor Shower: Updated the skill fact to display the increased endurance regeneration while the player has the Zephyr’s Focus trait. Added a red ring to indicate area of effect for enemy players. Added a white ring for allied players.

Engineer:
We’ve fixed a lot of turret issues that were causing them to behave poorly or inconsistently (many of these issues have been reported via the bug forums, thanks guys!) In the coming patch, you’ll see quite a few improvements in this area. For example:
• Fixed the bug that was causing all turrets to have a lower rate of fire than intended.
• Fixed the bug that was preventing the overcharge for the Rifle Turret from increasing its rate of fire.

Guardian:
This one is more of a bug fix, but will help out nonetheless:
Searing Flames: This trait now activates only if the target has a boon on them.

Necromancer:
Fixed the bug which caused your heal/utility skills to be locked out when you exit deathshroud.

Ranger:
Ranger pets are receiving a responsiveness pass and will be much easier to command. For example: Activating your F2 skill will now break your pet out of its current action in order to execute that ability.

Once again, this is not the end of the notes and there’s a lot of stuff we’ll be talking about soon! We’re looking forward to it.
-Karl

Since Mesmer wasn’t even mentioned, I wouldn’t go getting your hopes up.
Mesmer confirmed for new Paragon.

McLovin.2408:

pretty sure there will never be anything Dire in PvP WAYY to Op

That’s the joke.

Karl McLain.5604:

In general, we’ve got quite a bit more stuff coming. As before, we can’t say what these things are just yet… But there’s a bit of stuff that will shake up the meta. We’re really looking forward to it!

-Karl

Dire Amulet for spvp confirmed.

Pyroatheist.9031:

After several months and many patches, this skill is still horridly bugged and absolutely needs a fix.

Very often the warden will spawn and then simply stare at the mob. This happens close to 50% of the time, seemingly more often in situations where you actually need the reflection.

Fix it please.

I’d say its probably more than 50%.
I’ve noticed if you have Wardens Feedback equipped the failure rate goes through the roof.

Also here is a video with a little less going on in it, I suppose I might get some video from an opponents point of view with 3 wardens chasing them around doing nothing in the spvp’s tomorrow.

You just, just in case there is somebody out there who wants to call this a visual bug or something asinine like that.

I figured when I posted this it was gonna at least get a Mesmersoplol post or two, but since this thread is devoid of even that I guess I’m bumping the thread.

I dunno, here’s a picture of cat.
Quality discussion inbound.

As it stands right now, illusions do not benefit from a rather large chunk of the effects of sigils and runes, along with traits and consumable effects.

Once upon a time, this wasn’t the case.
From memory, I believe it was changed due to phantasms being mixed with sigil’s of earth to stack insane amounts of bleeds.
Now days, all the offending sigils all have ICD’s, so it hardly seems like it would be a balance issue any more.

Any ‘do extra damage to’ or ‘take less damage from’ effects also have no effect on illusions, along with most other special consumable effects.

There are a few traits as well with little indication as to which do and which don’t.

This really creates a bunch of confusion for new Mesmer players when they have no idea what traits, sigils, runes and effects actually get passed on and really only serves to hamper Mesmer build diversity.

Mesmers aren’t exactly in a great spot in spvp, have pretty poor damage in pve (with the current design in pve, damage is all that matters.) and outside of utility botting in zergs, serve little point in WvW save for a few roaming builds which rely on a rather broken trait.

The class as a whole needs improvements and reducing the disparity with how the Mesmer interacts with attachable, consumable and traitable effects compared to other classes is a step in the right direction.

Probably nobody.
The crit damage changes wont change anything in PVE, the only place anything will change will be small scale WvW, where condi bunkering will be even more of a superior option in every case ever.

Supposedly its all supposed to somehow make sense with the super duper secrets that “We Cant Talk About Yet™” so I don’t know.

Maybe it wont be as silly as we all seem to think it will be, but at the moment we don’t know because apparently keeping the playerbase uniformed and confused is the best option somehow.

Josh Davis.6015:

I’ve seen quite a few posts mention the lack of bug fix mentions and I wanted to let you guys know that for the most part they’ve simply been excluded from the balance preview. Our designers have been and will continue to work on profession bugs all the way until this build is locked up and ready to ship.

Why not mention them though?
Allot of people (myself included) are getting pretty tired of reporting the same bugs over and over again to no dev response whatsoever to then watch patch after patch where superficial or trivial things get fixed over skills and traits that directly effect the balance of the game remain untouched and untalked about.
Most folkes would be happy with a simple ‘We are aware of the bug.’.

Mesmer skills make great examples, in general the dev responses to Mesmer class bugs are nothing short of comical.

The last dev response on Illusionary Leap was something along the lines of ’Engine limitations prevent the skill from working and we cant fix it.", which is nothing short of a copout because working pathfinding for a nigh identical version of the skill exists not only in the game, but on the same class with the Phantasmal Swordsman.

It took almost 6 months for the Phantasmal Berserker hitbox bug to even acknowledged beyond “Its not bugged, its just a damage floater issue” in a thread with literally hundreds of players reporting the bug along with ample amounts of video evidence.

There are plenty of other cases with other classes.

So no, ‘excluding them from the patch preview’ isn’t good enough.

Those changes would remove all of redeeming factors Mantras have, whilst nerfing their already sub par baseline, pretty much nullifying all of their traits and taking more active play and turning it passive.

In summary:

Dear god no.

Soon.          

Qaelyn.7612:

What are they playing? Mostly warrior, with some guardian. So naturally we leave those classes alone and nerf mesmers?

Then there’s PvP, where hardly any top players run mesmer, and those that do usually don’t run PU.

And then there’s PvE, where PU mesmers are basically useless.

This is NOT something that needs to be fixed. What needs to be fixed are all the problems that lead to so few playing mesmer in general.

I’m not going to sit here and say PU is the most pressing balance issue in the game right now, because you are right, its far from it.

It doesn’t work in spvp because you cant contest points in stealth.
Mesmers take spots in teams for utility, not for damage or support, other classes fill those roles much more efficiently, not that a Mesmer cant forfill those roles, there are simply better options.

PVE is PVE.
Zerkers, stand on wall, Treasures of the Deeps.

It doesn’t have to be OP across the board to be a problem, and simply ignoring what’s actually wrong with the class and nerfing everything else isn’t going to help anybody.

Marsares.2053:

I pretty much only solo roam and I haven’t run with PU in 4 months. There’s plenty like me and – if anything – I see less and less PU Condi roamers as they’ve realised that they can’t kill anything if people choose to disengage, which is incredibly easy to do in WvW.

The vast majority of my playtime in GW2 is solo and <5man roaming and I literally have not seen a single non PU Mes in months.
At the end of the day, its still our personal experience, but do you really want to try and argue to me, or anyone for that matter, that PU builds aren’t some of the strongest roaming builds around?

Don’t forget you can always run a power oriented PU build, its not just the on death condi builds that work, since you spend almost most of fights in stealth with protection and Aegis its very viable to run a power PU build in full zerkers with little to no consequence.

That is why this trait is to strong right now.

Qaelyn.7612:

As I wrote on the mesmer forum, I’ll agree that PU is a problem when I see PU mesmers dominating the PvP leaderboards, running in quantity in WvW zergs, or being requested for dungeon runs. Not one of those things happens now, not even close.

That’s a rather silly way to look at things.
I’m not saying it needs to be nerfed into oblivion, but PU is clearly to strong right now, its basically the top dog roaming build and you’d be pretty hard pressed to convince folkes otherwise.

This isnt baaaaw stealth2hard, the fact is, you can remain in stealth, lay conditions while gaining a bunch of great defensive boons with very little effort.
Or you can run zerkers on it, poop phantasms and get reasonable damage with very little chance for retaliation from your opponent.
Either way, it’s low risk, high reward.
The fact that almost every Mesmer in WvW is running it should speak for itself.

This game needs less cheesy easymodo builds, they are bad for the game.

Addressing the absurdly powerful PU clone death builds by reworking DE is still silly.
At least, that’s where I think this change is coming from, outside of PU builds on death traits aren’t exactly what I would call great.

All this will achieve is shoehorning Mesmer players into 1-2 METAGAEM builds even harder than they are already.

Using DE offensively is a great risk/reward mechanic, you give up dodges for extra offensive power.
It promotes active, skilful and thoughtful play from a Mesmer.

If anything needs a rework, its PU and stealth in general.
Being able to spam stealth, farting loads of boons on yourself and laying on conditions without breaking stealth and lay revealed on yourself is not skilful play, as much as many of the PU players here would like to claim.

I have not seen a Mesmer that isn’t me running anything but a PU variant build in months.
Its not fun to watch, its not fun to fight and I cant really see how it would be fun to play.

Roaming in WvW these days is basically:
Fighting 4 PU Mesmers Simulator 2012: Occasional P/D Thief Edition.

I just cant wrap my head around the logic behind these proposed changes.

“Hey guys shatter builds are OP”

Nerf Phantasms.

“Hey guys Phantasms are OP”

Nerf Shatter.

“Hey guys Mesmers are worthless in pvp.”

UHhh, Mantras are Aoe. Well two of them are. See? Mesmers are fine.

“Mantras are still useless in pvp”

What’s a Mantra?

“Hey guys Prismatic Understanding is OP”

HA HA HA HA HA

PURPLE

HA HA HA HA HA

CHEESE

HA HA HA HA HA

PRUPLE CHEESE

HA HA HA Nerf Deceptive Evasion.

Maining a Mesmer is suffering.

PU is probably the least effort/highest return playstyle the Mesmer has right now, I wouldn’t mind at all if it got nerfed and I finally saw a Mesmer who’s not running it for a change.

The less stealth cheese in the game the better.

Dxtory.
Disturbingly customisable.
High Quality.
Low resource imprint.
Cheap as hell.

If you have what you need to run Shadowplay well, use that, otherwise Dxtory will basically dump all over any other option.

http://psychcentral.com/lib/the-5-stages-of-loss-and-grief

Melanion.4892:

I don’t understand the majority of what you intended with this post, but I assume you mean to say that the group in this photo is a zerg that is mindlessly attacking you and your three friends? Because I was there, and we just came back from wafflestomping 30+ FA near Umber before stopping to res our friend on the bridge. Also, lol, mortars on dead bodies.

Its mostly just in rebuttal to RazGerb behaving is if Ebay has literally 12 people playing against 80 all day every day.
Especially coming off yesterday, like where I said there wasn’t even anybody at EB, 5 people could have ran through and taken half the map unopposed, but there was nothing for hours.

Melanion.4892:

I had fun tonight, but FA seemed off their game. Most of the bigger guilds weren’t on EBG apparently. Also, lol at the FA group (I think it was BLOB, but it might have been GLOB) that wanted to run in to Anz and just… didn’t because we waited outside the door until the lord was dead. So much lewt.

Today was a great day, lots of good fights, and quite a bit of zergy shenanigans.
I really do hope this keeps up, plenty of fun to be had.

In other news, quite the slog in EB today, some good fights throughout most of the day both zergs, 5v5’s and some other smaller teams.

Hopefully this pace sticks around.

RazGerb.6173:

clipnotdone.9634:

I’m just gonna leave this here.

I really don’t see whats wrong there, it’s just generic Eternal combat, with the Stronger server constantly pushing out of SM While EB Tries to defend their keep against a Blob server like yours.

About the exact response I was expecting.

EB is only loosing because they don’t have anybody playing, that zerg in the screenshot?
Nope, doesn’t exist.

Last night when FA had outmanned during oceanic times?
Nah, that’d never happen.

It wasn’t to long ago that FA were in the exact spot you are in now, the matchup threads are still there.

You know what I was going in EB yesterday?
Reading.
There were less than 10 FA players in EB, we had everything and I was sitting in Orgath digging into a good book because you lot weren’t even trying.

I’m just gonna leave this here.

Aitadis.8269:

Crazy, there was a FA mesmer from another GODS guild who tried to do the same exact thing at bay last night when we took it.

Hopefully something gets done about it soon, its more or less on the same tier as outright bugging into keeps and towers.

To those of you waiting to res that Mesmer in overlook through the wall.
Its not happening.

UPDATE:
Well, at least you tried.

The current maps are simply to small for 8v8, 3 points leave bugger all room to split your team.

That being said another mode, with larger maps suited for 8-man teams would be a great change of pace.

Wagonvil Rock
Wagongate
Wagorlis Pass
Crystal Wagon
Darkwagan
Devona’s Wagon
Wagonbrand
Wagony Bay
Eredon Tewagon
Ferwaguson’s Crossing
Fort Aspenwagon
Gate of Wagon
Henge of Denwagon
Isle of Janwagon
Jade Wagon
Wagoneng
Magwagon
Northern Shiverwagon
Sanctum of Wagon
Wagon of Sorrows
Sorrow’s Wagon
Stormwagon Isle
Tarnished Wagon
Wagon’s Bend

Always alt-tab when solo roaming.

Its good for you.

Peacemaker Xeranan.4508:

Snip

Disregard what I said about the scepter. This is better.

Not huuugely, Mesmers generally play a utility bot role in group scenarios.
Especially in lager fights since their offensive power via clones or phantasms is hampered by the fact they just wont live enough to be shattered, attack or lay down conditions.

That being said, things like traited wardens can unleash hell if placed well in a backline with the right timing.

JonPeters.5630:

Overall I think this a good small step for a profession that has a lot of roles it can fill fairly uniquely. I think this might give us 3 strong mesmer build archetypes.

1) Shatter
2) Phantasm
3) Mantra

I think right behind those are the interrupt shutdown mesmer and the signet mesmer, so future suggestions towards those are appreciated as well.

On the subject of Mantras, I really feel like Harmonious Mantras is rather detrimental to their usage.
3 Charge Mantras are amazing utilities, but the 2 charge ones are just a little subpar.
I understand why Mantras without it aren’t great, for the same reasons they were changed during beta, but having to go 30 deep into Domination means you have very little trait points left to play with, which means you wont really be able to take full advantage of Mantras unless you go 30/30 into Domination and Dueling as a full glassy offence build, which is hardly viable since most of the damage mitigation and avoidance the Mesmer has lies in their utilities, which you wont have access to in a full Mantra build.
I think reworking, or outright removing Harmonious Mantras and raising their baseline effects slightly would give them a push to be much more viable in spvp and other game formats.

I run a 10/30/0/30/0 Mantra/Phantasm build myself, I feel the two playstyles compliment each other and promote much more active play but, I feel their problem lies in the fact that Mantras take a huge investment by the player to be made usage of properly, giving up much of the survivability the Mesmer uses in other utilities, and quite frankly, Mantras are really just slightly poorer versions of shouts with a 2+ second prime up time without a 30 trait point investment that severely limits what builds you can use them in.

And on a somewhat related note, is there any chance of Illusions being able to benefit from sigils and other % effects again? At the very least outside of spvp?
I understand they were initially prevented from making use of them because of sigils of earth allowing insane amounts of bleeds, but the limitation really limits Rune and Sigil choice for Mesmer in PvE and WvW, purely because they barely benefit from them.

JonPeters.5630:

Scepter
Scepter is still missing something but we don’t want to overload the autoattack as we think that promotes more mindless play and are trying to move away from builds that focus so much on the “1” skill. I feel like that scepter should be the tricksy defender that can stop enemies from attacking and defend allies, but maybe it’s single target nature is keeping that from working.

I think the single target nature of the scepter isn’t what hampers it, its the clunky and unresponsive nature of the animations that do.

Confusing images, when positioned and timed correctly is amazing in a group fight, but the long charge time, and the attacks tendency to flip out when a target is out of range or a little to far to the side can cause it to outright fail, meaning it takes a significant amount or premeditation to land correctly.

As far as the auto attack goes, compare the auto on the Mesmer scepter to that of the Guardian, it hits faster, harder and has longer range.

The clone created by the scepter is in general, useless to any build, they offer zero utility like sword clones do, and lay no conditions like staff clones, in addition to this, their attack is also slow, short range so they are also the wost clone for procing sharper images.

In general, using the auto attack shouldn’t be the priority of the weapon, that would be silly. The problem is the slow and clunky nature of the attack, coupled with the general uselessness of the clone produced basically makes using the auto at all during a fight detrimental if anything.

JonPeters.5630:

Mimic
Last thought. This skill is for almost all intents and purposes just not working, but is causing some broken behavior with certain bosses. I would like to replace it with a complete redesign and am open to discussion on that as well.

Personally, I love how mimic works, I do realise how it is um “broken” in behaviour with particular bosses it is, having taken advantage of said behaviour myself.

That being said, I’ve always felt the nature of the skill was a very active counter type skill which had a very good risk/reward notion attached to it. If you chose to eat a heavy ranged attack ie, killshot, you could then reflect that attack back at a later stage, promoting very thoughtful decision making in a fight.

I believe an elite version of that same concept, that also allowed the ‘reflection’ of physical attacks could be a very interesting thing to play with, kind of like Echo or the Simple Thievery and Symbols of Inspiration Elites from Guild Wars 1.
ie, a Mesmer could allow themselves to fall victim of an attack, to later allow their usage of it.
It could make for some very interesting plays by skilled Mesmer players.

Shattered Conditions is still basically worthless, its 30 trait points for 1 condition per shatter, regardless of illusion count.
If it were to be merged with Restorative illusions it would be a much more attractive trait, powerful yes but its a grandmaster tier trait. It needs to be.