Guild Wars 2

Kinda peeved about the Illusionary Counter power nerf, 25% is a cuhrazy nerf and from a CD point of view, 3 stacks of torment doesn’t really sound like much especially on a counter basis.

Overall it feels like this is gonna make the scepter weaker.
Chaincountering with the scepter and offhand sword was a great counter for instagib thiev- oh I guess that’s why its getting nerfed then.

Right shame too.

Hexxen.7216:

3) Very skilled usage of Phase Retreat (very short teleport and requires you to have a target be behind you and can put you into combat if you are not really skilled with the distances.

I also want to mention, if you have an about face key bound and pretty low ping, its possible to use Phase Retreat for mobility without a target with About face>Phase Retreat>About Face.
Not exactly all that reliable due to the ping thing, but hey.

blutstein.2468:

learn 2 immobilize. iWarden is fine as it is.

I at no point in my post made mentions of having trouble keeping people in the whirl.
Just gonna throw that out there.

The point is that since it doesn’t move, where it gets placed is very important and as of yet, you don’t have control over this.

Now don’t get me wrong, iWarden is my waifu, but its really hard to make use of it as best as it can be like this, in a drawn out fight its not as good as other phantasms due to its lack of movement, but as a utility its lacking because you cant place it.
It would be lovely to get just one of those, the skill just feels incomplete as it is.

Serhend.6382:

Snip

clipnotdone.9634:

If you are outrunning thieves and engies, they must be only autorunning.

Out of combat, Mesmers are one of the slowest classes in the game.

I bolded the keywords for you. Reading is fun. Try it some time.

Darwin Iznang.1342:

As stated above, with runes of Air or Centaur, you can give yourself swiftness when healing. Combined with the Focus, and the right traiting, you can have perma-swiftness, or darn near it. And your build will not be giving anything up either. Both of those runes make sense in our builds.

The point is other classes can do this as well without runes, in addition to various weapon leaps that Mesmer’s don’t have and not everybody wants to run Air or Centaur.

I’m not saying that Mesmers are UNBEARABLY SLOW but my point still stands.

If you are outrunning thieves and engies, they must be only autorunning.

Out of combat, Mesmers are one of the slowest classes in the game.

I’d be pleased as punch if the Marriner’s Horn could be channelled while running.

I want to spam it while chasing ’vaders down in WvW.

Anet pls.

Its not behind, its just randomly within range of the target.
Which is silly since it cant move.

Either it needs to follow its target, or be ground targeted.

It would be nice if the summon didn’t bug a good 25% of the time too, but that’s probably asking to much.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Maul.3284:

@garr. I’m in T1 and it gets used quite a bit in WvW and in PVP. Not sure what server you’re on.

LOL.

You really think people use moa in wvw? In T1?

‘guyzzz, I moaed one of the 60man zerg over there.’

’i’m helppinnggggg’

I carry Moa to use it exclusively on downed players.

It doesn’t even stop you from using downed skills.

I just take solace in the fact that somewhere, someone is staring bankly at their monitor asking why.

I’ve grown accustomed to zerkers doing absolutely no damage and tend to just ignore them entirely.

I think It’s going to be an interesting week 4 or so years from now when this bug eventually gets fixed.

It’s broken, has been that way since launch.

That being said some mobs have ‘boons’ which aren’t really boons and cant be ripped or stolen.

Because who needs logic.

Shorter Mantra charge times?
Nom nom nom nom.

They mentioned bugfixes as well, so that’s good news.

Here’s hoping they don’t completely break something.

There are people that run this without Restorative Mantras?

Its half the reason to run a Phantasm/Mantrea Hrybrid.

Use it with Persisting images since it will let them survive most attacks that would 1 hit them, you can then fully heal them with MoP.

In general, Swordsmen have the highest sustained DPS.
Followed very closely by the Duellist, then Zerker (When it’s not bugged.) with the Warlock and the Warden bringing up the rear.

The Warlock gets a good boost from conditions though, so it can jump right up, the Mage doesn’t get a mention since its useless for power builds.

So in general, Swordsmen.
If it spams AoE, get your pistol trait on spam duellists.
If its a only ranged Boss, put on Wardens Feedback and giggle as you get 3 Wardens whirling completely shutting down the boss and reflecting all its projectiles back at it.

PadmaN.7820:

While we are aware of and working on number 1 & 2, number 3 is a technical limitation of our system and not a bug. Unfortunately, this is not something we can change as of this time.

Thank you for the reports! We hope to get these fixed in an upcoming patch.

Have the clone spawn as phantasms used to, on top of their target.
To avoid exploiting, have swap only work as far as LoS will allow.
Let the design team know I said "You're Welcome" : D

If such a problem existed and has been known about, why was this skill even implemented in the first place?

It can be blocked, dodged and still wont work through Aegis most of the time.

Also it will just randomly not work sometimes.
Its been like this for awhile now. When it DOES work its an okay skill that’s not quite as nice as MoC or Null Field.
Since it still hasn’t been fixed I don’t think it will any time soon.

I’ve been running a Phantasm/Mantra Hybrid since the Illusionary Membrane nerf.
I was gonna make a thread on it and maybe some videos on how to play it well but, I dunno I guess I got drunk and forgot.

Anyhow,

In general, don’t run zerkers with this build in the Wub, run as much Knight’s as you can.
The extra damage is NOT EVER worth the toughness that you would loose. Phantasm builds better suit drawn out battles, and with this you can generally poop out swordsmen and heal yourself and everyone around you while doing pretty great damage.

That being said, in dungeons feel free to throw on a few zerkers pieces and float around the back end of your group healing while discovering the Treasures of the Deeps but remember that your Phantasms benefit from toughness, its a very important stat that you should gouge as hard as you can.

Personally I run Sword/Sword+Staff And mix it up with the Focus from time to time.
That being said, GS works great with this, as does pretty much any offhand. The one problem is you have to take off those delicious Mantra heals for the reflect trait.
Its more than worth it for range only bosses though.

While we are on the subject of the spear, would having the Mariner’s attack rate buffed like it was supposed to be when it’s damage got halved be to much to ask?

Oh and enabling them to attack things near the surface would be lovely to.

1 skill doesn’t hit anything.

What more can I say, Id make a quip about play testing but that would be rather moot at this point.

Conquest/point capture just does nothing but promote the bunker burst or gfto mentality, its a really poorly balanced mode that pretty much does zero to promote build diversity or team strategy.

SPvP feels more like AB than anything.
Only not all that fun.

GW1’s PvP was just so much more diverse and enjoyable.

13 year olds.

Oh, class.

In my experience, Thieves, Warriors, Mesmers.
I see it in others, but those are the big 3.

dank.3680:

Well I have a tendency to /s 22222222222222222222 every time I poop on a HS spammer. Other then that, I don’t notice if ppl talk trash because I just don’t care.

I do that too, bonus points if you do it while they are spamming HS and then poop on them afterwards and give them another about of the 2’s during the finisher.
They tend to get upset about it though.

The biggest problem is that they can dish out upwards of 20K in under a second, due to the increased lag in spvp and the wub, this can mean you are dead before your client even reports damage to you.

No amount of skill makes up for that.

The only thing that does comparable damage is a GC warrior doing 100B, but the setup for that is significantly longer.

IF this game had local servers where everybody had <50 ping, getting gibbed under a second wouldn’t as hard to avoid as it is, but given this is an MMO here, that simply isn’t going to be the case.

Burst in general as far as I see it, as a design flaw that needs to be addressed.
But then again, spvp is riddled with design flaws right now.

EDIT:
To add just one more delicious paragraph, your best bet, specifically with thieves is to try and predict the burst happening and blocking, via aegis or whatever you have available to you. A Mug>CnD>BS frontloads everything they have into that burst.
Thankfully, 90% of Thief players are awful at video games and hit their gib macro as soon as you are in range which makes avoiding it fairly easy if you know they are around.

As for the ones that aren’t, Id say roll a thief and spam CnD, get a feel for the animation so you can spot it in a fight, decent Thieves wont open up with their burst, they will try to bait you into using your defence skills/wear you down first so its really a matter of getting lucky at point.

They stack, but they also compound.

IE, the second 15% takes the first 15% into account.

I love how quickly this thread devolved into my class is harder to play then your class.

For the most part, any minor change in terrain will cause it.

The ‘projectile’ that spawns phantasms seems to travel the same way staff projectiles used to in beta. ie, along the ground.

As a result, you will get obstructed in places where other professions ranged attacks will work. The auto attack on the greatsword seems to follow a similar path, so testing your position with that before trying to summon can help.

Forefire and Forest are two maps that have huuuuuuge issues summoning phantasms in, especially on capture points.
Sometimes they can also ‘miss’ as well, like with projectile channel skills.

All these bugs were introduced when summoning phantasms without los was decidedly gamebreaking overpowered and phantasms were changed to their current state.

Of course, there is also the old summoning bugs where they just didn’t spawn, or spawn dead as well.

In general, I’d avoid using phantasm builds in spvp because of this.

Mungrul.9358:

I was thinking about this on the way to work.
I don’t think they’ll ever add PPT Ascended gear. Why?
It’ll push crit chance closer to 100%, and they don’t want that.
Even more evidence that Ascended gear really wasn’t planned before release and that Exotic was supposed to be the top tier. They’re having to compromise stats in order not to break the game, hence the closest to Knight’s Ascended you can get being Power / Crit Damage / Toughness.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_ascended_equipment

You can get Berserker’s, in fact as far as rings go, they are the most common.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_ascended_equipment

We don’t want bunkers dominating the game.

We don’t want burst dominating the game.

Why release a new tier of gear that caters only to burst and bunker builds?

I’d like to be able to Ascend regular gear, at least then we can get distributions that work with balanced builds builds instead of sacrificing my playstyle (and my fun) just to be able to run higher level fractals.

You know that set of stairs right before Old Tom?
You can mimic those lovely beam things.
Provided you can eat the damage you can crit with them for 40k+.

Also you used to be able to stack agony on bosses with the Mad Asura’s projectiles, but that got patched out.

Also Champion projectiles in EB are fun to throw at lowbies.

Yes, but only if you blind the Mesmer themselves.

I think people need to learn the difference between a crutch strategy and one of the only things that actually work for its role.

The greatsword is the only power based ranged option a Mesmer really has.
The iZerker is the only AoE and the closest thing to a gap closer the Mesmer has.

Its like removing all the stealth skills from Thief and saying that Thief players should learn to adapt instead of expecting their skills to work.

Id say a having a pause before Phantasms attack is a bigger detriment to balancing than what you might think.

Mereto Nat.3621:

After Blink character animation is stuck, when Blink was used while running forward

Personally Id prefer that one didnt get fixed

Almost as funny as jumping during emotes used to be.

Nothing, it reflects the attack back as is. Same attack power and its crit status.

Also be aware that you take all the effects of the first attack, which means you can use it to absorb anything that would interrupt you, unless you throw stability on yourself.

PROTIP: Use it to eat Champion mob projectiles and fire them at lowbies in WvW.

Good times.

Warkupo.1025:

That does get annoying, I’ll admit. I tend to play all the classes, and as such have no silly notion of “loyalty” to any of them.

Right now Id say the Mesmer forums are the worst for this happening, closely followed by the Thief forums.

djtool.8372:

This thread is a function of a group-think mentality that Anet still hasn’t beaten down yet, so I’ll repeat it:

Illusions are not proper pets. They aren’t meant to be. Mesmer is not a “pet” class. This will not change. Thus these in fact are attacks (a representation of attacking someone(s) mind) and therefore they are treated as such.

Good day.

clipnotdone.9634:

It is apparent that a large number of people don’t know what Phantasm skills are, so here is a highly patronising video explaining the matter.

Pretty much all the events were bugged for me until they weren’t available anymore. The final event happened around 6:30am my local time and I had stuff to do in the morning, so I cant really give feedback since I didn’t exactly get to do any of it.

New zone was pretty though.

The funny part is that they actually are since trident clones hit multiple times per attack and stack confusion.

Warkupo.1025:

clipnotdone.9634:

It is apparent that a large number of people don’t know what Phantasm skills are, so here is a highly patronizing video explaining the matter.

You… Made a video just to declare an opinion that others have already simply stated to me? I guess I should feel honored. I like your Charr, by the way.

I guess I’ll just rephrase my counter to this argument again by stating: Summoning a Phantasm has the effect of creating a thing which then hurts the enemy. It is an attack by my definition of “A thing you do that hurts other things.” I’ve not seen a compelling argument to the contrary. The only Phantasm that doesn’t really do any significant amount of damage is the Warden, which I’ve already expressed an opinion on.

Not entirely for you, I know there are a large amount of people that have never played the class making ‘lel you got nerfed deal with it’ threads right now.

That being said, watch the video again.
Calling out a phantasm is not an attack, I’m pretty kitten sure Necro’s don’t have their minions fail if they are blinded and Rangers pets don’t despawn if an opponent is blocking.

Also, dont talk bad about iWarden.

iWarden is my waifu.

The CD increase on portal was well.
Pointless.
Its a minor annoyance and nothing more. I can only assume it was to address the WvW portal issues but since you only use portal once in those situations the increase more or less means nothing.

Id say Blink’s cooldown is fine where it is, traited you can use it pretty often.
It would be nice if some of the utilities had auxiliary effects instead of realistically only having one ‘open’ utility slots.

You cant not have a stunbreaker and condition removal and since Arcane Thievery is so unreliable and bugged , Mantras are generally rather impractical, Phantasms are failing in to summon in more situations than not pretty much every Mesmer and their dog carries Null Field and even then, its not exactly working all the time either.
So most bars are pretty much [Null Field][Stunbreaker][X]

Id like some Auxiliary effects on utilities like say decoy transferring your current conditions to the clone it produces. Maybe it would be a bit strong like that, but you get what I mean.

It is apparent that a large number of people don’t know what Phantasm skills are, so here is a highly patronising video explaining the matter.

alanis.6094:

Mesmer phantasms work like regular attacks.

They sure do.

Hagaren.7125:

This does not overwrite regen buff, although it takes about 3-4s before the first regeneration is applied and you have to be something like under 250-300 range from phantasm for it to work, which means Phantasmal Healing is most of the time completely useless. On the second hand Phantasmal Fury works just fine for me, but it actually overwrites Vengeful Images trait, which has been broken from the start.

Typo on my part, I meant to say Vengeful Images.
It is worth noting that Illusionary healing is also bugged on every Phantasm bar the Duellist.

I see this argument being brought up quite a fair amount, there are things you fail to take into account.

The main thing being just how buggy spawning them is right now.
In addition to all the previous bugs, there are a slew of new ones associated with LoS, and given how important they are to Phantasm builds this is a pretty serious problem.

To counter your argument however, keep in mind Phantasm attacks themselves are blockable and dodgable, not to mention they can be killed.
They were more than manageable and counterable previously, what with being able to kill them before their attacks landed.

Disregarding all the AI, pathfinding and summon bugs that already existed it was still very easy to negate illusions.

In addition, barring the iZerker, they all have pretty long cast times so its pretty easy to dodge. To easy.

This change pretty much makes Phantasm builds in spvp pointless against decent players. Which is unfortunate because the shatter builds that 90% of Mesmers are running are super strong right now and those are what needed a bit of scaling back. Instead Phantasm spawning get half broken.

Heres my observations so far.

Illusion pathfinding is borked.
They still regularly get stuck on hills, minor obstructions and occasionally just run in the opposite direction of their target.

Illusions attacking out of range and not connecting with anything.
Sword clones are particularly prone to this, as are iSwordsmen. Illusions often shatter out of range and don’t damage their target.

Clones still use Beta versions of skills.
Trident clones still stack confusion for example.

Illusion summoning is still buggy and unreliable.
They still flat out fail in conditions where they should normally work, Illusionary leap still fails on stationary targets at point blank range.

Phantasm specific summoning issues.
With the new behaviour introduced in the patch, Phantasm skills often miss, or otherwise fail in conditions in which they should work. The iWarden has had this behaviour for some time and was often overlooked because of how unreliable summoning it was, now ALL Phantasms act like this. In addition to the regular illusionary summoning bugs, they also enjoy projectile based bugs as well.

iZerker damage and ability to hit target has been kittened.
iZerkers appear to do roughly a third of their original damage per hit, in addition they are connecting with their attacks considerably more unreliably, often outright missing and doing nothing.

Illusionary Warden does not move between attacks.
Not entirely sure if this is intended or not, sometimes it half does sometimes it doesnt. There hasn’t been any official word either way so I have no idea. Personally I think it should though, its attack and summoning cooldown are huge and its attack is far from fast or hard to dodge.

Condition removal skills are still bugged
Arcane Thievery is still buggy and rarely works. Despite it being ‘fixed’ I’ve noticed it still being blocked by Aegis. Null Field still randomly doesn’t remove conditions and boons. Mender’s Purity still often doesn’t work. I don’t know about Shattered Conditions because the only Grandmaster trait that isn’t garbage is Illusionary Persona.

Phantasm buffs still broken.
Phantasmal Fury overwrites Phantasmal Healing, neither of which refresh properly on any Phantasm bar the Duellist.

Sharper Image bleeding still fails on Illusion death.
Bleeding caused by this trait causes zero damage when the illusion dies, given how quickly this happens in most situations, this is a rather prevalent problem.

The underwater version of Mimic lasts half as long as it does on land.
Pretty self explanatory, the window for absorption and reflection is half the time it is land with the same cooldown, very much hampering an already often ignored skill.

Absorbed attack still causes full effects with Mimic(?)
Not entirely sure if this is intended or not, but full damage and effects are taken on the first attack, preventing it from defending against pulls dazes and stuns which will interrupt the skill and cause the full cooldown to take effect.

Deception doesn’t break targeting.
Deception, the second downed skill does not break targeting and will almost never work as a result.

Illusion of Drowning has generally unlimited range.
Illusion of Drowning can be used out of range and most of the time will work at almost any distance so long as you have something targeted.

Temporal Curtain vertical range prevents it from reflecting projectiles.
Many Arching projectiles bypass it right now, slight elevation changes in terrain can also cause it to fail.

Temporal Curtain’s Swiftness buff does not stack with others.
Pretty self explanatory.

Distortion will sometimes fail to do anything.
Damage and various CC will often still occur during Distortion, from both the Shatter and Blurred Frenzy.

Blink and other porting skill still hilariously broken.
You can still port through walls, the floor and out of the map in general. Additionally, porting over the top of objects still has a habit of failing.

Blink occasionally doesn’t break stun.
Blink will often cause you to port, but not break stun. This happens more often than not with knockdowns.

Mirror Blade often fails.
Mirror Blade will often fail to activate at closer ranges and act as if it has been interrupted.

Illusionary Wave will fail at close range.
This skill will very rarely work at close range.

There are a few more, but there is already a tread for it.

I would like to ad one more thing though.

Mind Stab (Greatsword) is an awful skill.
Roots the Mesmer, does poor damge and has awful range. Id like to see it get an extra 10 seconds or so on the cooldown, revert to its old animation and becoming a launch.
Yes. a launch.
Because that would be pretty dang awesome to see in a WvW Zerg.

On the upside, all this progression is great.

I cant wait to progress towards legendary weapons.

Stuff that didn’t need nerfing got nerfed, stuff that needed buffing got ignored, bugs that have been around since beta didn’t get touched.

Did I mention the bugs?
Because hot diggity do, several classes have well over half of their trait pools bugged.

How can you make balance changes when half of the stuff that directly effects the classes balance doesn’t even work?
You know, because that is kind of a big deal.

Rangers are still pretty much awful at everything, Mesmers are gradually getting shoehorned into shatterbuildorgtfo and Engineers are being shown the pvp door and being told not to cop the door in the kittenhole on the way out.

All the event stuff aside, this patch was pretty dreadful given all the talk of actual balance changes.

Step 1: Get offhand sword.
Step 2: Mash 5
Step 3: /laugh

But in all serialness, do your best to negate their burst. Blurred Frenzy, and Illusionary Riposte are VERY good at this, once that initial burst fails make sure you hunt them down otherwise they’ll just make another attempt when their CD’s are up.

It was a slight cooldown nerf on Phantasms.
I run a Phantasmic build myself and it works fine.

Personally I run Sword/Focus+Greatsword, but I swap the Focus out as the situation calls for something different.

Also don’t rely to much on youtube build videos, experiment with the class and find a playstyle that suits you and build around it.

All of my thoughts on this aside, this is something Anet said they weren’t going to do, and now they are doing it.

And now my thoughts:

I don’t like it.
Gear treadmills are bad.
If you think they are good, then you are bad.

Gear progression go home.

Unfortunately.5940:

clipnotdone.9634:

Good fun had by all, quite a few good fights and some really great play.
Hopefully we can get a few more of them going before the matchup ends.

Also the whole thing was recorded.

Link to the recording pls? I’d like to review a few things..

I’m not the one who recorded it, a guildie did. That being said Ill send you a link asap.

Good fun had by all, quite a few good fights and some really great play.
Hopefully we can get a few more of them going before the matchup ends.

Also the whole thing was recorded.

Reflecting a skeleton’s bow attacks causes the player to go through a longbow attack animation.
It overrides whatever you were doing at the time and roots you, often you cant break the animation either.

Here is a handy dandy video.
http://youtu.be/S4K4F84KEIs

Its pretty funny in the SKELETONS EVERYWHERE door events when you sit there for several minutes after everything is long dead still reflecting projectiles unable to do anything apart from spam I WANNA GET OFF MR. BONES WILD RIDE in /say.