Spirit Weapons are some of the best designed AI in the game, requiring actual input to be successful. Just because you roll your face on a build without AI doesn’t mean you are playing more actively than someone rolling their face on an AI build. The most eSports game in the entire world – League of Legends – has a massive amount of PvE in its game mode, because (shock) whenever you make a gamemode more complex than DM you have some non-player mechanic you have to fight against.
to expand on this
Yorick, Heimer, Zyra, Malz all have AI that cant be microed and all are average power level. And none of them are strong because of the AI either. Heimer is a noob trap, he has 3 turrets and if you walk into him you are a kitten and deserve to die, he cant chase you and has no mobility. All he is good at is pve pushing.
Like I hate seeing the fricken “omfg no more ai!” complaints. It just is screaming “Scrub alert” to me.
I probably wouldn’t use Yorick or Heim as sterling examples of AI done right since they’re both an absolute pain in the rear to lane against depending on counterpicks. Heim has some play since you can burn down turrets as they’re placed and punish him for his lack of mobility, Yorick on the other hand is like flipping the middle finger to your top lane opponent. He is universally loathed, even by Riot (who are too embarrassed to get on with revamping him as planned).
Does GW2 have any effective AI builds? No. Does this mean we should start on getting some? I should hope I don’t have to ask this question. In a sense AI builds are high-risk. You sacrifice most if not all your utilities, you toss out any trait synergy or complementary spike, you give up situational mobility all in the hopes of pulling off a one-trick pony. At the same time you aren’t really playing the game and it isn’t going to teach newer players anything other than maybe positioning (since they’ll be dying a lot).
I think she probably took 30 into Shadow Arts for maximum outplay potential.
As for the new iLeap change, I am against it because it represents everything that’s badly designed in GW2. Infiltrator’s Strike is a bad skill: we do not need to use it to set the standards. There should be far more skills like iLeap (and no I don’t care what the Thief’s “role” is) and far less like this or Flashing Blade and so on.
Illusionary Leap was once balanced if very buggy and it stood almost alone amongst its competitors in this. It’s a terrible shame that this balance is going the way of the dodo.
I am however strait up not a fan of moving the traits in inspiration to illusions unless they all are grandmaster. Restoritive illusions, and shattered conditions, are way to strong to be taken with Illusionary persona as well as maxing the illusions tree, AND having access to domination and dueling traits. I think something would have to be given up. Although a better solution I think would be moving them both down to the Master tier, allowing for 0/4/0/4/6 builds to be viable, giving up damage and boon strip for sustain.
You are too ha0rd on yourself. I was like you once, you eventually come to realize that principles are meaningless and players on other classes have no qualms whatsoever about accepting crazy buffs and benefits if it’ll personally benefit them. I also think you’re overestimating the strength of these two traits, particularly Restorative Illusions. It would be a very fair trade for something like Illusionary Elasticity, it would not be even close to displacing any Dom traits.
edit: word filter
(edited by shimmerless.4560)
Whether it made much sense really doesn’t matter to me nor to most players who have had to endure this change. It killed off a weapon that was on life support at high level play to begin with.
Yeah…reverting iLeap…? No thank you…
Two ways you can use the new iLeap:
1. cast and swap the instant the clone appears
2. cast and let the clone cripple before swappingWith the old iLeap that pathing was horrible and mostly unreliable. Op I think you need to dial that back and think things through a bit….
I will agree about eh BF change… It makes no sense to be immune to incoming damage under distortion and still take damage from retal….
I am referring to the “bug fix” or whatever it’s called that broke Swapping on clone death.
Don’t feed the troll please people, thanks
I am referring to the “bug fix” or whatever it’s called that broke Swapping on clone death.
Mesmers have been waiting for many many months to see shatter brought into the realm of reliability and appropriate returns on performance.
For a lot of us the biggest source of frustration is that while with any other class or comparable spec in the game (like D/P Thief or S/x Ele) you can’t rely on the Mesmer to actually do what you intended it to. You can phase retreat out of harm’s way or you can phase retreat into the wall. You could teleport or you could get stuck in place and have to type /dance to free yourself from this psychic burden. Maybe your phantasmal warden will protect you, maybe it won’t. Your damage complement might land or it might whiff into the aether due to stray AoE or random cleave. It goes on and on like this for so many things.
In addition the spec is barebones and unforgiving. It has very poor sustain (with two sources of counter due to the resource system, meaning poison hurts shatter Mesmers far more than it does other glass specs), incredibly strict traits and utilities and it is often mechanically wonky meaning the Mesmer is at the mercy of alien things like clone pathing to stay relevant.
Some suggestions:
- Revert all Blurred Frenzy nerfs
- Revert iLeap “bug fix” (please)
- Place Portal on the F(x) bar instead of being a utility
- Take a look at trading some Inspiration traits that never see play into Illusions
- Ramp the base damage on confusion to somewhere between where it originally was and where it is now
I feel a bit hopeless at this point. The audience who will understand where I am coming from is very small (in a game that already doesn’t court tremendous numbers) and given the frankly baffling statements the devs have made about the class I am even less certain that anyone in the dev team has a true appreciation for where shatter is right now. That it can somewhat fulfil a role on one or two teams is not by any means a sign-off on the spec’s health.
None of the Mesmer changes bar iElasticity (which only further bolsters Staff/GS) are going to substantially help matters at all. I don’t see why all this energy is being wasted on meaningless fringe traits like PU or Mimic or conditions on scepter or whatever. Shatter falls further and further behind its competitors (like Elementalist and Thief) which repeatedly reap the benefits of power creep and strong changes each patch cycle. Where shatter is concerned the devs have their heads in the clouds.
In my opinion, the PU change isn’t a huge nerf at all and I will go even further and say it doesn’t really change much at all. A few seconds less of protection isn’t a big deal with all the mechanics a PU mesmer has to avoid damage. You get more damage however little that may be and look on the bright side. Some classes can remove boons from you, and swiftness and might could help shield from removing some of the more important boons like protection, aegis.
To me clone death traits is just dumb and mindless gameplay. All you would basically do is just spam clones and there is pretty much no counter for it. If you leave the clones alive, they will stack lots of bleeds on you if you even try to close the gap. If you try to kill them, you are putting bleeds, weakness and vulnerability on yourself. And a lot of classes have AoEs and cleaves and have no choice but to destroy the clones in order to hit the mesmer and you pretty much have no feasible way of avoiding it. It was being used so much as a crutch. Now at least you can avoid it and there is some counterplay involved. Maybe the bleeding change was unneeded, but I think IE on staff clones and auto attack on torment more than make up for this. IE interacting with staff clones is a tremendous buff to any build that uses Staff (Power or Condi) that it makes this nerf look like a drop in the bucket.
It’s not like you can dodge every clone death either, if that was your crutch for DPS I feel sorry for you.
There are dozens of counters to clone death traits. They have a very small radius, you don’t have to kill them, they can be cleansed. In addition the only popular spec that gets fully hard countered by such a setup is DPS Guardian due to the nature of its abilities (no retreats) and reliance on cleave. Others will struggle but that is the nature of GW2, every class has a sidepoints spec and the Mesmer version just happens to be slow but very reliable.
I am all ears for players who wish to argue that these traits and mechanics are overbearing but this nerf is not even close to being the right way to go about changing them. It isn’t even consistent with dozens of far worse offenders (such as Steal traits, as a player above noted). There have been no positive changes to making the higher skillcap Mesmer less frustrating to play, maybe once those arrive (in the year 2042) these complaints will carry more weight.
Just revert the skill to what it was before they did the bug fix/nerf.
I would agree with this but it’s still head-in-the-sand because the skill had tremendous issues even before the nerf. I do agree with ANet and others that it needs some kind of attention, I just think this is the wrong way to go about it.
Illusionary Leap was once an exemplary skill. It was versatile, well-telegraphed, balanced between offense and defense (which suited the sword) and allowed for maximum creativity on the part of the Mesmer.
Infiltrator’s Strike and Flashing Blade are terrible design. There is no telegraph, only anticipation (or reaction): skills like these are part of the reason heavy invulnerable uptime is prized in top-level play. Illusionary Leap does not need to become more like these abilities.
If it simply isn’t possible to fix the clone pathing and make it reliable, then why not set the casting time onto Swap instead of Illusionary Leap? I would gladly forgive the stun break to keep this skill from being just as overbearing as all the other instant-casts in the game.
I really urge the devs to reconsider what they’re doing here. I understand that other Mesmers have long pushed for this change but I strongly feel it’s in error. There have to be better ways to go about fixing this skill.
Well yeah that is true. It’s just for mesmers, helseth suggests that they won’t even need PU, since torment spam will let them faceroll through everything. It’s too strong of a condition to just slap on an autoattack.
No it isn’t. Only on Mesmers is that true because the clone system lets them up to quadruple their condition output. If the clones aren’t applying it, then it can be balanced on an auto.
Heck, even if it was on almost any other weapon, it wouldn’t be so bad, but Scepter clone generation is quite fast.
Have you actually played a Mesmer even once? Are you posting from planet Mars?
So much QQ cuz Mesmers can actually reliably set up a shatter.
If I can out play steal and infiltrator strikes into bigger burst than a Mesmer can possibly pull off, surely you can out play a clone popping into your face version.
Inf. strike is on a weapon set that lacks any burst to follow it up with (and is shorter immob), and traited steal merely dazes (and doesn’t prevent dodging).
I laughed.
The fact that people are excited about (maybe) getting a skill fixed which has been broken for over half a year now is pretty sad.
Has there been any word on reverting this terrible change?
I think Pack, Mesmer, Traveler’s, Scholar’s and Lyssa (although I stopped using these long before the nerf) are all solid choices. Ogre too, even if the reason they’re good is a bit gamey.
I did a little reserch to see how powerfull these sigils can really get, heres what i got:
with 25 stacks of might, 160 bonus power from a frozen fish snack, 300 from the trait, full berserker ascended equipement wepaons and trinkets, rune of strength, a slayer sigil, banner of strength, signet of might and empower allies, these things can do at the very most 3088 damage, on an enemy, wearing basic (white) armor…
put the dude in an exotic armor for a moment: There, its reduced to 2468…
The damage is on an enemy that is using NO toughness except the basic attribute… and this is of course in accordance to the wikis formulas, so its questionable numbers. however, if the wiki is correct, those sigils are giving the users, 50% of 1 basic attack as an addition to its normal critical damage… I don’t think that’s OP at all…
It isn’t the raw numbers, it’s the investment → return ratio that peeves a lot of people. It also doesn’t help that they’re basically random, so you’re going to get hit by them eventually no matter how you play.
I think you could make a case for both sides ‘til the cows come home, but personally I don’t like them.
I am happy to be used as a moving target for any aspirant Mesmers, though I can’t promise I won’t bite back.
Anything with offhand dagger (on Thief) is going to be basically as viable as its opponents allow it to be.
Good video in any case OP.
Sword/Dagger? =)
Touche! I’ve been out of the loop for a while so I’m a bit rusty, good catch.
To be fair Sword/Dagger is the exception that proves the rule, since it can use the melee stealth for flavor but isn’t dependent on it by any stretch.
Anything with offhand dagger (on Thief) is going to be basically as viable as its opponents allow it to be.
Good video in any case OP.
I will go on record as saying that the recent change to Illusionary Leap may have been the most ill-advised in the game’s history. Who in their right mind took an appraisal of the game as it stands right now and decided this skill needed added punishment?
The ability — leaving aside its tremendous pathing and consistency issues — is now badly out of sync with comparable skills. Infilitrator’s Strike (Thief) and Flashing Blade (Guardian) are both instant-cast, can be used well out of range to act as a medium displacement and neither of these has a glaring telegraph like a marathon-sprinting bright red clone screaming “DODGE NOW”. I understand the clone can be seen as a positive in the resource sense (on some setups) but Illusionary Leap even has a blinking UI warning as a second telegraph!
Here are some of the ways you can currently counter this skill:
- Dodge the clone
- Evade the clone
- Walk away from the clone (can be outpaced with swiftness etc.)
- Evade the swap
- Displace yourself (Blink, Shadowstep, Phase Retreat, Acid Bomb, Lightning Flash)
- Invuln/pseudo-invuln (Ranger/Warrior blocks, Shelter)
- Dodge during the swap (you will still displace yourself during the immobilize)
- Destroy the clone
- CC the clone (fear, chill, cripple etc.)
- Stealth (clone won’t follow laterally)
- Kite outside of range
- Cleanse the cripple and move
- Cleanse the immobilize
- Abuse the z-axis (pathing issues, does not act as a port without a successful swap)
I urge the devs to please revert this change back if nothing else. Players could still destroy the clone beforehand, the Mesmer just had a port to where the clone would’ve been at the time of destruction as compensate. This recent change has borderline spelled doom for the sword anywhere beyond beginner-level play.
- Blissless
It’s one utility and a trait (which procs at an extremely low health threshold). Reveal skills work just fine against the rest.
The strength of shortbow has nothing to do with trickery Thieves being “unpredictable”.
You haven’t played a good thief if you don’t think thieves inherent ability, their fundamental strength in a fight, is to be unpredictable.
It’s that there’s no substantial downside to using any of the five shortbow skills whenever you like.
I am really tired of this gross oversimplification of thief weaponsets. Especially weaponsets like shortbow. I get it, you get stomped because you don’t know when the thief has screwed up to take advantage of it – many players are like this. All this is is just more senseless whining though, and it’s not productive at all. I would say more, but people who whine like this clearly have made up their mind so it would be like talking to a brick wall.
Perhaps you aren’t confident enough in your own arguments? I stated my reasoning quite clearly and all this above amounts to is a sputtering collection of ad hominems.
If you don’t understand what I mean, let me revisit what I said. When it comes to Thief/Mesmer engagements, shortbow has no situational downsides from the perspective of the Thief/Mesmer engage. Say if a Mesmer phase retreats away from a D/x Ele’s Frozen Burst, you can say it was an even trade, perhaps one slightly in favor of the Mesmer, but it is situational. The skill has a moderate cooldown and it is tied to a more defensive attunement (where the skill itself is an aggressive lockdown).
When a Thief uses shortbow against a tourney Mesmer, there are almost no trades that aren’t overwhelmingly in the Thief’s favor. A Mesmer has to respond to the bouncing auto, he has to respond to every single cluster bomb, she can whiff dozens of high-value skills into the evasive shot (which was mercifully given an aftercast recently). To trade unfavorably against a Mesmer in shortbow you really have to be going out of your way to fail.
The audience I was addressing was other shatter Mesmers, in any case. Your original post was a gross oversimplification of my own class in that you seemed to reason the Mesmer’s weakness was to the oh-so-spontaneous mind games and creative combos practiced by Trickery Thieves. I am easing Mesmers’ fears and telling them not to stress out so much because none of that nonsense has any bearing on why Trickery is difficult to deal with in this particular instance.
I would advise any shatter Mesmers reading this not to stress out, don’t take Chicaco Jack’s rather silly post too seriously. The strength of shortbow has nothing to do with trickery Thieves being “unpredictable”. It’s that there’s no substantial downside to using any of the five shortbow skills whenever you like. Cluster-bombing is always effective, even at point-blank (shatter doesn’t take any clone death traits). Poison is always effective. Evading is almost always effective (who knows what you might dodge). Arrow is a displacement which can wreck clone pathing or act as a z-axis port. The autoattack alone is pressure that has to be accounted for.
From the Mesmer’s perspective everything has to be countered at a grossly uneven opportunity cost. That is the advantage of shortbow, it has little to nothing to do with the Thief or the Mesmer’s behavior. Gimmicks like stealing mid-cluster bomb to proc fury or immobilizing from stealth are on the whole superfluous and even hurt the advantage of shortbow which is that the skills are cheap and almost devoid of situational use. It is by design, thanks to a select group of developers’ “vision” of structured PvP.
I’ve considered the self glyph but to my understanding it works instantly when downed. These players were usually downed for 3-7 seconds before mistforming and the revive happened after the mistform.
Also vs the eles that did this its extremely unlikely they would be using this unless the top tier meta for ele has changed significantly the last few days.
I think everyone gets a tad bored and tries out new things from time to time.
This thread is incredibly embarrassing for almost all involved. Goodness what a train wreck.
Shame about the hijack OP, best of luck if you do put a guide out in any case.
Dagger makes a lot more sense than mainhand pistol (there’s a reason they didn’t just give us mainhand pistols to begin with).
All the boons last more than 1 second. On a good day you can get 15 seconds of protection, (technically 10 by the time the armor ends). If the boons were per attacker on a good day you could get 15*X easily getting close to one minute of protection (and this is without boon duration). 1 min of protection could be comboed with our other skills/traits, or our ease of gaining chaos armor, to have perma protection. I think that is what ANET is trying to avoid.
It’s almost as if people could stop attacking when they see Chaos Armor is up? It has its own buff icon for crying out loud.
You’re really suggesting more tooltip changes?
Oh, not at all muffin, I’m suggesting that they follow the lead taken with Illusionary Leap and change the skill to match the tooltip. I know, I know — sounds like a lot of work compared to just rewriting tooltips, but that’s why we’re here to help support our devs in getting their ‘vision’ of the game on track.
It’s been a few weeks since the update that finally put an end to players abusing the Mesmer ability Illusionary Leap, and I have to thank the balance team for their tireless efforts which have made Guild Wars 2 as enjoyable to play as it is today. I think we can all agree that forcing skills to pedantically follow a sentence-long tooltip two years after release is a noble endeavour indeed.
As a small token of my appreciation I have decided to put together a brief selection of similarly-bugged skills which are also currently being exploited to full effect by our player base. Hopefully this should help the devs with their heavy workload, as I’d like to see these fixed just as fast as Illusionary Leap for the good of the game.
Engineer
Grenade Kit: Grenade skills throw two grenades untraited, contrary to tooltip descriptions
Healing Turret: Heals nearby allies indefinitely, unstated in tooltip description
Cleansing Burst: Base effects affect allies within the radius, unstated in tooltip description
Detonate Healing Turret: Causes a blast finisher at the location of the player rather than that of the healing turret detonated
Fire Bomb: Triggers four times over the duration, unstated in tooltip description
Rocket Boots: Player will travel further than the 900 stated range with movement speed boosts active (e.g. swiftness)
Toss Elixir H: Potent Elixirs allows players to receive two boons (one at 1/5th base duration), contrary to tooltip description
Warrior
Rush: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description, and can be affected by movement speed bonuses
Shield Bash: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Dual Strike: Can hit multiple opponents, contrary to tooltip description
Riposte: Will block all attacks over the skill’s duration without triggering the Riposte unless certain melee skills are used by an opponent, contrary to tooltip description
Chop: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Hammer Swing: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Greatsword Swing: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Elementalist
Dragon’s Claw/Vapor Blade/Lightning Whip/Stone Shards/Ice Shards/Flamestrike: Do not require a target, contrary to tooltip description and will still proc cast-based benefits (such as healing from SoR)
Dragon’s Tooth: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Magnetic Grasp: Can be used to leap to a target long after the immobilize has expired, contrary to tooltip description
Ride the Lightning: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Lightning Touch: Can strike multiple targets, contrary to tooltip description (“Shock your foe”)
Lightning Flash: Can be used while stunned or disabled, not stated in tooltip description
Fiery Rush: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Thief
Steal: Does not require a target for some on-use procs, contrary to tooltip description (quite who are they stealing from, then?)
Infiltrator’s Strike: Does not require a target, in fact the full skill chain can be used sans target without ever entering combat; can be used to port to various z-axis locations despite 600 tooltip-stated range; can be cast mid-evade
Disabling Shot: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Heartseeker: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Cloak and Dagger: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Pistol Whip: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Whirling Axe: Reflects projectiles (not stated in tooltip)
Consume Plasma: Grants stability (not stated in tooltip)
Necromancer
Spectral Grasp: Chills target regardless of whether it connects or not
Signet of the Locust: Affects nearby allies, not stated in tooltip
Summon Flesh Golem: Grants life force upon death and can be activated without a target, not stated in tooltip
Summon Bone Fiend: Autoattacks are projectile finishers, not stated in tooltip
Summon Flesh Wurm: Autoattack is a projectile finisher, not stated in tooltip, can be activated outside of the stated 1200 range
Lich Form: Grants 30 seconds of stability, not stated in tooltip
Ranger
Swoop: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Hornet Sting: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Monarch’s Leap: Does not require a target, contrary to tooltip description
Counterattack: Will block all attacks over the skill’s duration without triggering the Counterattack unless certain melee skills are used by an opponent, contrary to tooltip description (this one very specifically states “an attack”
Whirling Defense: Reflects projectiles rather than blocking them, contrary to tooltip description
No doubt I have missed many more, hidden combo fields and the like. Feel free to add your own so we can get PvP cleaned up pronto.
Change mechanics: Require ports to have LOS to be successful (although Grouch has said they don’t want to add counterplay in this way to me before).
I’m sure whatever Grouch has said is terribly insightful but I would love to hear other developers justify their reasoning for porting in and out of Clocktower, etc.
-snip-
I wouldn’t worry too much about the devs taking poor advice from whiners on the forums. They don’t listen and act on that any more than they listen and act on our bug threads. I suppose that’s both a pro and a con.
I’m not sure this is completely accurate: remember the Temporal Curtain nerf?
Kaamau is one hundred percent correct. Say you take ten points out for a little extra sustain with Mender’s Purity or another Dueling trait. What will happen? You will completely vape yourself on retaliation because you have no consistent boon strip. It’s even worse thanks to the sword nerf. You would think that those ten/twenty points should be flexible, but in practice they’re not.
Power Block
This trait was nerfed incredibly fast on release, and it is now seldom taken because the amount of spells you can reliably interrupt through all the blocks, instant casts etc. in the game are fairly few, and fewer still have an effect powerful enough to warrant a ten-second cooldown (over CI’s spell-ambiguous movement halting abilities).
This one is a real shame to me. Am I alone on this? I believe the devs were a bit overzealous in stamping it out. The trait is 30 into a glassy line and was something truly unique to the Mesmer (and one of the few real parallels to its predecessor). You could feasibly run it as support (in which case you gave up damage) or as a traditional burst (in which case you are very fragile). The risk-reward is always there.
I am not at all convinced the original incarnation was too strong, and I would love to see it returned to normal. The trait caused so much excitement and the burgeoning of a new variety of smart, punishing Mesmer setups, why would the developers want that killed off so quickly? It doesn’t make sense to me.
We all know that the original Power Block they gave us was a bugged skill from the get-go, yes? I mean, it went through Defiant, stability(I think), and screwed even AA. Basically, it wasn’t nerfed, it was fixed. And it also isn’t that the trait itself is far worse, only that we can now not see how well it’s working.
Bug or no, the original incarnation was a trait that genuinely added something to the game. (It was also far closer to the original Guild Wars skill it succeeded, which would not only block any spell but simultaneously all spells of the same type).
I am curious to know what people think about Restorative Illusions, since sustain is one of our biggest issues.
Moving Restorative Illusions to Illusions line
One of the issues with shatter Mesmers is the lack of any sustain between heals. Among its competitors it is alone in this: Elementalists have weapon skills and often Soothing Mists from 10+ points in Water, and Thieves have Mug accompanying a very low cooldown heal as well as Shadow Refuge.
One of the reasons that Mirror and MoR aren’t taken over Ether Feast is precisely because the lack of any sustain means a strong burst heal is the only answer. In essence a shatter Mesmer lives and dies on a twenty-second cooldown.
Restorative Illusions is an Inspiration GM that very seldom sees any play, even in phantasm specs. I have heard it described here once as being designed “for an 80 trait points Mesmer”.
What if Restorative Illusions were moved to Major or Adept Illusions? It would be a lovely bump in sustain while still forcing the hand of the Mesmer into making difficult choices. Do you still trait for iElasticity or shatter recharge?
One neat and tidy consequence of this is that Dazzling Glamours could easily take its place and be revamped a bit as an appropriate glamour GM in Inspiration.
Power Block
This trait was nerfed incredibly fast on release, and it is now seldom taken because the amount of spells you can reliably interrupt through all the blocks, instant casts etc. in the game are fairly few, and fewer still have an effect powerful enough to warrant a ten-second cooldown (over CI’s spell-ambiguous movement halting abilities).
This one is a real shame to me. Am I alone on this? I believe the devs were a bit overzealous in stamping it out. The trait is 30 into a glassy line and was something truly unique to the Mesmer (and one of the few real parallels to its predecessor). You could feasibly run it as support (in which case you gave up damage) or as a traditional burst (in which case you are very fragile). The risk-reward is always there.
I am not at all convinced the original incarnation was too strong, and I would love to see it returned to normal. The trait caused so much excitement and the burgeoning of a new variety of smart, punishing Mesmer setups, why would the developers want that killed off so quickly? It doesn’t make sense to me.
I’ve been so completely sold on Mesmer dagger for a long while now. Maybe just have it as a mainhand- or offhand- exclusive, similar to torch/scepter.
Plenty of classes have effects granted on weapon swap. I fail to see your reasoning.
But can they do this w/o breaking casting skills ? No they cant.
12 sec CD on attunement don’t change the fact that you can swap sigils every 9 sec.
Maybe i have 4 sigils but for sure i cant use them all at the same time.
First of all it’s 13 seconds and secondly you can put two identical sigil sets into both of your weapon sets and have identical effect as an ele who has to put 6 trait points into arcana without the ‘benefits’ of chill.
And ? I still have only 2 sigils on 1 weapon set.
The classes are not supposed to be the same, and when I say that many classes gain benefits or effects on swap I mean that it’s a general rule.
Because X class can do Y, I should be able to do Y too is not a terribly convincing argument on its own. It is doubly so in this case because the developers clearly intended for Elementalists to use swap in tandem with their weapon skills (there is really no other reason for the 5 point Arcana minor otherwise).
I dont know, balance ?
Could you describe the ways in which it causes some kind of balance issue? Because from my perspective attunement swapping is about as thoughtful and skillful as GW2 gets. Swapping to get Fury (which doesn’t last long) during a Fire Grab, or switching to Earth for traited stability during Ether Renewal: this one is very clearly intended by design and allows for precision timing. Why in the world would you take this away?
I’m honestly baffled by some of the things that have been said in this now awfully derailed thread.
So tell them to stop using “Attunement swap = weapon swap” as argument.
Plenty of classes have effects granted on weapon swap. I fail to see your reasoning.
I dont know, balance ?
Could you describe the ways in which it causes some kind of balance issue? Because from my perspective attunement swapping is about as thoughtful and skillful as GW2 gets. Swapping to get Fury (which doesn’t last long) during a Fire Grab, or switching to Earth for traited stability during Ether Renewal: this one is very clearly intended by design and allows for precision timing. Why in the world would you take this away?
I’m honestly baffled by some of the things that have been said in this now awfully derailed thread.
Ladies, if you could perhaps move this endless slap fight into another room…?
Some replies have mentioned Stop Drop & Roll: I think it’s certainly true that Stop Drop & Roll is a great option, however it compounds the issue of pushing and shoving the Ele into Water. (It is also a bit less selfless than Cleansing Wave or Cleansing Water at that tier). This is similar to saying, “Just run a Generosity sigil” in that these arguments only circumvent the fact of Ele being painful to play under chill.
Are people on this thread purposely acting dumb?
Sigil of air x3 + Sigil of fire x2 = 5k+ damage over 10 seconds. These sigils are doing more damage than even Incendiary powder.
Lol chill dude, I didn’t see the part about 10 seconds.
First of all, I’d like you to tell me the last time you saw a thief running sigil of air and sigil of fire. I’ve only ever seen thieves running one or the other (including since the update to sigils/runes), not both at the same time.
Secondly (and more importantly), the probability of hitting sigil of air three times and sigil of fire twice in a given 10s period is extremely low (and technically impossible in the case of SoFire anyways) on a 20066 thief such as this one. Even assuming you had permanent fury and could get in 2 hits per second on average (which is highly unlikely), it would still take you ~1.587 additional seconds on average to activate your sigils, meaning you’d get in an average of 2.18 Lightning Strikes and 1.52 Flame Blasts per 10 seconds- and this, again, is highly optimistic, when you considered that we assumed that we would be making a total of 2 hits per second on average and had permanent fury. Plus, I’m not even sure that the meta 20066 thief runs Sigil of Agility anyways- I just put that in for the additional precision.
And anyways, in the end, anybody who runs enough power/precision and the two sigils to get 5k damage/10 seconds (assuming that’s even possible) is going to be pretty glassy anyways, and will probably go down quickly. Ironically enough, conditions are a massive weakness to S/D, as well.
It’s more than possible, actually Air/Fire is the gold standard in Europe at the moment.
I’m not sure that conditions are that much of an issue either, there’s a solid boost in health from Acrobatics as well as Pain Response (simultaneous CC or fear-locking notwithstanding).
And how about a random defensive proc from nightmare runes? Nobody complains about that lol.
In fairness people did try to tell ArenaNet about Nightmare runes and their response was to buff them into some kind of bizarre quasi-RNG guaranteed proc. They don’t seem to either grasp or care that because you can only make an educated guess as to what runes an opponent is using, Nightmare runes will always be basically random anyway no matter how much you fudge the proc chances.
I think the almost 2k damage lightning strike proc’d of a random 1k damage autoattack more of a problem than the backstab damage :/
A lot of players feel that the Fire and Air sigils are very poor design. Unfortunately, you can expect a balance pass in maybe six or seven months.
What meta are you referring to? They had one nerf reverted and an evade put on Burning Speed. This was a problem before this patch regardless.
Eles are pretty common and very desirable in all game modes atm, so when you base your argument around eles being too weak because of this, you’re going to face (very valid) criticism that frankly eles aren’t weak right now. Eles are actually extremely strong in both 1v1 and teamfights because they bring tons of literally everything.
The reason chill affects it is because it is considered a skill, and skills are affected by chill.
His argument was not at all that Eles were “too weak because of this”. He said that the interplay between chill and Elementalists was heavily overbalanced in favor of chill. He gave the Thief’s steal as a particularly egregious example. Steal can only be reasonably anticipated as it is instant cast and as of a few patches ago it can’t be LoSed (which has huge implications in WvW and on maps like Kyhlo). Granted many Thief setups do not have the easiest time against Eles but this sole matchup is a poor and narrow basis for forming long-term balance decisions because the game is always changing. People did not argue against QoL passes on Death Shroud just because Dhuumfire was strong at the time. Such an argument would be asinine.
As for the condition itself, you are not only locked out of the Protection from Earth attunement or the cleanse from Water but you’re also moving -66% slower which puts you in danger of melee burst and point-blank AoE. If I am afflicted with Weakness on my Mesmer I either cleanse or wait it out before using any high damage abilities. If an Elementalist is afflicted with a long duration chill, what exactly are they supposed to do? Pray they took Cleansing Fire and that it’s off cooldown? Walk in circles? For how easy it is to apply chill (it can be traited on sigils and runes) the reward ratio is way over-the-top.
As an aside if you have an issue with the popularity of “meta” Eles then it is in your best interests to reevaluate the effect of chill on Ele, because your chances are arguably best at recovering from chill on a common bruiser D/D Ele due to the substantial points in Water. Leaving things the way they are will only reinforce that perception amongst them.
Most of the Mesmer’s I find aren’t stupid, it’s not a class you can just pick up and get going so the, shall we say, “Sucky” mesmers aren’t in high supply. Most will just quit it after realizing what it takes to be “effective”. Necromancer on the other hand is a lot simpler to handle. It isn’t a brainless class, but when I see fear spam and MM everywhere it strikes me as an easier task to get into. Happened yesterday with the same situation, necro was using staff but putting marks at their feet, didn’t have OH dagger, actually thought I was a condi necro when I was power. This is just an example of necromancer’s I keep running into, their possibly new or just haven’t explored options that take more effort.
With that in mind, the Mesmer’s I see are constantly kiting you, they don’t pounce and keep the pressure up. They are avoiding you from teleports, constant dodge/blocks/invulnerablities/stealth and don’t let you get time on them until the time is right for them to pounce again. If they use GS its a different story and are quite easy to stay with but staff is a nightmare to catch.
I’m not focusing necro over Mesmer thinking necro has worse condition clearing, I’m focusing necro over Mesmer because knowing how they work I can actually land my conditions and evade their methods of condi xfer fairly easy. Even if the necro transfers the conditions to antoher target say a pet or ally, that means I’m untouched by that and can just go to reapplying. Only counter to that is consume conditions which I can either interrupt or let it slip by knowing I have 25 seconds to get something going. I focus necro because right now, I’m not seeing a high volume of necromancer’s who effectively deal with conditions or counter my pressure. Mesmer avoids me like I made a bad family joke, and I can rarely lock them down long enough to get anything going on a condi build.
It is difficult to counter this as you are relaying your own experiences and it seems to come down to an issue of player skill. I will suggest though love that there is a reason Mesmers play the way you’re describing and it isn’t because they find conditions easy to handle.
I’d focus Mesmer over necro because I’d be chasing a Mesmer, necro isn’t dodging or blocking nearly as much or using stealth to recover and avoid. Mesmer doesn’t have terrible condition clearing, mix that with their ability to avoid things altogether versus taking it and potentially sending it back yeah, I’d focus necro first. Condition transfer only works if they don’t dodge or block it, otherwise it doesn’t remove them. Mesmer is below necro as far as removing conditions, assuming perfect conditions are set which is rarely ever.
As with the others I am also a bit curious about where your major experience in the game has been in, love.
A Necromancer with a head on his shoulders is extremely strong at dealing with conditions, and is one of only two classes in the game that can weaponize conditions he’s suffering from which is much more potent than a mere cleanse. On that note your comments about Mesmer are eyebrow-raising to say the least.
Unless there’s buy orders being filled we don’t know about, it doesn’t appear it’s even dropping enough for people to carry out RMT orders anyway.
Friendly bump.
/15char