Guild Wars 2

+1 really like the idea of unholy feast and specifically enfeebling blood being a blast finisher

FitG is actually really helpful because it’s the necro’s only source of stability (that isn’t on a 180s CD). It’s just in a really unhelpful location if you’re anything but a power/prec necro.

I’d much rather use the Near Death that FitG for the in/out deathshroud traits, but I can’t because the necro is severely lacking in CC protection. If spectral armor’s CD was reduced to 30-40 seconds, I’d be one happy necro.

As title says, should mantras be changed to have no charge time? Obviously they will need to be adjusted, but I think mantras would see a lot more use if they didn’t need to be charged. Use up the charges -> goes on CD -> CD finish, refreshes 2 or 3 charges. Most feel very lacking, and charging up before/after combat is simply not fun. Especially with underwater combat…

Traits wouldn’t cause any issue with this change either

-Empowering Mantras: Readied mantra’s could be counted as any not on CD
-Restorative Mantras: could be changed to heal everytime you expend a charge, healing adjusted accordingly
-Protected mantras: increase armor by x amount whenever you expend a charge, stacks in duration

Thoughts?

definitely looks game breaking, but I’d have to see it in practice. Not something that looks easy to pull off in a real fight.

Ceraphyn.7916:

Why is it taking so long to apply some serious changes to this class?

Because Anet doesn’t like to big, sweeping changes at once. They’d rather let the meta develop and make incremental changes. There’s 7 other professions that have glaring issues (granted, after playing every other class, Necro is definitely in some of the worst shape), so don’t expect any big changes anytime soon.

Get ready for the long haul. Necro is the red headed step child :P

brickforlife.1364:

Solo play: Duration. Group play: Damage

groups usually hit 25 bleed stacks ridiculously fast and you’ll never flesh out your damage unless you have enough damage to make a difference and make up the majority of the 25 stacks. However, playing in solo play, you want duration to maximise bleed stacks before you epidemic.

Pretty much this. Also, things may die so fast you’ll never get full benefit of duration.

I would be inclined to agree. I like the feel of the necro, but it seriously feels like this class never made it out of the beta. I don’t think it will be addressed any time soon, unfortunately. I wouldn’t say they’re UP, OP, or even broken. They’re just poorly designed and not very fun.

Weakness is a very underrated stat. Necros have lots of ways to apply it, esp with the grandmaster trait with a 25% chance per crit. Poison corruption cloud is also nice if kitten stays in it.

Wells are also marginally helpful if things stay in them, but pretty long CDs.

Also they can transfer conditions with signet and warhorn4, staff 4, under water DS 4. A little more niche though. More mobs need to built with more boon and condition applications so most of our abilities feel less niche.

Weapon with cleave? Pretty please? I love the staff, but I’d love it more if axe (and dagger?) did cleave damage.

Buff axe!
PS make dagger 2 faster
PSS fix our trait lines while we’re at it; they’re a complete mess
PSSS Bring our utility CDs in line with other classes
PSSSS fix minions
PSSSSS increase the projectile speed for all our abilities. ALL OF THEM!

I agree except I prefer DS#2 land instead. I would like it to do AOE bleed on too though. Already have enough poison options, and blind < chill imo

Just gave it a shot, some of my thoughts

-rune of grenth gives 20% more chill duration + condi damage, used it in place of MK
-Would take 10 points out of spite in to soul reaping for 20% reduction to spectral
-Change epidemic for spectral walk for a stun break

ofc this is from a spvp prospective. I’d rather have more spectral grabs for the chill and life force.

3, still playing my necro in hopes that Anet will give them some much needed love soon.

LordYz.8941:

The lvl 70+ Princess dolls disagree that confusion is useless.

Those little kittens are OP as hell

+1 needs to be replaced/redesignd/buffed. Horrible ability as it stands

underwater got a much needed buff, but the patch over all was very disappointing for necros…

priority should’ve been land combat, since a huge majority of content is land based combat…

signet of midnight’s 10% boon duration passive should be switched to 10% run speed… would actually make it useful.

Only foes? No thanks. Have it prefer foes? I could do that.

GS: I like the iZerker change a lot as well as mind stab. Mind stab really needs a bigger aoe. I’d also like if they added more damage or dazed for 1/4 sec if a boon is stripped this way.

Scepter: it needs to be sped up a lot. It’s about as fast as molasses. The damage could use some loving too. The block is nice damage, but it needs to last longer in duration. Things attack way too slow in PvE for it to be useful. But really, the scepter just needs to be redone or something… filling in the clone factory or confusion niche isn’t working for it. Maybe my opinion will change once they split confusion for pvp and pve.

Focus: I would like to see iWarden run between spins. It’s so kittening annoying that i cast it and the mob/opponent immediately moves. Sometimes you can reposition yourself to have it at least absorb the projectiles, but even then it can spawn at the weirdest spot. So frustrating.

Torch: Agreed. Channel needs to be removed desperately. The burn either needs to be at the beginning of the cast or at the end. IF they keep it at the end, then we should be able to press 4 again, cancel the stealth, and have the burn be applied on demand. iMage is just lol.

Manipulation: the problem with illusion of life is that it’s not entirely useful in dungeons. 15 seconds to kill something isn’t very doable in a lot of cases. Most other spells are a waste of a slot right now. Mimic and A.Thievery could be really fun with some tweaks.

Mantras: Would like to see them more group based outside of traits. I.e Concentration = group stability; resolve = 2 conditions off self, 1 off of group; pain = next attack causes 2 stacks of [condition] for group; distraction = you daze, group applies blind; recovery = group regeneration. This could add a LOT to mantras and mesmer.

Signet: SoMidnight is terrible. 10% boon duration is not worth the utility slot (at most we’re talking 0.3 seconds added), and a 30 second CD for blind is a joke. It just needs to be redone. Inspiration could use a 900 range increase and faster boon application imho.

And I also really agree on the traits and elites. Most of our grandmasters are anything but, and veil of invis is not elite quality skill, even with a CD reduction.

the block duration is way too short. Makes timing a real kitten in PvE. More often than not i’ll channel the whole duration only to be smacked the instant it ends, haha

the torch is pretty terrible in both PvP and PvE. The prestige is great as an escape tool, but Decoy does it better and doesn’t bring along a terrible phantasm at least. But it does have the potential to be a pretty decent sPvP weapon with 2 really easy changes

1) make The Prestige burn first, and blind at the end of the channel
2) make iMage attack faster and/or apply more stacks of confusion and retaliation.

Any other changes will only be a plus, but these two will at least make it functional.

I really hope the torch will be fixed ASAP. I’ve wanted to play a sword wielding mesmer that weaves in-and-out of stealth since the first BWE

iBeserker. Satisfying to watch it fly through a group of mobs and cripple them all.

Spin to win!!

the big problem with moving phantasm damage to the mesmer is that the weapon skills mesmer’s have are SO. BORING. in terms of non-illusion based damage. 2/5 of our bar is dedicated to illusion summoning, and usually the other 2/5 is some type of utility. Not much wiggle room. this is a design problem a lot of people complained about during the beta, but everyone has seemed to move on now.

The only skills that could absorb some of the power shift are blurred frenzy, mirror edge, mind stab, confusing images, chaos storm, and AA (and these moves already hit pretty hard); the rest of them have utility purposes (i.e magic bullet, temporal curtain, illusionary riposte, chaos armor). And, personally, I’d rather not have the majority of my damage be from AA because I don’t think a harder hitting blurred frenzy or mirror’s edge is going to ever be a reality.

Really, there’s no solution. You can either have the mesmer be more bursty or have phantasms be bursty. The advantage of the latter is that you can at least kill them quickly. Choose your poison.

+1 to fans…. I’m tired of holding cow bells or little twisted twigs… whatever the hell they are.

Tevesh.1265:

99% of those skill voice overs are annoying as hell.
Although ‘agony torment pain’ is still leagues better than I COULD OUTRUN A CENTAUR EAT MY DUST

URGE TO KILL RISING…!

My personal favorite one to hate. Would love an option to mute these voice overs.

^^^ wherever you warden spawns, it places itself and creates kind a small dead-zone radius around itself. So even if the warden spawns slightly behind or to the side of the mob, it’ll continue to block projectiles.

Sabyne.6329:

I wish it was a combo blast finisher, that seems coherent with the animation and would give some great utility to it. sigh I can dream.

this would be so much fun!

Munki.9452:

Ranger Pets and Mesmer Illusions are really apples and oranges.

Clones exist to distract and soak up hits, to be summoned very quickly, and sometimes adding some debuffs that help us out. Phantasms are clearly designed to do one or two rounds of their damage, at which point if they manage to live longer it’s a bonus. Phantasms are NOT balanced with the idea you have them as a long term turret, if we can get that situation to occur that means the odds have worked htemselves to our favor. We are meant to have them last just long enough to have the spells CD to reset.

I really think that all the people that feel Clones should be more like a Ranger pet or Spirit Weapon, should actually go play a Ranger or Guardian respectively. There is no reason to make the Mesmers defining mechanic copy another classes skills. If you like the other classes skills, well you can play that class!

QFT. Tbh, I don’t even feel like i’m playing a pet class on my mesmer.

I’m going to be blunt, but suggesting an overhaul to the mesmer mechanic is a waste of everyone’s time. They’re not going to change it. If you want to be constructive, suggest quality of life improvements the profession should receive.

Also, phantasms used to not attack immediately after being spawned, and just about everyone hated it. It was not fun and made for clunky gameplay.

Shelter is amazing for when you’re getting focuses fired. I can’t count how many times the block has saved me.

The most trouble I have are mine and grenade engineers for me… Mesmers are pretty easy with GS.

I would not be sad if I saw it removed. I like it’s applications other than being used for burst—fast finishers and res. It’s not a problem at all in PvE obviously. But it’s pretty fracking lame that I can be completely destroyed in 2-4 seconds because of it. Yeah you can use CDs, but those aren’t always up to save you and sometimes you just have to eat it.

Zeal traits as a whole really need to be worked on again. There are a lot of bland traits already, but 25 hp is definitely not worthy of a Grandmaster trait.

the uprising.6317:

The glow. Also imo the best voice acting out of all the races by far.

This x1000. Especially the glow effect.

Whaaat? I love the 1H Sword! It’s my favorite weapon…

I do agree that smite needs to be treated as a symbol. It would really help the scepter go a long way.

the uprising.6317:

A hint, don’t blow up the 2 so it recharges almost instantly.

This. A hint to your hint: if you position the mob at an incline or against the wall, you don’t have to wait for it to travel it’s full distance, making it easier to spam for more damage.

I think the 5 ability on the focus and shield were accidentally swapped during development and no one noticed it :P The focus shield would work better on the actual shield both mechanically and thematically. Projecting a huge, light dome seems something more akin to something a focus would do.

Irascible.8210:

I disagree with most of this.

1) Combat is not moving too fast. I can see retaliation up and I know not to spam my abilities.

2) It would be nice to see some more detail on the amount of damage it actually does.

3) Getting that 20+ seconds makes up for their otherwise lacking dps. There’s no heavy dps out there running around with tons of uptime on retaliation.

1) Well, for starters, there’s also issues with clipping on AOE attacks, which I forgot to mention. No one tabs through every enemy to make sure there’s no retaliation up before they use their burst/aoe. I don’t see what’s so unreasonable about this request. They’ve already done it with confusion and it’s “easy enough to see” sans the combat text. Anyway, it goes against the whole “play the game, not the UI” approach and is inconsistent with how they addressed confusion damage.

2) I’m glad we could agree on something.

3). First, I disagree. There are heavy dps builds running this because it scales with power. They kind of go hand-in-hand. Seconldy, have you even played a guardian? It’s ridiculously easy to get almost 100% up time on GS. Symbol of Wrath-> Leap -> blast finisher if you’re feeling happy, Save Yourselves!, Stand your Ground!, activating the signet, and a trait that increases duration by 25%.

What I got from this is, basically, that you’re okay with face tanking. Retaliation is the most passive way to kill someone. All I need to do is stack Pow/Tough/Vit and boon duration and watch things melt as they try to hit me

I want to love the hammer but i find it so boring in pve! 3, 4, and 5 are all so situational that they hardly seen any use.

3 is so easily dodged/side stepped and has nasty habit of pulling over mobs if you’re not careful

4 is awesome!… but annoying because now I have to chase back down the mob. Unless I hit them into my ring or against a wall or something. But, again, this is pretty niche and rare. Even then it’s a dps loss to even use on trash considering its century long charge up.

5 is great too! Too bad most of pve is out in the open.

But i’m glad to read that my favorite weapon type is getting some loving

Bourdain.1624:

Bobnintendo.1256:

Try using a Staff, Save Yourselves!, or Retreat!

Staff is not my weapon (s) of choice for combat situations.

Speed is nice when not in combat, retreat is terrible utility unless you are just running and not fighting

Save yourself is nice but it has a long CD. 10% really isnt that much. Just an idea.

Once again, im not trying to complain. Just thought it would be kind of cool.

Pretty much this. I have found that staff is too niche outside of wubwub

I only used Retreat! for PvE strictly for going from A to B. Other than that, it’s pretty terrible. It’d be nice if maybe it got 3s regen at the least.

First, I will start with what I believe are necessary changes/additions retaliation needs to see:
1) Floating combat text. I want this to look like how confusion does when it hurts me. Plain and simple. I’ve seriously been DESTROYED by retaliation while trying to kill another guardian. 69 hits, 17k damage. Ridiculous. I had no idea it was hurting me until I was already dead. And I know there will be someone who will tell me “well when you see the retaliation buff don’t attack.” Which leads me to another point, but first, most of the time combat is moving too fast to really stop and search for the icon. Combat text would really help alleviate this.

2)Tool tip Clarification. Kind of confusing and leaves a lot to be desired. The fact that it says “reflects damage back to it’s source” is misleading and makes it sound like a defensive boon. Also, it’s affected by Power? I would never had guessed if it did not frequent the forums. I would like to have the equation/coefficient available on the wiki at some point for theorycrafting. I’d like something like this:

Retaliation (3s): Your opponent takes x damage each time they damage you. Damage returned is increased by power.

Now it’s more of my opinion on changes

3)Retaliation should have a duration cap. Unfortunately, almost every burst move in the current meta game is a multi-hit. It doesn’t seem very reasonable that a guardian can have upwards of 20+ seconds of retaliation. What am I supposed to do, not do anything for 20 seconds? Boon strip? I would if I could, my utilities are already so clogged up with condition removal and stun breaks (usually run at least 2 condition removals or stun breakers). Even if I could, it random, so there’s no guarantee. Retaliation should never be longer than 10 seconds IMHO.

darqwonders.5308:

I don’t like the distance damage factor. It makes the GS really difficult to do damage on anything close by.

Even at max distance the damage is pretty pitiful.

I really hope so. I’m so tired of hot joining spvp matches while getting pissy messages “plz gtfo we’re trying to duel.” It seems to happen to me a lot.