Guild Wars 2

Exactly. This would really only put us on par with existing “meta” boonsharing classes, and they all would still have higher DPS than us and still wouldn’t need to work as hard…

Sebrent.3625:

Though, honestly, if they don’t want us to have a real rez skill … get rid of it and give us a good manipulation in its place. I’d love that. I’ve never once used Illusion of Life.

I have to agree here. I just don’t see the point of this skill as-is.

Windwalker.7421:

Let’s hope that they’re reworking the charging of Mantras as well. Now that another profession will also have to suffer it’s clunky & slow use, we can hope that they will actually improve the mechanics of Mantras a bit. (At least the charging!)

Well, we don’t know for a fact that Mantras will be given to another class. Nothing really prevents them from handing out Manipulations or Glamours to an Elite Spec instead. I think it’s 50/50 between Mantras and Manipulations being the Mesmer-only skill type that another class picks up. (I don’t think anyone else will get Glamours, just because they seem to overlap with Wells, Consecrations, etc..)

IIRC, the Livestream actually said that Mirror will become a Manipulation and that it will stack its reflect with the one from the Manipulation trait.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Ahaaahah: resistance, quickness, and alacrity (which was probably a boon originally).

Nice catch.

apharma.3741:

Improved alacrity I’m not sure of. On the one hand it’s a nice thing to get more recharge but on the other they already said it’s risky playing with cooldowns. A good way to reduce the risk is to limit the variables which would be to remove the trait. I also think it smells a lot like the traits that are being made baseline.

I think it’s in a weird spot where if it can’t actually be good unless it’s OP. At the moment, it seems like you might eke out a additional recharge speed increase of ~1s from this trait and a reasonable amount of Alacrity production.

What are the odds you actually notice this extra second most of the time? Like, unless you actually use a skill in that extra second, the trait might as well not have existed. It sounds powerful — a whole extra second off all my cooldowns! — but it actually doesn’t make a difference because most skills are inherently conditional/situational.

This is kind of a problem with recharge traits in general, but the problem exacerbated in the case of Improved Alacrity I think. You’re already getting faster cooldowns from the Alacrity, so is a trait to make your cooldowns even more fasterer by some tiny amount really worth it?

I think I’d prefer a trait that maybe interacted with boon durations in a more general way. Like, boons last longer while you have Alacrity on you? That avoids the “useless power” problem I mentioned before, plus it has some nice support-y synergy with boonsharing.

Daniel Handler.4816:

No reason there can’t be two manipulations as elites. I’ll point to Necro, and Guardian.

Yup. Mass Invis is almost certainly going to be a Manipulation. An Elite signet would certainly be fun, though.

I’m guessing that it probably won’t have a special effect for Continuum Shift, but enhancing the rift’s survivability would be an obvious candidate for one.

StickerHappy.8052:

As It stands as of now, Glamour builds will be obselete, as there is only 1 trait affecting them, which is also A GM trait.

Glamours are also facing heavy competition on the utility slots vs Wells. (assuming you go chrono)

I dunno, Feedback and Null Field are still pretty aces skills, even if you can’t trait them to be even better. Even in a Chronomancer build, I’d be highly inclined to take at least one of those two.

So, yeah, the idea of a “Glamour build” is definitely dead, but it’s not like Glamours will be off our skill bars or anything.

Actually, you misunderstood the dev comment. It was more like, “If you find a build that hasn’t changed after the spec revamp, let us know about it so we can break it.”

No, that was the cooldown from the Signet. It’s not clear yet whether the trait has a cooldown.

This is probably a topic for General Discussion rather than the class forums at this point, TBH.

Noss.4105:

-Different colored dots for clones and phantasms on the “clone bar” next to the shatter skills.

-Mantras recharging passively out of combat. One thing I find really annoying is when you get out of fight with one charge remaining and you have to either waste that last charge(and wait for full CD) or swap the mantra out and back to recharge it.

Yes, please!

Most of my other QoL gripes are cast times and animations. Phantasm summons in particular seem to take forever.

I’m with tetrodoxin on this one. Compounding Celerity definitely needs something, but I’m not sure a passive 25% speed boost is it. Sharing Swiftness to your allies on shatter seems a lot better, particularly as it fits well with Inspiration’s selfless aspects.

TyPin.9860:

I personally like the mechanic. But the question is, does this punish illusion spamming?

Yeah, it does.

I personally hate running into Necros in PvP as it is, because I feel like there’s nothing I can do to dislodge them from a point as I slowly die from a pile of conditions. But it sounds like the Reaper might actually be vulnerable to interrupt builds, at least if they actually use the Greatsword. So that’s nice for us.

I think a build that actually tries to share all that Quickness will be tough to achieve. Rather, you can do it, but it ends being basically the only thing you do.

If we’re talking about a Quickshare build, I assume you’re talking dungeon/fractal runs. So FI is definitely not going to produce enough Quickness to be worth sharing. I think Chrono/Ill/Insp and shattering a lot will be the way you get there. Take Shield (Tides of Time = more Quickness!) and Focus as your offhands, most likely with the Focus trait for reflects and better Phantasm uptime.

An interrupt-based Quickness build is likely to be a selfish PvP build instead, something pretty close to existing Lockdown builds. So having 100% Quickness uptime won’t be that important, compared with getting it at the right time to speed up your burst combo. That would be something like Dom/Duel/Chaos, which is exactly what Lockdown already does. I guess you could sub out Dueling for Inspiration if you really want to share that Quickness, but I’m not sure that’s worthwhile. Dom/Chaos/Chrono might be legit, though, to stack Delayed Reactions on top of Chaotic Interruption.

Non-Mesmers: Please don’t kitten-post in our forum just because you’re kittening bored. It’s kittening rude.

Carighan.6758:

Was there any further news about them removing the condition caps in HoT, btw?

Nothing recent. We probably won’t hear any more about it until the next beta.

Hmmm… Fastest Scepter in the West, you say? Sc/P/Sh, Chrono/Dueling/Illusions, or something like that.

Here’s a quick stab at it: http://dulfy.net/2015/05/02/gw2-specialization-calculator-that_shaman/#profession=mesmer&traits=“Chronomancer”,1,4,9-“Dueling”,3,4,9-“Illusions”,2,6,9

Something to test if any of us gets into beta, I suppose. I, too, am very curious how Interrupt traits interact with the new defiance break bars.

I’m agreeing with Levetty. What is happening? Where am I? Is the Confusion rework already here?

;)

Sebrent.3625:

• Share boons every time you summon a phantasm … so share that Quickness!

Quickness is currently an Effect, not a Boon. So it can’t be shared like that unless it’s changed to a Boon with the HoT release.

Sorel.4870:

And I love it. For the first time since launch, we will have (for a time) different variations of the same play styles.

Oh, we’ll settle down into three stable builds soon, but it definitely is fun right now to speculate on what those will be.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

But using quickness for clone production outside of GS2 and scepter auto.. Eh, Not seeing it. I highly doubt this trait will increase our shatter rate, because it’ll barely increase our clone production.

Oh, yeah, it has zero effect on shatter rate. I think it’s cool mainly because it lets the Chrono spam more stuff while Chronoshift is running.

that_shaman is obviously already a Chronomancer. Or will have having been a Chronomancer.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Quickness doesn’t affect movement speed (that’s what the super speed trait is for) and all our shatters are instant anyway. The trait will have no effect on shatter rate

I think the idea is that Quickness speeds up your skill activations, meaning you can use more skills before F5 expires.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

• Sword clones inflict decent damage

:D

• Sword attacks have a 25% chance to steal a boon & transfer a condi.

I like it, but maybe tack it on to Mind Spike as a guaranteed effect?

That Guy.5704:

JonPeters.5630:

• Chronophantasma – Your phantasms respawn the first time they are shattered.

With this trait, phantasms still run to your target and then respawn where they shattered. What this means, though, is that things like a duelist will run into melee, respawn and be in melee range. If I am using a duelist, it is typically because I want to keep it long range.

It would be nice if the respawn happened where the phantasm was when the shatter was activated not where it was when it physically shattered. <snip>

Keep it simple: Phantasms respawn at a point 50% of their maximum attack range from their current target. Melee phants spawn in melee, ranged phants spawn at range.

The trait might already work like that, for all we know. I think the video demonstrated it only with melee phantasms.

JonPeters.5630:

Minor

• Time Marches On – You move 25% faster. The duration of incoming movement-impairing conditions is reduced by 25%. (Cripple. Chilled, Immobilize)

FINALLY! And I’m so glad it’s a Minor, too.

Adept

• Time Catches Up – Activating a shatter gives your illusions Super Speed

This confused me for a bit until I realised what it actually does. It’s quite cool, now that I’ve wrapped my head around it.

For those similarly confused: Less delay between Click and Boom.

• All’s Well that Ends Well – Wells remove conditions from allies when they end. (1 condition)

I was really expecting this to remove a condition per tick. Seems UP as written here.

Master

• Illusionary Reversion – Gain a clone after you activate a shatter skill.

:D

• Improved Alacrity – Alacrity applied to you lasts longer. (33%)
• Danger Time – Gain additional critical hit chance against slowed enemies. (30%)

Both pretty reasonable alternatives if you’re already getting clone generation from DE, so that’s pretty cool.

Grandmaster

• Lost Time – Every 3rd critical hit will slow your target. (2s of Slow)

Every 3rd crit against the same target, or just every third crit in general? Was this originally intended as an every-crit effect that turned out too powerful with a build that maxes out crit, or what?

MSFone.3026:

Question: Illusionary Reversion – Gain a clone after you activate a shatter skill, does this clone participate in the shatter that summoned it?

The PoI stream demonstrates this pretty well. Any illusions you have out will shatter, then you generate a new clone that starts auto-attacking.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

• No ability to trait shield?

Yeah, that seems a bit weird. I guess they couldn’t think of anything that didn’t overlap with existing weapon traits? Or maybe the fact that both Shield skills can already reduce their own cooldowns (Alacrity from iCaptainAmerica, catching the Tides of Time) meant that a trait which reduced the cooldowns further would either be OP or require increasing the base cooldowns of the skills too much.

Also, we only have ~6 seconds before snapping back to the crystal location anyway. Exactly how far can you get in that time without warping away?

ASP.8093:

This is literally just “Phantasm builds don’t need to shatter much!”

So, yeah, sure, dungeon/Fractal builds don’t need to shatter. We all know this. That’s because PvE is largely about concentrated power, not flexibility. (If you want flexibility, change your traits / utilities between fights!)

Yes, it is. Because that’s exactly the point I’m making.

PvP is not the only activity in the game. A trait is not useless because PvP builds don’t use it or prefer to take something else.

Traits don’t need to be universally useful in every single build to be good traits. They just need to have a useful build that they are useful in. HM definitely meets this requirement, even if DE is better in other builds.

MailMail.6534:

People are also not realizing that we might get a well trait that would reduce the CDs and give an additional buff.

The Well CDs are explicitly designed around the presence of Alacrity, so I wouldn’t pay too much attention to the tooltip values necessarily. The actual gameplay values will be lower depending on what our access to personal Alacrity looks like.

Even still, the CDs aren’t actually that long. 20s on Well of Eternity is the same as Ether Feast, for instance. The other Wells have CDs on the same order of magnitude as Feedback/Null Field, apart from Well of Calamity, which has a CD half as long as those.

Usually, AOEs like this help to deter enemies from sitting on a point. It’s one reason why Nullfield/Feedback are strong Mesmer utilities when facing particular enemy compositions. Very underrated for pvp use imo. Wells will be the same.

Yes, exactly. We have basically zero point control through anything except burst damage right now. Wells give us a ton of point pressure that we just didn’t have before.

Sebrent.3625:

I think their balance team might want to put a shorter leash elsewhere though.

If they even have one?

League of Legends has a set of champion designers and a separate Live Balance team. I know that ANet thinks about balance the same way that LoL does, because of the language they use, but I think they’ve failed to recognise how important it is that the folks making balance decisions are not the folks doing the designs.

There’s a difference between a build that shatters as needed and a Shatter Build. In the latter, you need a ton of clone generation to spam your shatters. PU, Fractal Phantasms, even Lockdown would fall into the former category. At the moment, Lockdown/PU takes DE for emergency shatters, but will they still need to when they get IP for free?

And, even more importantly, dungeon builds already don’t take DE. Why would they start now?

At this point, I’m wondering what’s more true: Is DE a safety blanket that Mesmers refuse to give up, or is it a bandaid hiding festering wound that needs to be torn off so it can be treated properly?

Knox.8462:

Windwalker.7421:

Mostly a lot of stuff being said here is simply “grass is greener” spam, that sadly always happens when another class’ goodies are revealed.

This couldn’t be emphasised any more. It happened during the original class reveals, and it’s happening again. It happened during the Chrono reveal too. It’s as if these people don’t even look at the other sub-forums.

Seriously, go to Reddit or the Guardian forum and check how many people have been saying “Why can’t we get something cool like the Chrono?” They’ve mostly quieted down since Ready Up, but they’re still out there.

Yeah, you guys are soooooooo oppressed. Better get Amnesty International in here ASAP.

The thing about wells is that some of them have both an ally effect and an enemy effect. So, similar to Chaos Storm, there are a lot of ways to use them that don’t necessarily require your enemies to cooperate with you.

That said, I’ll give some thoughts on them one-by-one:

• Well of Eternity – The heal seems a little finicky, I don’t see myself ever using this. The Vigor could be useful for Shatter builds, I guess? It’s also a Light field that your iZerker/iWarden can Whirl for condi clear, though why wouldn’t you just bring Null Field if you know you need more condi clear than Focus can give you?
• Well of Action – Slow does have a use in helping land interrupts. This is probably more useful as a source of AoE damage and Quickness in PvE, but it might have a place in PvP on a Bunker-esque Lockdown build, I guess. I still don’t see myself taking this too much, though.
• Well of Calamity – Weakness and Crippled are pretty good conditions, especially in combination. This has little use in PvE, but you could really annoy a Thief in PvP by dropping this on top of them. Even one pulse could be enough to ruin their getaway plan by slowing them down and sapping their endurance regen. It’s our “damage” well, supposedly, but I think the conditions are more important. If you ignore the damage burst and just look at the condition pulses, this is probably our best PvP well.
• Well of Precognition – The Blur effect will be hard to time, but 3 seconds of Stability and Unblockable sounds pretty nice. And it’s a stun break (just for the Mesmer or for all affected allies?). This could be a solid well for WvW. Drop it right when your lines collide, laugh at the enemy Guardians whose Aegis is now useless. Probably not a lot of use in PvP or PvE, though, outside of boss fights where having tons and tons of group Stability is important. But those fights do exist, so it’s not nothing.
• Well of Recall – Being a reliable source of group Alacrity means this will probably be essential for dungeon and fractal runs. There’s admittedly no use for this in sPvP, though. (You’ll rarely be able to stand in the Well long enough to get the full effect, and enemies won’t stand around for the final pop unless they’re idiots or ran out of stun breaks.)
• Gravity Well – Three pulses of Stability + Pull is pretty sweet. Lockdown builds will probably still consider taking this, though obviously you need to force your opponent to pop their blinks first. Also should be pretty strong at defending in Stronghold, and it could have a use in open world PvE as well. Imagine dropping this on a cluster of Modrem attacking the gates during Silverwastes events, right?

So, they’re not all universally great, but most of them seem to at least have clear niches where they shine, and some of those niches are ones that have been poorly covered by Mesmers in the past. Again, Well of Recall is going to be a must-have for instanced PvE, Well of Precognition sounds like a great skill for WvW clashes, and Well of Calamity is one of the few utility skills we have that can actually annoy Thieves.

Curunen.8729:

The choice between Phantasmal Fury and Duelist’s Discipline is akin to the choice between Sum of All Fears and Malicious Sorcery, and I believe this is a good choice – if you’re using Pistol or Scepter you can take those traits, if not you’ve got a decent alternative. The problem is the third trait being pretty bad – Desperate Decoy in the case of duelling adept and Phantasmal Haste (illusions master) in a line strongly geared towards frequent shatters such that you likely won’t keep phantasms alive long enough to get more than two attacks off anyway. And secondly both Sum of all Fears and Phantasmal Fury could do with sometihng to make them more appealing – for the former reduce the number of confusion stacks per torment to 3 (to make it more attractive for a condition build not using the scepter), for the latter I can’t think of anything off the top of my head.

Yes, agreed. This is the real problem with Dueling Adept. Desperate Decoy is basically a trap trait. It only helps you if you’re losing, it doesn’t do anything that we can’t already do with the Decoy skill, etc., etc. ANet really needs to trash it and put something else there.

So, one of the reasons that the HoT Elite Specs are giving Wells to Mesmers, Traps to Guardians, etc. is that ANet want to make more Runes that interact with specific skill types. Given that, what effects would we like to see on our new “skill type” runes?

I think it’s a given we’ll see Well runes of some kind, and the Mesmer skill type we’re most likely to see on another class is probably Mantras. Starting from the assumption that we get a new “Superior Rune of the Font” and “Superior Rune of Repetition” or whatever, what would you like the 4- and 6- bonuses to be?

TyPin.9860:

If it’s like engie turrets used to be, it will be immune to conditions..

Minor correction.

Madisonlee.9641:

All I hear is “give me the best of both worlds, let me keep DE, don’t make anything good compare to DE”

I really think this trait is damaging to our build variety

It’s starting to seem that way to me as well.

That being said, I suspect that we might be overestimating the value of DE in a world where ever Mesmer gets Illusionary Persona just for walking in the door.

Ultimately, we’ll just have to see what builds shake out. I actually think Harmonious Mantras might be strong enough to contend with DE for non-shatter builds. Mistrust seems like it doesn’t give enough stacks of Confusion to be really worthwhile, but it at least has a clear function in Lockdown builds.

skcamow.3527:

Jon Peters also posted in the stream earlier that the chronomancer traits would be released very soon (I’m guessing within a week). Why haven’t they been before now? Who knows but we’ll have them soon enough.

I agree ready up is a lot better platform to showcase these specializations.

I’m gonna take a wild guess that the Chronomancer was in more active flux than the Dragonhunter. They had a whole extra week to firm things up, for instance, and probably the Dragonhunter posed fewed design challenges for them in the first place.

Why not lead with DH instead of Chrono, then? Hype management, I think. Chrono is a very flashy elite spec, and it’s also very easy to digest as far as being “Mesmer plus new stuff”. It sets a good expectation for what most of the elite specs will probably look like, whereas DH is a slightly bigger departure (completely revamped Virtues, traps on a class they don’t intuitively make sense on) from its base class.

Windwalker.7421:

Not to mention Alacrity. We’ll see how the Mirror thing works out, until we see it we can’t really know how it’ll work. Maybe the traits Mirror activates after the Manip has been used, which would add maybe another 1s or so to the Reflect. We’ll see soon enough I guess.

Yeah, it’s entirely possible that ANet will special-case the interaction between Mirror and Master of Manipulation. I kind of hope they do, actually!

MailMail.6534:

• Master of Manipulation (Mirror) + Mender’s Purity = might just make Mirror a highly competitive heal in the pvp scene considering it’s extremely low CD, the plethora of on-heal runes you can use with it and the ability to have 4 seconds of reflect every 12 seconds… Also remember Mender’s is AOE now, which means more condition clear for teammates.

Intriguing idea. But since Reflection does not stack with itself, I don’t think this combo actually does anything special. Unless the trait is coded to proc at the end of the Manipulation skill or something rather than on-cast.

For PvP, I quickly switched from Power Shatter to Lockdown and started having a lot more fun. Shatter builds in PvP seem to rely a lot on having team support or opponents who cooperate with your burst setup. Lockdown is much more self-sufficient and rewards players who can pay attention to what their opponents are doing.

We already have a thread about this skill.

And Windwalker already made the best suggestion for what to do with it:

Windwalker.7421:

Why not just have it summon a Phantasm, and block ALL attacks while summoning ? (At least that would make those god awful Phantasm summon times useful for once!) Much easier, much more powerful, much more like a shield is expected to work!

Quadox.7834:

Harmonious Mantras
Really cool trait, but i find it hard to believe it can compete with DE. Needs conclusive testing from Anet.

This is probably fine, actually, even if DE is going to be used in more builds. It has a clear niche, IMO.

Illusionary Defense
Has never been a good trait. Clone death weakness was always better on any build.

Yeah, the “get something while illusions are up” traits always seemed lacklustre to me. Even if they were hypothetically good, they’d still be really boring. I’d rather see this replaced with something that makes illusions survive longer, if anything.

Temporal Enchanter
Not nearly strong enough to make a glamour build work. Not sure what to do, maybe make a pulsing super speed in glamours or just add another effect to it.

I don’t really understand why Glamours are giving Super-Speed instead of Confusion or Blindness. Super-Speed encourages you to leave the Glamour zone, which only makes sense for Portal. For Feedback, Null Field, and Time Warp, you want your allies to stay in the Glamour zone.

So the Temporal Enchanter trait really ought to have some kind of effect that encourages allies to fight within the Glamour.

Sword Trait (forgot name)
Terrible choice when you can go with reflect on dodge or blind on shatter. One idea would be to merge this with the mirror trait for something like this: (Gain precision while wielding a sword. 20% reduced sword cooldown. Reflect missiles while using blurred frenzy)

Really, the only problem with this trait is that it’s in the same tier as Evasive Mirror. Which may be intentional, they might not want Blurred Frenzy to have both a reflect attached to it and a reduced cooldown. You end up needing to pick which is more important to you.

Still, it should have a more interesting recharge mechanic and a more interesting effect than flat increased Precision. Ditto for Greatsword and Power, really. Our other weapon traits all have much better design, in that they actually add something entirely new to the weapon rather than just incrementing a number.

Like, for instance:

Blade Training – After evading an attack with Blurred Frenzy, your next attack has 100% crit chance. Crits reduce your recharge on Sword skills.

I don’t have a really good idea for Greatsword Training, though, TBH. Should be something that adds raw damage in a way that isn’t tied to simply handing out Power. It’s a brut force weapon with a brute force trait, which doesn’t really give me much inspiration.

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

Scepter/Torch will still probably be my long range setup for guard but the Fn mechanics truly shakes up the play style of the class even if you stick with the old weapons. The mesmer shield/F5 don’t really give me that feeling for mesmer. It’s cool but just doubling up on the same.

Right, exactly. Regardless of what you think about the bow or traps, Dragonhunter still gets a totally new set of Virtues to play with.

Windwalker.7421:

And to add insult to injury, it looks kinda weak as well…but I’ll probably eat those words come tomorrow! ;-) (I guess the AoE immob + light-beam-volley looked like it might be fun!)

Yeah, that’s the thing. It doesn’t look flashy, but it could still be pretty fun to play.

I’ve always liked the “few huge attacks” style of combat over “lots and lots of attacks” style, even though the former is always woefully underpowered in every game system I’ve ever played. So, yeah, I’m still really curious to see what the full picture looks like.

I don’t know about effective, but the business about active virtues makes it sound more fun than the existing Guardian. Was thinking of deleting mine to make another Mesmer instead. But maybe now I won’t.