I’m going to make my first post ever on these forums because I feel very strongly about this issue.
I’ve played guild wars 2 off an on since about launch. I’m a pretty casual player, my only 80 is a Mesmer (I rerolled my mesmer about a year ago). Mesmer has been my favorite class with a fantastic visual aesthetic. I enjoy the other classes as well, I’m a bit of a serial alt maker, but none of them have clicked the way Mesmer has. I love being the flashy mage who draws the attention of the enemy but is constantly eluding him. The brightness of the animations and visuals are essential to what the Mesmer is.
I felt chaos armor was one of the quintessential skills that established the visual aesthetic of my Mesmer. Being a support mesmer and watching blast finishers come down in a chaos field and spread chaos armor around was one of those moments in game that always made me grin.
I logged into guild wars 2 today to see the change to chaos armor and I am crestfallen. I know the developer who worked on the animation must have spent alot of time on it and I appreciate that immensely, but unfortunately to me it breaks badly from the visual theme of the class.
The egg shape clashes with the circular and spherical design choices for all the wells, feedback, null field, and time warp. The egg shape also brings up farmyard and breakfast connotations in my mind that are extremely immersion breaking. I don’t know about you but when I think about a flashy mage the first terms that come to mind are not ‘chicken coop’ and ‘scrambled eggs.’ Most importantly the flashy nature of the skill is gone. I will no longer will have that ‘wow’ visual moment that tells me I made a difference to my team when a blast finisher spreads chaos armor.
Now can I keep playing the mesmer with chaos armor the same way with the new animations, absolutely. Can I learn to watch for it on my buff bar instead of looking at visual que’s, no problem. However the skill won’t feel the same. The visual aesthetic of the skill is weakened and with that, the whole class’s aesthetic is weakened.
I understand the importance of decreasing visual noise. I have definitely been frustrated in more that a couple instances by not being able to see what was going on with boss animations. However I am really puzzled at how this change will help. The main area I have had problems with visual noise is in melee range.
I may be considered a ‘noob’ but I don’t see this skill often in use in melee. I always found getting out of range of a boss, especially when using my staff, the primary way of decreasing damage taken. Chaos armor was always secondary as a way to passively respond to the damage if damage was inevitable even at range. Every once in a while I would be able to spread chaos armor to the melee group but that was hardly often, and I don’t see many other mesmers actively doing it either.
TLDR
In closing, I really hope they reverse this change. Although the change was instigated as a way to decrease visual noise, I don’t believe it had much of any effect on visual noise and instead hurt the visual aesthetic and design of the mesmer class.