Guild Wars 2

Fay.2357:

What if mirrors had a similar function to gangplanks barrels in LoL? Set up mirrors in an area during a fight and then use a shatter to detonate all of them with specific effects.

They already “borrowed” Azir’s sand soldiers for the new Necro spec, so I don’t see why they couldn’t steal Gangplank’s barrels for Mirage.

Levetty.1279:

The only way I can fix this is to get rid of mirrors and just have those abilities give you mirage cloak.

This is a really obvious fix that would work perfectly fine, but it won’t happen because it would further drive home the fact that Mirage offers very little to distinguish it from core Mesmer. (Since there would be virtually no difference then between a Mirage and a Dom Mesmer with Blurred Inscriptions. Except that BI gives a full second of Evade and also cures conditions.)

Arshay Duskbrow.1306:

After five years, shatters remain untouched. The inherent contradiction of Mesmer design, that you want us to both sustain illusions AND shatter them, has not been addressed, and will not be addressed by Mirage either in its current form.

This is the fundamental problem with releasing Mirage after Chronomancer. Chrono band-aid patched our broken Phantasm mechanics. Mirage rips off the band-aid again.

glenndevis.8327:

But honestly I’d have loved to get an offhand axe as well. Especially since Warriors got both main & offhand daggers and Mesmer really lacks a good 2nd offhand condi weapon in case you want to use Scepter & Axe.

Yeah, as much as Mesmer really needed more main hand options, it still kind of sucks not to get a new Phantasm.

(Torch is arguably a pretty good condi off-hand, at least.)

It’s always funny to me when people try to brag about being eSports pros in GW2. Nobody gives a kitten.

90% of HoT, and the LW3 content even more so, is just “(random parts of) the floor is lava”.

The big problem for Mesmers in post-HoT open world content is all the kittening RNG ground-target attacks. Mobs themselves aren’t hard to deal with, but we have no good way to handle the situations where you dodge a telegraph attack or random puddle and another random puddle spawns underneath you while your dodge is on CD. It basically requires us to take Restorative Illusions to sustain through the damage when we take those random hits.

(+1 is not a role.)

It does defend you. It just does other stuff.

Seriously, Mirage Cloak is Distortion that we can get without shattering plus it enables Ambush attacks. It’s literally all upside when compared to a normal dodge.

Focus is definitely going to be a top pick, just like it was before we had Shields.

After that… depends. I think you can make an argument for just about anything.

The real question is whether the access to Mirage Cloak from utilities and traits will make up for the loss of Blurred Frenzy when using Axe MH. OH Sword might be pretty important for the extra block when you’re trying to get over to a Mirror so you can tag it and get Cloak.

This is the reference.

The other interesting thing about Illusionary Ambush is: it seems like it actually lets us retarget our illusions? Including phantasms?

There are multiple ways to get Mirage Cloak, it seems, and I assume any source of Mirage Cloak will enable Ambushes. We get Mirage Cloak from Dodge, but also from the constructs left behind by Deception skills.

(Actually, have any of the Mirage gameplay videos shown Phantasms at all? Seems like a weird omission, unless they’re trying to downplay the fact that Axe doesn’t come with a new Phantasm.)

Focus is for pulling enemies into one spot so you can drop all your wells on them at once.

Don’t worry. As soon as people start using Power Mesmer in PvP again, we’ll get nerfed back into the ground.

Ookamikun.6472:

Clearly Lazarus is actually an asura piloting an armor.

Three Asuras in an overcoat.

Deep Sea Dragon isn’t “Steve”, he’s actually “Surazal”. Surazal is Lazarus. Larazus is Surazal.

I’m calling it now, everyone must credit me when I turn out to be right.

*implying there are Mesmers left who haven’t already noped out

What OriOri said in his first comment is correct. You have to choose between clearing content in a reasonable amount of time but occasionally dying to tougher fights or surviving everything but taking forever to do anything.

Silverkey.2078:

At the risk of not being very popular, not being able to cast damaging phantasms while remaining in stealth sounds good to me.

Yup, completely agree. You should have to choose between lurking in stealth or using attack spells. You shouldn’t be able to do both.

Don’t bother, ANet clearly doesn’t want anybody to play their game apart from MLG Pro eSports types. We’d all be better off if we just gave up and found a game that actually WANTS our money.

I mean, what happens when Ventari gets buffed to be viable and/or the tablet mechanic is reworked to not suck as much? Will ANet take Alacrity away from them at that point, or will they keep Alacrity and also have a viable support line on top of it?

Permastealth phantasm builds are half the reason the Mesmer changelog is usually nerf nerf nerf, so anything that makes them fall out of meta is fine by me.

I guess the real question is: Does this change anybody’s builds, or does it just make the existing ones (that don’t rely on permastealth) a little nicer to play?

The Ventari thing is kinda dumb, but apart from that I like the sound of these changes. Probably not enough to pull me back into the game, but it’s nice to see some positive attention that benefits both core Mesmers and Chronomancers.

Is it the same as this PU build, perhaps?

PvE meaning…?

It’s definitely not meta for raids (you’ll be using boonshare for that) or fractals.

For open world, you can get away with it, though it’ll be slower than power due to condition ramp-up time.

Are you guys actually accounting for the stack limit on Quickness?

I think he’s imagining a Power Lock > iLeap > Swap combo. So you break the Daze from PLock and then kill the clone before Swap fires, or something, or at least you have time to throw up a block before the back half of the shatter combo hits.

Which, fine, but the meta build for PvP Mesmer now is a condi shatter, and the above only applies to power shatter, which is out of meta right now for reasons entirely unrelated to the above combo. (And if you were gonna play a power shatter, obviously you’d bait out the stunbreak before actually going in for your combo.)

It could be 10 Eles and nobody on the dev team would notice. They’re simply not capable of thinking things through beyond “Thing Strong, Make Thing Less Strong”.

As I’ve been saying on Reddit, Mesmers don’t have much to complain about as far as losing group slots. It’s all the folks competing against Eles for the four DPS slots who should be kittened.

Is your Thief using Escapist’s Absolution or Shadow’s Embrace? You really need one of those two as a Thief in the current meta. Pain Response is also a nice pick-up if you’re running Daredevil.

Fay.2357:

I don’t feel that this rotation will significantly more difficult to pull off than the old rotation. It’ll be a little tighter, but that’s not a huge deal overall.

…

Now consider a much weaker and newer group. Not only are they only clearing some bosses by the skin of their teeth, they’re also less comfortable swapping classes, so maybe the won’t be able to transition smoothly into a mirror comp. This group will suffer significant dps losses because of this update, and all of a sudden they’ll be failing at bosses they once completed. They’ve been effectively set back months of practice all because Anet didn’t properly consider the ramifications of this change.

Typical ANet balancing, in other words. The top tier keeps on trucking, everybody else gets shafted.

I mean, I hate the whole concept of “hardcore” instanced group PvE to begin with, so if everybody except DnT stops raiding, that’s no skin off my back. But there are definitely people other than me who are going to be justifiably kittened off about that.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ll be dropping my GS for Sw/F for the pull into a BF cleave.

It’s a ridiculously flimsy band-aid, though, rather than the comprehensive change that’s actually needed.

So, you admit that there’s a balance discrepancy between classes, then? You know, the thing the whole thread is about? I’m glad you finally came around to admitting that.

Spatial Surge: The aftercast has been reduced by 0.3 seconds.

I’m curious what this actually does to GS autoattack damage.

In general, though, I don’t feel like we got particularly good compensation for the nerf. Sure, there’s still a rotation (thanks, Fay) that can theoretically produce permanent group Quickness, but the skill floor to execute this rotation has been raised significantly. Will non-top-tier raid groups even bother bringing a Mesmer?

I mean, I guess we could have had those hilarious Engineer patch notes, though. Remove the one useful feature of an underperforming skill type and give absolutely nothing back to those skills in compensation. Nice, nice, nice.

Ah, that’s the Azukas we all know and love [citation needed].

Why should only Mesmers need a group for LW achievements, though? That’s the question at hand. No other class has trouble doing the achievements solo.

Compensatory damage buffs will likely amount to some AA number tweaks. Which will be welcome, don’t get me wrong, but they won’t really address the real problems with the class or the PvE meta.

Redfeather.6401:

Is kinda sucky for everyone I think.

Well, Eles have a lot to be happy about now that they won’t have to compete with Thieves for DPS slots.

To be totally honest, I don’t think our traits per se need much adjustment. All else being equal, “Increase Illusion damage by 10%” is not conceptually different from the “Increase Greatsword damage by 10%” kind of traits that other classes get sometimes.

The biggest issue with Mesmer traits is that the class as a whole can’t do anything useful right now other than boonfarting. So all the traits that aren’t related to boonfarting might as well not exist, even if they’re perfectly fine traits by themselves.

Converting all the weird percentage damage buffs into stat increases would be nice, though.

You won’t find much disagreement on this forum, but ANet seems happy with the status quo.

Blur and Distortion give the same result (invulnerability, cool shimmering special effect) but Distortion blocks capturing and is affected by Inspiring Distortion.

The difference between Blur and Dodge is that Dodge is an Evade while Blur is Invulnerability. Also, Dodge travels and breaks channels, while Blur doesn’t necessarily.

Scepter is actually a pretty ok Power weapon due to the high coefficient on Confusing Images. I don’t know that the difference between Viper’s and Berserker’s on one weapon will be all that huge, though, so going with Viper’s might give you more flexibility if you find some way to use a Scepter condi build in WvW or wherever.

Nicely done, Xstein.

Curunen.8729:

I’d like to see axe be a solid hybrid weapon with the ability to generate might (like ranger’s axe) and some mobility (a leap or a port). That would allow the option of speccing whatever you like – power, condi or hybrid.

I feel like ANet doesn’t have a great track record with hybrid weapons, though?

Seems like the same amount of work as adding, say, new ranged animations for hammer or new melee animations for staff, which already happened with the last round of elite specs.

I’d check around the time of the Alacrity nerf, that’s probably when you would have said that. Prior to then, our Alacrity generation was still valued over our Quickness sharing.

apharma.3741:

To be honest blur instead of dodge is only marginally better than you know, dodging. I guess the only good thing would be you no longer have to move to evade stuff.

Presumably, the spec comes with a bunch of traits that interact with Blur, to make this more interesting.

Silverkey.2078:

I mean, in PvE, to have any chance to compete with chronomancer’s quickness/alacrity buffing (and considering it still has to work with 2 core specs and with the overall mesmer design), it will need to pack some serious punch!

In WvW, the boonshare frontline also needs the shield for multiple reasons.

Yeah, I’m skeptical that a melee condi spec will do anything useful in PvE.

WvW could go either way. It might slot into a nice roaming build. Probably not a frontline build unless its defensive features are crazy good, though. But even if it has the ability to stand in the front line, will it be worth bringing over boonshare? Or, since boonshare is getting nerfed to the ground soon, worth bringing over literally any other class that can stand in the front line? Time will tell, but I’m not hopeful.

In PvP, to make the shield unnecessary, it will need to give serious amount of defenses (blur?) or pretty good damage.

This seems likely, at least, if the new thing has Blur as a major mechanic. So I’m not too concerned there.

That is the problem with trying to fix all design problems at the elite spec level and saying elite specs are mutually exclusive: you have to fix the same problem with every new elite specs, over and over and over and over….

Indeed. At best, we’ll have two elite specs that are useful in different game modes, which is actually not a terrible situation per se. But we’ll still have no reason to play a non-Elite Mesmer, and the design of those elite specs will continue to be tightly constrained by the requirement to fill in gaps in the base Mesmer’s design.

He’s talking about PvP, where condi is in fact the only meta build for Mesmers now.