Guild Wars 2

Just a thought- being that illusions already are intrinsically tied to one enemy(they disappears when the target dies), and therefore thematically are likely to only exists in the target’s head, what if clones could only be damaged by their main target and were hazy, insubstantial, and tinted some color for all other enemies(something to make it immediately obvious if you aren’t the player capable of damaging the clone)?

This change obviously couldn’t be applied to phantasms since for instance the phantasmal warden has effects hat apply to a large number of enemies- but making it so only one enemy has the potential to kill a given clone provides a simple means for mesmers to actually have access to their illusions in group PvP scenarios.

This would be a tremendous asset to shatter builds as well as builds that seek to use staffclones or sharper images on clones to apply conditions in a team PvP enviroment. It would also make all of the “compounding” traits better in a group pvp scenario since maintaining 2-3 would actually be realistic.

Well a less extreme method could be to do the same thing, but only provide immunity to AoE damage caused by enemies besides the main target, since it’s frequently passive zerg AOE that insta-kills illusions anyway.

They should realy make burn tick every .5 or even .25 seconds rather then every 1 second- hardbreakpoints on a condition that tends to have very short durations are a bad things- they make the damage random an unreliable.

Raunchy.6891:

Carighan.6758:

selan.8354:

i agree with u. staff is very rng which is a problem because u never know how effective your attacks are. u can be lucky and get a ton of nice condis and daze off, but then u can be unlucky and your chaosstorm deal like no dmg, your phantasm fails to hit anything and your chaos armor is useless. rng is bad and mes has so many skills and traits that only work if a certain thing is fullfilled. some traits only trigger if u kill something, others only trigger is shatter hit other stuff only trigger if u get hit…etc. staff is rng weapon and needs a make over imo!

Half the chaos line is about random effects. RNG is a really good mechanic for game balance, it forces players to do risk management.

I know it’s unpopular among 1v1 players, but then 1v1 is just not a supported game format in GW2.

lolwut.
No one likes rng, especially in pvp. Ask anyone competitive and they will tell you how terrible it is for rng mechanics to be shoved into your face. It balances nothing. It just makes things more random, and random effects/consequences do not support skillful play. You know what actually promotes risk management? Skills that involve risk…..

The thing is it’s not really particularly random. Anyone witha cursory understanding of statistics knows that over a larger sample size any random variable isn’t really particularly unreliable. The more trials, the smaller the standard deviation- and 95% of the time you are within two standard deviations.

Between the bouncing attacks, clones casting winds of chaos, and the fact that staff is more defensive in general(longer fights), the number of trials for winds of chaos is huge- and will get even larger when they fix clone bouncing/elasticity. I could say with absolute confidence that Winds of chaos performs fairly reliably in terms of conditions applied. It’s most unreliable feature is whether bounces hit who you want them to- but that isn’t random at all: They ALWAYS 100% of the time hit the closest available target.

Liewise chaos storm, potentially throwing out 20-50 conditions depending on circumstances, and if you and/or an ally use it’s ethereal field to proc chaos armor(which you always should) easily another 10-20 conditions, creates more then enough conditions for the law of averages to make the effects fairly reliable.

The one tool in the staff kit that arguably has too few trials is vanilla chaos armour- which in a scenarios where only one enemy is attacking you will create a mere 10 conditions every 35 seconds. But even that isn’t horrible.

Honestly saying competitive players hate all forms of randomness is a gross exaggeration- they hate the unreliability and unpredictability that comes from random variables with wide standards of deviation(which generally means super powerful effects that only get “rolled” a few times per fight creating a huge schism in power between the fights they proc and the fights they don’t). But over a sufficiently larger number of iterations random rolls don’t really introduce a particularly notable amount of unpredictability.

Now, back on the original topic: All I think staff really needs is for staffclone winds of chaos bouncing & elasticity to get the bugfix we’ve been told is coming and perhaps for staff 4 chaos armor to get a bit of a boost(it’s been nerfed a few too many times and still has a very long cooldown).

Also because of how useful staffclones are in general due to the boons/conditions they apply, staff builds in particular would benefit from Arenanet dealing with the general Mesmer problem of illusions dying instantly.