Mesmer PvP and WvW Changes

MesmerSkills• Phantasmal Disenchanter – Increased the cooldown from 20 seconds to 30 seconds in PvP and WvW• Illusionary Riposte: Increased the cooldown from 12 seconds to 15 seconds in PvP and WvW• Illusionary Swordsman: Increased the cooldown from 15 seconds to 20 seconds in PvP and WvW. Decreased the number of might stacks from 8 to 4 in PvP and WvW• Mirror Blade: Reduced damage by 14% in PvP and WvW• Signet of the Ether: Reduced the cooldown from 35 seconds to 30 seconds in PvP and WvW• Illusionary Counter: Reduced the cooldown from 8 seconds to 6 seconds in PvP and WvW• Jaunt: Reduced damage by 50% in PvP and WvWTraits• Elusive Mind: This trait now applies 3 seconds of Exhaustion when breaking a stun• Bountiful Disillusionment: Reduced Stability duration from 5 seconds to 3 seconds in PvP and WvW. Decreased Might stacks from 5 to 3 in PvP and WvW• Mental Anguish: Reduced bonus damages from 15% and 30% to 10% and 20% respectively in PvP and WvW• Confounding Suggestions: Increased cooldown from 5 seconds to 15 seconds in PvP and WvW

Welp!

mmmm, still exhaustion on EM. :/

Yes, I believe elusive mind is pretty dead now. They truly nerfed the stab from BD tho haha :-D We had that discussion on an other topic about ppl calling for stability nerfs, well here it is!

The EM nerf I’m ticked about. Exhaustion is a horrible mechanic on any class. Yes it’s only when you break stun but it’s still bad. The other changes...

iSwordsman felt good at 15 seconds but I’ll try it at 20. The might stacks will hurt my WvW build but I’ll survive somehow.The BD nerf is silly. We have very little access to stab and chaos isn’t played with much because it doesn’t offer damage compared to dueling or Dom.Signet of Ether needs to be 25 seconds, 30 is still too long for how poorly it scales with healing power.I’m fine with the CS nerf because it always seems like it’s used as a crutch for people that can’t set up shatters well.I’ve not been using mental anguish in PvP so that won’t hurt but it’s still a nerf.

Overall it could have been much, much worse.

I was thinking they were going to nerf ether signet so you couldn't double-cast inside continuum split - reducing the burst of phantasms

Disenchanter got a longer cooldown than originally listed, but it's probably fair given how effective it can be

BD nerf is weird - I mean just how much might stacking is possible, even if you take Shatter Storm and have alacrity. And the stab is one of the few good things about that trait.

But yeah looks like no hope for EM right now - 3s exhaustion is no better than 4s exhaustion - it's still dysfunctional with mirage.

The only way EM will make sense is if they nerf mirage dodge to not be able to work at all when cced. Which tbh I wouldn't be surprised to see happen in the future.

@Jace al Thor.6745 said:The EM nerf I’m ticked about. Exhaustion is a horrible mechanic on any class. Yes it’s only when you break stun but it’s still bad. The other changes...

iSwordsman felt good at 15 seconds but I’ll try it at 20. The might stacks will hurt my WvW build but I’ll survive somehow.The BD nerf is silly. We have very little access to stab and chaos isn’t played with much because it doesn’t offer damage compared to dueling or Dom.Signet of Ether needs to be 25 seconds, 30 is still too long for how poorly it scales with healing power.I’m fine with the CS nerf because it always seems like it’s used as a crutch for people that can’t set up shatters well.I’ve not been using mental anguish in PvP so that won’t hurt but it’s still a nerf.

Overall it could have been much, much worse.

Yes I agree it could have been much worse. I was surprised when the list ended. The nerfs look okeyish, I agree CS needed a nerf as well. But BD though...It isnt a super nerf but I can't find the reason behind it. I'm surprised shatter storm survived based of what I've read and seen.

Well, at least that makes me believe the dev team isnt easily manipulated from the playerbase and I'm happy about that. Overall, I'm okay from these patch notes.

Also let's keep in mind other classes are nerfed as well so the current mesmer nerfs will probably be less noticable when the balance patch lands. I think the pvp team is on a good start. Not everything is perfect for everyone, but the steps are okay.

@Vicko.1204 said:

@Jace al Thor.6745 said:The EM nerf I’m ticked about. Exhaustion is a horrible mechanic on any class. Yes it’s only when you break stun but it’s still bad. The other changes...

iSwordsman felt good at 15 seconds but I’ll try it at 20. The might stacks will hurt my WvW build but I’ll survive somehow.The BD nerf is silly. We have very little access to stab and chaos isn’t played with much because it doesn’t offer damage compared to dueling or Dom.Signet of Ether needs to be 25 seconds, 30 is still too long for how poorly it scales with healing power.I’m fine with the CS nerf because it always seems like it’s used as a crutch for people that can’t set up shatters well.I’ve not been using mental anguish in PvP so that won’t hurt but it’s still a nerf.

Overall it could have been much, much worse.

Yeah and what’s so funny is... I don’t see anyone run Shatter Storm unless they’re condi but to do so they give up Torch trait. Most people I see run power are Dom/dueling.

Honestly, CS should have been nerfed when they did the mantra changes. I’m also pleasantly surprised to see staff and it’s related traits escape this go around. Saw too many people complain about the protection uptime with staff for my liking.

This hits pretty hard at the heart of the sw/sw Disenchanter build actually. However, it's sustain remains intact and the might stacking will still be significant (it's overflowing as is). I'm actually always surprised in playing the build how quickly Disenchanter seems to be back up, so I don't know that the cooldown will hit that hard.

What I see hitting the hardest is EM and Jaunt, I quite often use Jaunt to stay on target/keep damage up. Now potentially see Jaunt as a disengage tool while Exhaustion is on.

@Curunen.8729 said:BD nerf is weird - I mean just how much might stacking is possible, even if you take Shatter Storm and have alacrity. And the stab is one of the few good things about that trait.

But yeah looks like no hope for EM right now - 3s exhaustion is no better than 4s exhaustion - it's still dysfunctional with mirage.

The only way EM will make sense is if they nerf mirage dodge to not be able to work at all when cced. Which tbh I wouldn't be surprised to see happen in the future.

You’re not going to stack a ton of might using BD alone. But when combined with swordsman, staff, and Phantasmal Force you can easily maintain 18-20 stacks of might and spike 25. My WvW build relied heavily on this.

Putting an internal cd would have been a much better plan. Or remove the stun break and replace it with something else. I really only used it in PvP for the condi clear. When I first saw the proposed change I swapped immediately to IH to get used to 3 clears vs 5.

@Curunen.8729 said:BD nerf is weird - I mean just how much might stacking is possible, even if you take Shatter Storm and have alacrity. And the stab is one of the few good things about that trait.

But yeah looks like no hope for EM right now - 3s exhaustion is no better than 4s exhaustion - it's still dysfunctional with mirage.

The only way EM will make sense is if they nerf mirage dodge to not be able to work at all when cced. Which tbh I wouldn't be surprised to see happen in the future.

There are actually a variety of pvp builds that almost always had 25 might on them. One was illusion and chaos with mirage, which essentially garanteed passive 25 might after a short ramp up.

@tartarus.1082 said:

@Curunen.8729 said:BD nerf is weird - I mean just how much might stacking is possible, even if you take Shatter Storm and have alacrity. And the stab is one of the few good things about that trait.

But yeah looks like no hope for EM right now - 3s exhaustion is no better than 4s exhaustion - it's still dysfunctional with mirage.

The only way EM will make sense is if they nerf mirage dodge to not be able to work at all when cced. Which tbh I wouldn't be surprised to see happen in the future.

Fair enough, I can see with staff ambush/lining up IH clones, sigils, illusion traits, BD, and things like sword 5 or GS2 it's easy to boost up the might, though I do think it's a loss for builds that benefit from might but don't necessarily focus on buffing up to 25 stacks.

@Curunen.8729 said:

@tartarus.1082 said:

@Curunen.8729 said:BD nerf is weird - I mean just how much might stacking is possible, even if you take Shatter Storm and have alacrity. And the stab is one of the few good things about that trait.

But yeah looks like no hope for EM right now - 3s exhaustion is no better than 4s exhaustion - it's still dysfunctional with mirage.

The only way EM will make sense is if they nerf mirage dodge to not be able to work at all when cced. Which tbh I wouldn't be surprised to see happen in the future.

Tbh I’m more apprehensive about the mirror blade nerf. It’s not like burst Mesmer had anything in its toolkit besides the combo.

And exhaustion is just the wrong way to deal with EM imo. It should’ve just been replaced with a different functionality.

People were being hit by the mesmer attack from summoning iSwordsman? People are being hit by the phantasm attack of iSwordsman?

Wow people really are just standing still and spamming skills when fighting Mesmer.

@Levetty.1279 said:People were being hit by the mesmer attack from summoning iSwordsman? People are being hit by the phantasm attack of iSwordsman?

Wow people really are just standing still and spamming skills when fighting Mesmer.

They also don’t pan the map either so they get hit by GS burst combo. It’s sad on one hand.

And then you have people saying mirage cloak is overpowered because it’s a 1 second evade with 1 second of superspeed and when you explain its because a dodge roll more distance when strafing or dodging behind THAT is a l2p problem according to them. So we obviously don’t know how to dodge while strafing.

My understanding is ppl will not stop asking for mesmer nerfs untill the class disappears. There is not a single thing of mesmer that doesnt need nerfs in the eyes of the majority of the ppl who use the pvp forums.

The dodge preventing the capture of a point is a brand new idea, running atm in the pvp forums.

Every time you try to reason with any of those ppl, you end being unskilled, having l2p issues etc, while spamming sword 3 on thief is the epitome of astronomic gameplay skills. There were ppl claiming mirage has perma stealth. I've already seen some posts about mesmer nerfs not being enough. Maybe some complains are right about some things and truly some things could receive a little damage reduction nerfs but there are so many complains that if you add everything into a new balance patch, mesmer will have base 9k hp, phantasms will have 2 secs daze before they first attack, confusion will also confuse the mesmer, blink will have 1min cd, only 1 clone up instead of 3 cause it's too hard to find the real mesmer, shatters having 1 sec cast time and the prestige will now burn the mesmer instead + its stealth removed cause it's a permanent stealth, dont forget about that.

@Vicko.1204 said:My understanding is ppl will not stop asking for mesmer nerfs untill the class disappears. There is not a single thing of mesmer that doesnt need nerfs in the eyes of the majority of the ppl who use the pvp forums.

The dodge preventing the capture of a point is a brand new idea, running atm in the pvp forums.

Every time you try to reason with any of those ppl, you end being unskilled, having l2p issues etc, while spamming sword 3 on thief is the epitome of astronomic gameplay skills. There were ppl claiming mirage has perma stealth. I've already seen some posts about mesmer nerfs not being enough. Maybe some complains are right about some things and truly some things could receive a little damage reduction nerfs but there are so many complains that if you add everything into a new balance patch, mesmer will have base 9k hp, phantasms will have 2 secs daze before they first attack, confusion will also confuse the mesmer, blink will have 1min cd, only 1 clone up instead of 3 cause it's too hard to find the real mesmer, shatters having 1 sec cast time and the prestige will now burn the mesmer instead + its stealth removed cause it's a permanent stealth, dont forget about that.

I know what you mean. It's like thieves, People don't know the mechanic, don't know how to counter, so they die and want the class decimated with a nuke from orbit (just to be certain).

Personally I don't feel it will be game breaking for me personally, but I don't like the BD nerf. I just don't think it was necessary.

@Musty.3148 said:

@Vicko.1204 said:My understanding is ppl will not stop asking for mesmer nerfs untill the class disappears. There is not a single thing of mesmer that doesnt need nerfs in the eyes of the majority of the ppl who use the pvp forums.

The dodge preventing the capture of a point is a brand new idea, running atm in the pvp forums.

Every time you try to reason with any of those ppl, you end being unskilled, having l2p issues etc, while spamming sword 3 on thief is the epitome of astronomic gameplay skills. There were ppl claiming mirage has perma stealth. I've already seen some posts about mesmer nerfs not being enough. Maybe some complains are right about some things and truly some things could receive a little damage reduction nerfs but there are so many complains that if you add everything into a new balance patch, mesmer will have base 9k hp, phantasms will have 2 secs daze before they first attack, confusion will also confuse the mesmer, blink will have 1min cd, only 1 clone up instead of 3 cause it's too hard to find the real mesmer, shatters having 1 sec cast time and the prestige will now burn the mesmer instead + its stealth removed cause it's a permanent stealth, dont forget about that.

Thief faces a mechanic problem, just like Mesmer. Both have stealth, both can potentially do high damage, both have tools to close in and escape. Which is why they are always compared to one another. You can put exhaustion on a daredevil and they still have mechanics available to them to regen endurance on top of having three dodge. That’s no where near the same as mirage cloak. Mirage has two dodges and no external traits to regen endurance other then vigor. Exhaustion works on one not the other but they can’t understand that.

The BD nerf isn’t game breaking no but it is rather ridiculous. But the people whining won’t be happy until they can afk kill a Mesmer. Or thief, they’d like to afk kill them too.

@Ithilwen.1529 said:“I note that you're basically shutting down the elusive mind trait. The trait counters itself. If you have exhaustion, you're still CC'd. In fact you might actually be worse off. I'm guessing that you're shutting down the trait with numbers because you can't make a pvp version? That's a pretty hard hit on Mirage. I note also the heavy shatter damage reductions.Good.

Please be very cautious. Balance changes come far too seldom and a radical change can cause problems that linger. Mesmer was widely acknowledged trash tier after the glamour nerf and that situation dragged on for well over a year... remember when Illusionary elasticity was shut down for what? A year?Mesmer may have been regarded as trash tier at one point in time. However, those days are long gone and now mesmers are widely acknowledged as completely overpowered and broken.

In most complex situations, it's better to under react than to over react.Well, it's your lucky day. These mesmer nerfs were under reactions. They still need a lot more nerfs because at the moment, they are completely broken.

Illusionary Defender is hitting people for 18k multiple times due to resummons.Illusionary Disenchanter is hitting for 10k+ as well.The 10+ clone spam makes it almost impossible to tell what's going on. Not only does it render tab target nearly useless, but click targetting as well.It is impossible to discern which clone is which because they just resummon themselves.Mirage is still extremely difficult to pressure due to the nature of Mirage Cloak.Chronomancer resummoning is even stronger than Mirage's (albeit a weaker MU).Mesmer can also hit 20k+ damage from stealth repeatedly on a short cooldown without any tells if you don't see the mesmer coming. By the time the mesmer leaves stealth you die unless you can react an almost instant burst with quickness with a stunbreak that's also an evade or an invulnerability skill.Chronomancer has access to 18+ seconds of alacrity as well as permanent EVERY boon in the game including 25 stacks of might. Core and Mirage do as well (minus the alacrity).Mirage has the highest access to on-demand invulnerability.etc. etc. Mesmers are extremely broken.”

Pulled from the PvP page.

Can someone tell me when we were able to have 10+ clones, permanent stacks of boons, etc? Last I checked we could only have 3 clones out, had limited access to Resistance and retaliation, etc.I would love to run these builds. I think life would be much easier.

People are being hit by Illusionary Defender as well?

The state of the PvP community. :/

@Levetty.1279 said:People are being hit by Illusionary Defender as well?

The state of the PvP community. :/

Yeah it’s not pretty Lev. Not pretty at all.

Started testing a new build last night, with dueling and illusions, will comment after Tuesday once I have enough testing time to form an opinion. I cut out all the nerfed stuff.@Curunen.8729 I guess I shouldn’t sweat the passivemancer fights anymore. Anet fixed the encounter for me :lol:

I’m mostly ok with these though I think the majority of the problem skills needed reworking in some fashion rather than a skill split. The problem is everyone is out for blood on mesmer rather than recognising what is too strong and what isn’t and coming up with a rational change or rationally thinking that you can’t fix it with a numbers change.

For example is a single disenchanter summon OP? Not really, the damage on no boons is a tad too high especially with minimal investment but it’s only very strong with chronophantasma and indeed most of the phantasm complaints are with how a single trait doubles the damage of a certain class of skills. This is flat out overpowered no matter which way you cut it, no trait should effectively double the damage of something but rather than address that it’s easier to nerf the core skill to the floor where it is only useable with chronophantasma or signet of ether.

Just like how everyone and their mum is complaining about the number of dodges a mirage has when in reality it’s no more than any other class has if that other class has permenant vigor. What their complaints should be about is how elusive mind enables mirage to go unpunished for not carefully dodging CC and that stunbreak on dodge shouldn’t be a trait, no amount of exhaustion will balance it.

Finally I think it’s time they started really looking at the way mesmers trait for damage. You have some traits to boost your damage but not phantasms, traits to boost phantasms but not yours, traits for stacking might which also have to have a component to essentially pass on a benefit to phantasms. Then you have traits to buff certain shatters damage but it doesn’t affect all other forms of damage. The whole thing is a mess and allows defensive mesmers to get high damage out of 1-2 skills while being traited for defense. Time they made the damage mods more universal and toned down the burst, this way someone who’s already running a glassy build gets more damage on other attacks (skills, autos, phantasms) while not being a one shot and defensive builds that only take a single damage trait don’t hit very hard.

@Arlette.9684 said:Started testing a new build last night, with dueling and illusions, will comment after Tuesday once I have enough testing time to form an opinion. I cut out all the nerfed stuff.@Curunen.8729 I guess I shouldn’t sweat the passivemancer fights anymore. Anet fixed the encounter for me :lol:

Heh true.

@Arheundel.6451 said:

@Musty.3148 said:

@Vicko.1204 said:My understanding is ppl will not stop asking for mesmer nerfs untill the class disappears. There is not a single thing of mesmer that doesnt need nerfs in the eyes of the majority of the ppl who use the pvp forums.

The dodge preventing the capture of a point is a brand new idea, running atm in the pvp forums.

Every time you try to reason with any of those ppl, you end being unskilled, having l2p issues etc, while spamming sword 3 on thief is the epitome of astronomic gameplay skills. There were ppl claiming mirage has perma stealth. I've already seen some posts about mesmer nerfs not being enough. Maybe some complains are right about some things and truly some things could receive a little damage reduction nerfs but there are so many complains that if you add everything into a new balance patch, mesmer will have base 9k hp, phantasms will have 2 secs daze before they first attack, confusion will also confuse the mesmer, blink will have 1min cd, only 1 clone up instead of 3 cause it's too hard to find the real mesmer, shatters having 1 sec cast time and the prestige will now burn the mesmer instead + its stealth removed cause it's a permanent stealth, dont forget about that.

I don't know how in any kind of sense you manage to arrive at that conclusion.

In case it wasn't clear to anyone, this list of changes is in addition to the already proposed list of changes (or in some cases, overriding the old list). So the full list of mesmer changes would be:

Skills• Illusion of Life: Reduced the cooldown from 120 seconds to 75 seconds in PvP and WvW• Phantasmal Disenchanter – Increased the cooldown from 20 seconds to 30 seconds in PvP and WvW• Illusionary Riposte: Increased the cooldown from 12 seconds to 15 seconds in PvP and WvW• Illusionary Swordsman: Increased the cooldown from 15 seconds to 20 seconds in PvP and WvW. Decreased the number of might stacks from 8 to 4 in PvP and WvW• Mirror Blade: Reduced damage by 14% in PvP and WvW• Signet of the Ether: Reduced the cooldown from 35 seconds to 30 seconds in PvP and WvW• Illusionary Counter: Reduced the cooldown from 8 seconds to 6 seconds in PvP and WvW• Jaunt: Reduced damage by 50% in PvP and WvW

Traits• Elusive Mind: This trait now applies 3 seconds of Exhaustion when breaking a stun• Compounding Power: Reduced the outgoing damage buff per stack from 3% to 2% in PvP and WvW• Phantasmal Force: Reduced the Might granted from 3 stacks to 2 stacks in PvP and WvW• Mirror of Anguish: Increased cooldown from 60 seconds to 90 seconds in PvP only• Bountiful Disillusionment: Reduced Stability duration from 5 seconds to 3 seconds in PvP and WvW. Decreased Might stacks from 5 to 3 in PvP and WvW• Mental Anguish: Reduced bonus damages from 15% and 30% to 10% and 20% respectively in PvP and WvW• Confounding Suggestions: Increased cooldown from 5 seconds to 15 seconds in PvP and WvW

I guess I'm fine with it. They really nerfed a lot of things pretty heavily (the most annoying of which is the confounding suggestions nerf, at least to me), and gave us only token buffs to skills that won't do anything to change their use. I'm not going to start using signet of ether because of a cooldown reduction, nor will I suddenly decide that illusion of Life is worth taking because it went from usable once very other fight to usable once every other fight. That being said, I don't see anything here that will make mesmers a non-competitive class.

I hope that they spend the next patch period working on doing appropriate buffs to unused skills like Illusion of Life in order to make them competitive options with things like Portal, Blink, Mantra of Distraction, etc.