The Abusive Relationship Between Master of Manipulation and Mass Invisibility

Since the devs have stated that a balance patch is in the works it's inevitable that our beloved profession will get changed. Although I believe that Mesmer is oppressively strong right now, I'd really like to see one specific change. That change I am hoping for is the anti-synergistic interaction between the Master of Manipulation trait in the Chaos specialization and the Mass Invisibility elite being looked at. Basically if you have this trait and are running MI then once you finish casting it, it "buffs" you with reflect. If you so happen to reflect a projectile such as a ranger auto, then it bounces back and reveals you...completely rendering the purpose of MI useless. One solution is to give Mass Invisibility the Ether Feast treatment and completely remove the elite skill's archetype and lower its cooldown to a base 72 seconds across the board. This change won't impact Mass Invisibility's functionality at all because Master of Manipulation is the only trait that affect manipulation skills.I hope you take this QoL change into consideration!

Cheers and keep up the great work!

Kthen

It's not just this one elite and this one trait however. Forcible making each type of skill better when you have trait X is just... eh. I thought I was supposed to pick whatever is relevant to the context?

I find MI+MoM very annoying, too. There always seem to be some random projectile in the air by the time I finish casting the skill.

How about buffing the original attacker with Revealed instead of the victim who just happened to reflect the projectile?

I would really like MoM to have its effect catered to each skill it affects instead of a blanket reflect on every manipulation skill. For MI specifically, gaining 1-2 seconds of superspeed makes way more sense than reflect does, but I'd be happy with a great many other options as well.

@OriOri.8724 said:I would really like MoM to have its effect catered to each skill it affects instead of a blanket reflect on every manipulation skill. For MI specifically, gaining 1-2 seconds of superspeed makes way more sense than reflect does, but I'd be happy with a great many other options as well.

Yeah it would be great if MoM worked like Gadgeteer for Engineers (Tools line).

But I personally love reflect on both Blink and Mirror heal, so wouldn't want those two to change. Blink is so nice with it when kiting say LB rangers in wvw.

Even the reflect on arcane thievery isn't bad, although I would be more willing to accept some different enhancement here - ie AoE boon/condi swap.

Sure Illusion of Life and Mass Invis could have different enhancements from MoM instead of the reflect.

Edit - though tbh I'd rather see:Mass Invis -> Utility GlamourPortal -> Elite Manipulation

@"OriOri.8724" said:I would really like MoM to have its effect catered to each skill it affects instead of a blanket reflect on every manipulation skill. For MI specifically, gaining 1-2 seconds of superspeed makes way more sense than reflect does, but I'd be happy with a great many other options as well.

Maybe have the abilities "rotate"? That'd be cool and fairly unique.

So for example, Null Field also reflects 1 projectile for each attacker shooting into it, like a "mini feedback". Feedback gives "pseudo-stealth" where to enemies inside you appear invisible on the outside, Mass Invisibility, if affecting downed players, will give them 50% of their bar back over the duration and if this rezzes them they get back up, if not they instantly lose all gained health again, and so on. Forms a chain of skills which loops at the end.

Maybe just make it so reflects don't proc reveal? If that's to powerful for other classes or something, then make the lack of reveal an exclusive feature of MoM.Or perhaps have it give something different to MI and take away the reflect.

@"Daishi.6027" said:Maybe just make it so reflects don't proc reveal? If that's to powerful for other classes or something, then make the lack of reveal an exclusive feature of MoM.Or perhaps have it give something different to MI and take away the reflect.

That's an overly complicated solution to the problem. It seems simple, but revealed is caused by dealing damage, and when you reflect a damaging projectile, you are dealing damage to the person you reflect it towards. So this fix would involve changing how that works in the engine so that the damage doesn't come "from you" in order to make it so that reflects don't cause reveal. It would be simpler to just update the trait

@Carighan.6758 that is an interesting idea

Why not simply make master of manipulation a cool down reduction only. No mirror, just cool down reduction then move onto other non GM traits that do far too much across all classes and finally start curbing the power creep.

Disappointed this wasn't looked at but not too many changes to mesmer so I guess I can't complain

@"K THEN.5162" said:Disappointed this wasn't looked at but not too many changes to mesmer so I guess I can't complain

I'm not, I wasn't expecting any real balance changes for mesmer outside of toning down CP and UW skills. Lately Anet has been on a kick of "themed" balance patches (which I actually think is really great for the game). This one's theme happened to be UW skills/combat. Already, MoM was outside that scope, so the chance of it getting addressed wasn't big to begin with. But then consider that Anet also completely revamped deadeye, along with almost reimplementing revenant (new weapon, new legend works underwater, on top of all of their other changes to allow stuff to work underwater), and I'm honestly surprised mesmer got as much attention as itdid.

I wish the patch actually did a lot of underwater changes, though. The only class to see any significant touching up in that regard was Revenant. The rest is... ANet style. Means disappointing.

What about replacing reflect with a short evade for the MoM effect? You could then trait into gaining reflect via Dueling, but it would alleviate the baseline anti-synergy component.