apharma.3741

I'm less bothered by the "GvG" environment and how utterly brain dead stupid the boonball meta is. Can we give the current WvW balance dev a slap and say reduce every boon duration by half on every zerg meta build? Oh and making necro and guardian have the most mobility in the game while sacrificing nothing for it, 10/10. Real genius devs at ANet these days.

Hey ANet, Why don't you stop nerfing stuff that's viable on a class barely anyone is playing and sort out how oppressive warriors, guardian's and necromancers are in WvW at the moment? Also genius kid that came up with cripple, I know it was your idea to nerf mesmer and make the ambush trash but next time put 1s chill from each source on and it may work in an interrupt build without being overpowered.

Somebody tell the guardian main at ANet's balance meeting this please :)

I'm just waiting till you realise that while it's got damage that it just doesn't work with the mesmer kit in general and with what it does work with EVERYTHING has more mobility and will just chase you down and kill you. Ofc I'm from a WvW perspective where necro and guardian are just flat out broken now. Edit: While we're at it can we discuss the clarity mechanic and obvious bias towards an already strong (in WvW) class guardian? Mesmer your skills are empowered by a single buff from exactly 1 skill. You have pathetic mobility on phantasmal lancer (but it does hit like a truck empowered) and a dodge and cleanse on the 3 skill. The ambush makes me want to die with how long it takes to cast and mental collapse damage I find lacklustre but at least you get a follow up of clarity. Guardian on the other hand, EVERY SINGLE SKILL EMPOWERS THE FOLLOW UP. Just let that sink in, every single 2-5 skill as long as it hits or in the case of 5 just stand there, empowers the rest. You get counts on the mobility skill, which yes does less damage but it heals and goes further, while empowered does a lot more healing and inflicts weakness. The solar storm skill just annihilates people and can turn a fight with a few people. I'm impressed by the damage on spear, I am, but it has no mobility and very poor synergy with the rest of the mesmer class while having a worse version of the favourite's mechanic.

I wouldn't want the return of clone death traits though, it punishes people for rightly making a conscious decision to kill clones. What I'd prefer is if they didn't instantly die to a willbender pretending to be a ballerina which is on a 15s cool down, or the other 10 AoE damage skills they rotate round with 100% crit chance and doing more damage in a single hit than phantasms have health.

The video creator is a moron, he has rudimentry knowledge of the game and is at best the usual trash NA reaction streamer gamer. How do I back up this statement? He didn't target the mesmer most of the time even when it was very clear for 2s and all he had to do to completely shut down the build was use elixir gun auto attack as weakness reduces endurance regen. Also commenting he has no mobility when he has both shift signet and rocket boots is next level copium. He got outskilled, plain and simple and not even by someone who's great, just someone with a strong build rotating their skills.

Can't comment on QQ as not run into them NA but Hunt is pretty chill. The real problem children (who were dropped on their heads) in roaming are [SA] and [JP] and their cronies with Slonder etc. Also what hurts roaming far more than any one guild is this idiotic boonball meta which is seeing any and all tools for hurting them removed and made useless. You can't even moa pull the enemy com soon, not that it should be easy with perma 5+ stacks of stability, prot, regen, aegis spam and bubbles. The boonball meta is the child of a person who could never command well removing anything that hurt them. The only thing that kills them is a better skilled boonball or their own stupidity, where the bar for that is so low it's practically in hell.

I'd love for phantasms to spawn with swiftness (if only for 5s) and when you shatter clones get swiftness for 5s. It won't solve everything but it at least gives them a chance to hit. Oh and ofc they won't get affected by relic of speed because that'll just have to be ignored by the dev team forever. You know how it is.

Dude, stay on topic instead of talking out of where you rage whisper people from. My point is that Signet of Humility, the skill that was designed to counter unkillable builds AND transforms is now worse than a simple rushed clone job of toss elixir X. You know it, I know it and everyone else here knows it.

Maybe you should look at the changes more closely, signet of humility will put an animation above the target also, you'd have to be blind or brain afk to get hit with it now. Bringing up the signet passive show's you're scraping the barrel, it's nothing anyone would even build around, and it makes barely any difference, even a 3s stun becomes 2.4s which would still make you dead without stunbreaking. Missing toss elixir x sounds like a skill issue tbh, you can hit with grenades right?

This is literally the point where we can call the person balancing WvW incompetent, just looking at the base skills show this. The skill that was originally designed to transform and enemy into a moa and combat transforms is WORSE than the tacked on toolbelt skill to engineers, toss elixir X. Toss elixir X has the folowing over signet of humiliation: 50% more duration. 200% more targets affected. Recharges 50% quicker. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Toss_Elixir_X https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_Humility

Let me address a few points. 1) Traits: You shouldn't have to trait so that the basic functionality of a weapon works, by that I mean phantasms hitting. You can literally run away from them with swiftness and they will never ever hit. Can you imagine if a ranger had to trait their arrows so they don't have a 50% chance to miss? Or you had to trait for faster projectile speed because otherwise people out run them? 2) In zergs: The example I was choosing wasn't a zerg fight, there were only 2 players but the AoE damage from both instantly killed all clones and phantasms, in a 5v5 a grenade engineer does 2k damage with just spamming grenade autos, that will instantly kill all clones and most phantasms. There's a lot of damage around and you can very easily in this meta have 1-2 guys pumping a constant 4k damage AoE either PBAoE or at range with 2-3 people supporting them (that is increasingly becoming the roaming meta now) and I'm not even mentioning the condition AoE spam. 3) Class mechanic: The basic functionality of the class does not work very well, you set up clones then shatter them to do damage, interrupt, apply conditions or be invulnerable. I'll accept the argument that because Illusionary Persona is baseline you do always get the PBAoE effect but you more or less get it at anywhere between just under half and a quarter of it's effectiveness because clones die so fast. What this does is push the class into either boring tanky builds that don't rely on shatter scaling, see current zergling build or high APM instant shatter builds. There's very little in between because clones tend to die when spawned if they're melee to the enemy and if they live because they're ranged they never reach the target on shatter because everyone has swiftness.

I was fighting in WvW as usual and as usual my clones died to just random AoE from a spellbreaker and ranger using double barrage. When I think about all the times I'm playing now, it's really rare for an illusion and even some phantasms to live, let alone hit anything without 0 range shattering as they spawn. Sure if I spawn them at range or against single target attackers they live, but they still die in 1 hit usually as they run to explode butterflies all over the enemies face. Don't even get me started on "team fights". Add to this the unbelievable mobility of a lot of classes now (perma superspeed, relic of speed, will bender, mobility skills added to weapons etc) it's also tiring to see phantasms never hit because someone has teleported or just outrun it, even in combat and not away from me. Can you imagine how much other classes would complain if their skills took 1s to cast and also might not hit at all? Before someone says "mine hit most of the time, skill issue" etc, I'm not saying I don't know how to land them, I do and I make sure to not target enemies in a group (despite berserkers cleaving) I'm just pointing out that these were originally designed in context of a game that was significantly slower and had significantly less sustained damage. They've never really been looked at since the base game and, well, it's changed a lot. The power creep is real. Below is the health values in case people didn't know. Illusion PvE PvP/WvW Clone 4,171 2,433 Phantasm 5,821 3,396 Phantasmal Defender 12,476 7,278 So the questions are: Do illusions need more health in WvW at least? Do illusions need a certain amount of swiftness on spawn? Any other thoughts are welcome.

I agree that shared chaos aura is broken, however claiming that frost aura spam isn't broken is not accurate. You cause enemies to be perma chilled moving 66% slower AND having massive recharge penalties to skills while taking 6%-10% less damage (depends on modifiers). Frost aura is a very broken aura to be spammed. As for distortion share, it was fine WHEN MESMER ONLY HAD F4 FOR DISTORTION, where it broke was the stupid distortion spamming enabled by blurred inscriptions and signet of illusions which no-one enjoys fighting in any incarnation. Add to that signet of illusions recharging distortion (while granting it itself) and continuum splitting it, and you can see why distortion share was broken. It wasn't because it's bad, it was because there was/is too much distortion in the game. I agree keep chaos aura just for the mesmer and don't share but the trait really needs to do more than share regen, that boon is passively vomited out by many classes, especially support classes, maybe an idea is that chaos aura's detonate at the end giving you 1-3 of the boons it can give and inflicting 1-3 of the conditions on enemies. Allows more control over the application of the conditions and to limit it to a certain range.

I've played both and I'd say it depends. Power mirage has a lot more cleave with split surge and outside of shatters, also beams are not reflected. It's also a bit more mobile for running away. Power virtuoso is very good if you're with a few people to spike someone out as the shatter is more reliable and ofc unblockable because you would never run without that trait. The main drawback with mirage, chrono and core is that against anything that vomits AoE damage the clones can often die as they spawn or die before exploding on the enemy. Make no mistake, damage is crazy high now and these things only have 2.4k health and the same toughness as you. As for what I play, I tend to play a variety, Power mirage, virtuoso, marauder scrapper, the obscenely broken WB and on occaison DE when I just want to be (more of) an a**hole. I play other classes but not always power and not really longer than to get a feel for them.