apharma.3741

Honestly I feel like the OP shot at the target and somehow hit his foot. Condi is a problem in GW2 but imo not because X is OP or condition builds are stronger than power (they objectively aren't), the biggest problem I have with condi is how much is loaded onto skills for no reason. Many fights you suddenly get 5 to 6 conditions on you just for being in the fight. They're not damaging but when 1 of them is immobilise you're basically dead unless you're a class that can largely ignore or specifically cleans immb at will. Unless you have a super strong cleanse skill. But hey, who cares, at this point I think ANet is actively trying to sink this ship given the state of WvW.

Choo choo All aboard the karma train. Just use this build from metabattle and this macro to spam all skills and you're good to go! CHOO CHOOOOOOOOOOO!

I'd like to second this, let people who want rewards karma train around edge of the mists like they once did. Also let event rewards be earned there too otherwise you get the same queue problem during these half kittened events that only serve to draw in people who care about rewards over gameplay.

hmmm must be a different Alva.4590 recruiting for a guild. The point is that the weapon cannot be used for anything BUT a healing build, you look at other support weapons (mostly staff) on other classes and you see that while they are healing focused they also provide plenty of options and self defence. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Staff The only 2 classes where the "healing" weapon doesn't have any defence is scepter on thief and torch on necro, this is because the support and defence is put into the class mechanic, traits and or utility skills as part of a co-ordinated elite spec focused on support.

Personally I think you can break mobility down to the amount of distance travelled over time and has 2 components with the 2nd having 2 distinct categories. Movement speed, as defined here which is mostly passive: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Movement_Speed . This determines how fast you are at moving compared to others, this is where mesmer is slowest for investment. Movement skills, these are skills that travel X distance during their cast and have 2 distinct categories, those that travel on X/Y and those that travel on X/Y/Z, the latter is almost always a teleport (needs path except portal and shadow portal) and is much more valuable. This is also where over time against meta builds mesmer has been losing out, mirage thrust helps a lot but the other mesmer elite specs have seen an erosion of mobility through blink CD increase and other CD increases over the years while other classes had more skills added. We should also not ignore a classes ability to chill and cripple you or the opportunity cost of it, example being necro sword provided perma chill almost on auto and two 700 unit movement skills on a 10s CD, phase retreat eat your heart out.

You clearly do not play competitive game modes across enough classes. Mesmer isn't particularly fast when you compare it to Thief (all), Ranger (Slb, Drd, Unt), Guardian (DH,WB), Revenant (Shiro, Vindi), Warrior (all), Elementalist (air + x/d or s/x), Engineer (rocket boots, Scr, Holo) and even that notoriously "slow" class Necro (s/x, reaper, harbinger). To reach the same level of mobility you have to run mirage and sword with blink but even that's not enough against WB, Slb, Drd, DrD, Harb, warrior and they have the better sustain to fight you with. On Chrono, Virtuoso and core mesmer you are slow. We are talking about the same class, the difference is Lincolnbeard and I actually play it in said modes 90% of our time while you only dip your feet in to get dailies/achievements, going off your responses. "So we decided to restructure and focus it more on PvE content" - this is a quote from you. It's fine, it's a good PvE weapon and I agree with that but it's an awful PvP and WvW roaming weapon. It's better for zergs than staff, at least till it gets nerfed because ANet only thinks about zergs and removes chaos armour.

I was talking to a friend about it and I stand by what I said in the beta, they should have made it a rifle. This would have given them more skills to add AoE or ground targetted skills, they could have fleshed out the bullet mechanic to 2 generators and 2 consumers (or 3:1 with #5 being the consumer) and generally would be easier to adjust numbers.

Giving only 1 example in 1 specific area where it is good is niche. If you're trying to disprove what he said you're doing as good a job as ANet in regard to balancing. Not agreeing or disagreeing, just showing that you've only proven their point. At topic. One of the biggest issues I have with rifle is it doesn't fit in with mesmer's play style very well and it feels like a shoe horned approach to providing support, especially in the context of the changes they made a few months ago to inspiration and chaos trait lines. It has no mobility on it for the mesmer, no defence for the mesmer, and the self healing is focused on 2 skills which are not big enough to get allies too. Heal on auto while nice, the damage side isn't too good as mesmer doesn't have huge damage modifiers to stack like other classes. I'd like to see the damage on auto increase a little, about 10% should do it. I'd like to see you able to swap places with your singularity from singularity shot, it's not often I find the need to portal and ally out as opposed to teleport away from thieves. Journey needs a lower CD in WvW, play around with the healing/damage modifiers if needed but constant clone generation would be useful. I'd like to see boon removal added to the phantasm but we all know how much some people on the balance team seem to hate boon removal. This wouldn't do anything to the PvE performance but would help PvP and WvW. Evaluate after the changes.

Gotta make sure players don't get silly ideas like venturing off on their own or even "roaming". Get your titles guys!

This is what happens when you keep adding and adding and don't take away. The sheer amount of boons, the cool down on them and their durations is nuts, I'll link a core video below but also the amount of heals, cleanses and then the nerfing of corrupts and strips (entirely justified if you were reducing boon availability) has left us in the boon ball meta of HoT and that helped kill the game with desert borderlands. We also see skills that are already pretty overloaded getting buffed doing multiple more things on top of the multiple things they already did, take protectors strike, Aegis wass added in 2016 which it didn't need, then later the radius was increased for absolutely not reason, this was a great skill without these 2 buffs. Strong boons also have been given out like candy, quickness, alacrity, stability and protection at the same time condition application has had the same thing done to it where poison, immobilise, weakness and chill are mainstays on your bar for looking at someone. What I'd like to see is a scaling back in HOW much traits and skills do, it's OK for something to do 1 thing. Also ANet seems to have a really creepy bias for guardian atm in WvW, kinda nuts how strong this class is across the board.

STOP NERFING BOON REMOVAL ENTIRELY! Null Field: Reduced the field duration from 5 seconds to 2 seconds in WvW only. Reduced the number of pulses from 6 to 3 in WvW only. Then again this plays into someone's agenda of 2 big blobs smashing into each other like meat sacks as they dance around pretending to have skill.

Was very clear I was talking about WvW if you'd bothered to read and contextualise, thank you for the completely irrelevant reply.

It's still not competitive with other healers. My tempest has 1296 healing power and giving an aura heals for 1815 in game with two "healing to others" increases, with the mantras that will be about 1910 about 100 more healing.. You can cycle the mantras a little more but I can also transmute that frost aura to heal for another ~2.6K and I cleansed a condition on providing the aura and 2 on transmute and I can do this to the point I'm cycling an aura every couple of seconds. I also get other benefits to this like frost aura on allies (-10% damage and perma chill to enemies) overloading water for it's healing and cleansing that will dwarf any mantra. The heal mantra can be cycled a little faster (~20s) than wash away the pain for the same total effects and probably about the same healing depending on range. We are also not factoring in the general utility of shocking and magnetic aura that tempest does provide plenty of, despite mantras on paper healing a little more in reality a build with mantras and rifle will still heal less I believe, even with restorative illusions as you're not going to be doing full shatters as often as overload water comes off CD. For reference, you get frost auras on the following CDs and all are transmutable. 20s - weapon skill 24s - Overload water 30s - Flash Freeze shout (also cleanses an additional condi if running trooper) 40s - elemental bastion passive 60s - Soothing ice passive 75s - "Rebound" The reason people took mesmer support was the perma chaos aura and perma alacrity or quickness, both of the latter boons are getting nerfed to the point where it affects EVERY chrono build in WvW. Looking at the mantra change and saying it's better on paper, sure it is but it's not comparable to already good healers (putting aside how awful it feels to use mantras) and it's unique aspects that made it worth bringing along despite the poor heals are also getting nerfed. The mantra change doesn't exist in a vacuum. Edit: Btw healing to allies is multiplicative if you're wanting to math it out.

WvW changes are clearly designed only for GvG and Zerg v Zerg and the 2 guys doing it should really stop balancing exclusively for this. Mantras nerfing the healing power by 50% on top of splitting it to each mantra use is a bit excessive. All 50% nerfs are excessive. Nerfing alacrity is just dumb because they made it dumb in the first place. If you want to provide group alacrity DO NOT HAVE IT ALTER THE TRAIT GIVING PERSONAL ALACRITY. All it does is make the class outside of a minstrels boon ball have no alacrity even if investing the traits. That once again we see a DOUBLE nerf to it only shows how much the balance devs dislike mesmer. Can't wait to play a "support" mesmer which can't output anywhere near the healing a tempest does by rolling their face over the keyboard or cleanse anywhere near as much, or provide as the important boons. Hey, you heal on auto attack with rifle (🤭) and you got a personal portal! So stronk. Absolute bunch of biased double standard clowns.

I was there when balance wasn't only about GvG and Zerg v Zerg.

I hate this boon spam meta, you honestly get the dumbest players in a blob now that essentially macro their skills to be spammed and it's all good because everyone has too much healing, protection, aegis and everything else while siege does nothing to them. Then they just pull people in and flatten, no skill just choo choo and keep up with the commander who will 100% turn around to stop you getting attacked for not having the cognitive ability to realize the commander moved 5s ago. The only thing that's remotely a threat to them is another equally sized boonball or a slightly smaller one with players who are more compact and able to move out of the way of the train better. How do I know they're dumb players? I catch some of them running around and you see stuff like a scourge back peddling and using PBAoE skills when you're auto attacking at range. They start a fight by dodging, back peddle for a second and dodge again and I haven't even drawn my weapon and attacked them! Increase cool downs by 5-10s, reduce boon durations, remove minstrels or change it so it's not perfect all defence stats.

I think we've all realized reading isn't your forte. I'm not making out that reaper is too good, pointing out it's as mobile as everything that isn't completely busted like thief, willbender, soulbeast/druid and a few other niche builds. Do not undervalue Z axis teleportation. TrollingDemiGod argues everything is a slug compared to those, putting aside the hyperbole, I do not exclusively see the hypermobile builds and often do see engineers, ele's, other necro's (where mobility is almost 1:1, exception harbinger) revenants and very commonly non WB guardians which reaper competes with very well mobility wise. Is Willbender broken in WvW? Yes, it has burst and sustained damage, good regen and is probably the highest X/Y movement speed there is while having great defences and boon access.I doubt it will be nerfed though as it's a class favoured by the best and the best are devs tend to win.

Problem: Perma or prolonged stealth. Cause: Stealth stacks duration, no forced "no stealth" period after exiting. Solution: Stealth no longer stacks, forced reveal for 3-5s upon exiting stealth for any reason, not just attacking. Readjust stealth durations accordingly. Adjust traits to be stronger for entering, exiting and staying in stealth etc. Additional changes: Remove reveal effect from marked, there are too many areas where it removes stealth as a defence and it's not needed if the issue of stealth stacking is addressed properly. Imagine if a tower or sentry reduced the duration of your protection to 3s then removed it and prevented you getting protection again or instantly reduced your block duration to 1s.

You also forgot Death's Charge which gives reaper mobility that is not on core or scourge and will give it much more mobility that something like core mesmer, chrono, non dagger off-hand ele, non-rocket boots engineer and non shiro revs. This is also without mentioning the amount of chill and cripple reaper vomits out. Your argument is disingenuous, it may not be super mobile but most reapers are very mobile these days, just not as mobile as the top mobile builds out there. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Death's_Charge

My man doesn't know it's 2 stunbreaks, wouldn't trust this guy's advice. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spectral_Walk https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Necrotic_Traversal

My thoughts on this is as follows: The bullet mechanic is clunky and dumb. If this was rifle and skills 2, 3, and 4 gave bullets which are consumed on skill 4 use then this starts to work better. Of course, this would require the skills team to make 26 skills instead of 18. Range on rifle should be 1200 and have less ground targeted AoE to make it distinct from staff but have some AOE damage around the target with some PBAoE skills and defences.

My overall feeling is that some of these weapons were made by the best and the best tend to win.

WvW perspective, I have used celestial, marauder and minstrel stats and I can honestly say this weapon is either a meme or the designers (especially looking at other weapons) have completely lost the plot. It has generally poor damage on the autos, the skills are decent but slow and not especially big damage and the boons it gives are nothing special, the saving grace is AoE chaos aura on skill 3 and resistance/barrier on skill 5 but this isn't a stand out compared to other support. It needs something else like quickness, alacrity or stability. It's kind of slow and kind of clunky to use with 3/5 skills being ground targeted. Also it doesn't really work that well with other weapons for support, they have just done an overhaul of chaos and inspiration to add more support to it but that's left a lot of crossovers with rifle, for example if you go chaos you have a lot of chaos aura and so regen but what a lot of support builds lack is clone generation. Add more clone generation to rifle and it will have a lot more synergy with most weapons and roles. Make that what rifle does, makes a lot more clones faster. Auto attack: The damage is pathetic, when many other support weapons at least have decent scaling on theirs. This is to offset the healing but healing should be on skills with cool downs not on autos. Remove the heal and buff the damage so it can at least be useful on power builds. Ambush: This is not well-made. It has egregious particle effects and adds to the visual clutter plaguing mesmer, the heal is OK, and the damage is bad but being a 1s channel you can often end up interrupting yourself. The vigor is nice, but it doesn't do anything with infinite horizon except give more vigor. Maybe make it like death's judgement or fire a volley that heals and inflicts weakness with low damage but good power scaling. SKill 2: Not bad the healing is good, damage is OK but could do with a little bump but it's slow to hit, it is abysmally slow to hit where people will very likely have moved out of it. Why not make it track the target and be cast on friend or foe? Skill 3: This skill is very weird, you're trying to make a PvE and a PvP/WvW skill in one when everyone will be detonating it immediately in PvP/WvW and PvE they're not going to care about the might and fury. I would suggest buffing might and fury in traits for PvE and make this skill just abstraction. The damage and healing is good so no complaints here other than it's kinda clunky and a bit slow. Skill 4: Pointless, literally pointless. Does no damage, takes ages to shoot, does the death's judgement beam so the enemy knows it's coming. Why do we need a single target projectile stun that takes 2s to cast on a support weapon? I'd rather have something that scales with power really well but applies chill and weakness on enemies, that works for support but I guess PvE need their breakbar... Skill 5: If this was just singularity shot that pulsed barrier and 1s resistance for 3s after initial shot I would be happy with it. It works on support and resistance is always nice. The portal is just someone saying "isn't this cool" while a lot of players are saying "Sure, but it's not very useful."

Only dumb people vote for 4 week relinking when you have 5 tiers, and the proof of this is already apparent to everyone in T5 EU. WSR+Viz should be T1 right now, but instead they have to spend all this time climbing up the tiers ruining everyone's matchups for 4 weeks till they approach other bandwagon overpopulated server combos. This means no server or server like entity starting in T5 can ever get to T1, there just aren't enough weeks. This might work better with permanent relinking beta, giving more balanced unmoveable populations, but that isn't here yet and there's no concrete date set. So our last few weeks/months/years of server system will be mired in blowout match ups where 1 server dominates everyone for 2-4 weeks depending on start position and bandwagon. Well done everyone, real smart moves.

OP is right to an extent, there's A LOT of builds that hard carry the player and you have an uphill struggle or disadvantage fighting on anything with appropriate risk and reward, some examples: Cele harbinger, the damage and regen on this is nuts, enough mobility to get to safety a lot. High passive prot uptime. Cele willbender, again, tons of damage, tons of boons, defence and king of mobility at the moment. Passive prot uptime. Cele vindicator, vindicator as a legend is grosly overloaded, add in shortbow and you get an incredibly hard to kill spec that spends half it's time evading or glitching out. Deadeye, gets to dictate the fight completely and stay at a nice safe 1200 range needing only 3 or 4 buttons to win. I wish I was joking. Cele catalyst, with high protection, might stacking, stab on aura and waterfields on demand it's a very tanky spec to fight even 2v1. Druid or Soulbeast, lots of stealth, mobility, cleansing, stunbreaks, damage, it's got everything you need to fight or get out of a fight. These are just a few but there's many other build/stat/class combos that you have to play something incredibly broken to fight. Many might point out cele is the culprit, it's not, it's maybe 40% of the reason many of these builds are broken, the rest is plain biased or inept balancing. Marauder willbender jumping you for a 20k combo then running away to try again in 30s when CDs are back is every bit as broken as cele willbender, just they go from stupidly hard to kill to hard to kill. Once you get over 50% boon duration (runes for 25%, diviner armour for another 25%) a lot of these builds get very strong and one of the common aspects is passive stacking of boons or excessive defensive options within one place. So removing cele won't magically make it better, just a little better. All these builds will still be super strong. Then we come to the balance patch preview, I don't think anyone is looking at that and saying ANet is addressing real problems in any way.