Curunen.8729

I'd like more changes such as sword 5 cast time halved to 0.5s.

I actually prefer the short duration footfalls of astralaria. I don't like the excessive footfalls of eg aurene legendaries, or those that linger for ages. Too much visual effect. It would be nice if we had wardrobe unlocks for: - footfall - aura + arm effect - draw/stow effect - projectile effect That we could then mix and match and use on anything once unlocking the respective legendary.

In terms of mirage's backbone, not much has been solved. Sure we've come a long way from eg slapping exhaustion on elusive mind, but the disjointed foundation of the spec is the same. While it was overpowered (like everything else) at the start of pof, you could at least play more like a thief given low cooldowns etc actively porting around like crazy. Instead of pushing the spec more towards this route, we got alacrity (a mistake), and a move towards passively massaging enemies to death. The difference is myself and I imagine quite a few others can't be bothered to provide much feedback anymore - the game is as it is and will likely barely change so best just play and enjoy what's there. Dagger ambush is cool though, I'll give them that. Despite going against their previous philosophy of separating cc and damage, they give us this spammable madness lol.

OH sword 5 player cast is really stupid. Tiny hit radius and then a phantasm that only works on stationary npcs. I'd rather have the old leap back on the phantasm. BF regarding audio I just want it to be silent again in terms of player voice. It used to be silent, then it became so every single time at least on female asura is that battle cry - I don't mind on the odd occasion but on every time kills the smooth vibe of the weapon and the main reason I always drop it when trying it again. It also looks odd with the faster animation that came with the shorter evade frame. It used to feel so elegant, now with the "perma quickness" and battle cry it's lost some of that. I don't know the solution as we aren't going backwards, and these are pretty niche subjective issues so I don't mind if never touching sword again so long as we get a few new melee/mobility/utility weapons in the future. Also definitely agree all relevant skills should count as blades (though I don't personally care for virtuoso), because it makes no sense for them not to.

Shame, axe clones used to look cool with the auto attack chain but first that got removed and now completely meh. On the other hand I'm shocked dagger ambush has been allowed to exist for 6 months given previous philosphy about cc. Likely because the rest of the weapon is kind of pathetic which balances out lol. Edit - mirage trait line is still a mess as hit has been for 6 years with the most minimal changes. It's about time things like IH as a minor, rethinking all GM majors as both EM and dune cloak suck (EM because it's completely useless against immobilise, the entire trait should be killed and replaced at this point having been an issue since the beginning), opening alacrity to not be such that running staff+mirage mantle is completely game changing in terms of cooldowns compared with everything else, addressing energy sigil crutch etc...

Great, so force only axe/axe because in order to do any damage you have to take the trait... I hate beyond words them always pushing towards staff/staff, axe/axe, dagger/dagger with kittening energy sigil reload button. Why can I not go staff axe/x, or staff dagger/x, build alacrity on one, swap to the other to make some damage then back to continue alacrity? Or even dagger/x axe/x for damage and then cc when needed? No, got to play the most kittening boring and monotonous way possible instead... I mean better yet they just delete alacrity from mirage and give all deception skill cooldowns back, but given the situation why cannot two kittening different weapons be encouraged?

Bountiful disillusionment F2 gives incredibly long vigour. Between that, false oasis, on crit in duelling, and shatters from nomads endurance it should be enough to get by, though could mix and match with some boon duration if preferred. Relic of evasion kind of overkill and more fun to go with other relics in pve - ie on interrupt for dagger ambush, or eg akeem in open world with D/F. wvw still think adventurer relic is better than evasion for effectively a third energy sigil, given you have enough vigour when cele. Sigil of energy mandatory in all game modes, it's crutch for mirage - basically glorified "reload". However also sigil of stamina if GS or Dagger against many enemies, incredibly broken you will get repetitive strain from spamming so much dodge lol.

It could stay as it is but maybe higher damage/condi on single target, to go further in that niche. That or maybe the auto could have some splash effect like rifle, but damage instead of healing. Maybe the third auto does 1 stack confusion in small radius on hit.

The main problem for me is the single target auto/ambush. Staff has easy "aoe", axe has cleave and puts you in melee range for shatter, sword has cleave, dagger has obscene piercing ambush, GS laser discos everything. It's extremely easy to casually damage anything with other weapons even if not directly targeted, whereas scepter feels like its living in vanilla gw2 with the comparative effort required. That and the scepter ambush animation is like having had multiple cans of red bull or similar xD

Not sure if I'm hearing things but it seems to have a very definitive ending sound when the orb hits something or reaches its max distance before dissapearing. I'm assuming it is intended, though don't recall this sound being so prominent all the time before the recent patch. Is mildly unpleasant given the "smooth" nature of staff gameplay for such a hard sound at the end of each ambush, I'm curious if as eg alacrity sound effect got several changes in the past, whether this was there before but maybe not every time, or do correct me if I just wasn't hearing things properly.

The thing I don't get is why they push mainly the either dual staff or dual axe setup in pve. I know staff/axe can be played now for damage taking the axe trait, but still it seems two of the same weapon have been encouraged beyond what I would imagine the original idea for weapon swap was. Because it entirely hinges on the existence of energy sigils - if no energy sigils then the entire concept falls apart. It's kind of abusing a system that is held together by one piece of gear. Same with eg dagger/dagger - in order to make use of relic of the demon queen or midnight king. I don't begrudge anyone who prefers staff/staff, axe/axe or dagger/dagger, but seriously it would be nice for weapon swap to be encouraged for builds that swap to different weapons, whether for providing alacrity or other.

Phase retreat is easily one of the best skills on the entire profession. Can't count the number of times it has either been a lifesaver, setup a kill, clutch reposition etc. Any additional delay to activation such as a flipover would ruin it for me. Same with ground targeting on a clone summon - really hate the rifle 2 skill, and find camera about face or rotation with staff 2 to function well enough. Edit - realise this comes across a bit harsh maybe, sorry about that I just feel quite strongly about it. Edit 2 - thinking about it, an acceptable option would be for it to always port you backwards determined by the direction your character is facing and regardless if you have an enemy targeted or not. But the downside is then you can't do things like have a target selected, blink past them and hit phase retreat to instantly port further away from them, as you would have to rotate your camera every time. Pros and cons for each tbh, would accept either way.

On the side note of mirage and alacrity, I still find it annoying that all deception cooldowns were nerfed and then "remedied" by shoehorning alacrity on one weapon because of the nonsense homogenised role system in instanced pve that has developed (fair enough it's better than everyone going berserker, but now there's a different kind of monotony). And that mirage was moved away from its initial intended function as a highly evasive damage dealer being a hybrid of mesmer/thief, to justify virtuoso's existence... Anyway, back to rifle - surely there should be scope to allow the player to decide how to use the weapon via stats? Why can't there be greater scaling with healing power, or damage stats so that you can build for dps or for healing? I don't understand why weapons like this have to be forced into one use only, when shouldn't the point of the stat system be to give the player this freedom.

Skill 1 - feels extremely weak in terms of damage. I really don't like it. Sound effects - I like that they are more muted compared with pistol, but still could have the "normal" bullet sound reduced to be a bit softer/more sci-fi blaster. Mirage ambush - yeah range is way too short, and I appreciate the sound effects aren't there yet but doesn't feel satisfying or good to use. I don't like it much at all, and wouldn't mind having the phantasms DJ sniper shot instead. Skill 2 - kitten the ground targeting. Either make it on your target (enemy or ally), or enable snap ground target to current target for individual skills - not the blanket checkbox in the options menu. I hate this as much as I was expecting to, totally ruins the weapon for me. Utterly horrendous skill, please replace it with something else. Skill 3 - best thing on this weapon surprisingly. The might is good, and it's fairly quick and easy to use. Skill 4 - agree with others the windup is far too long, and there should be a player action on cast instead of waiting for the phantasm. Maybe have the player fire a shot that dazes the target for a short duration, and then summons the phantasm which has the ability to follow up with high damage and a stun? Skill 5 - agree with those suggesting it to function both ways, still single use. So the player can make personal use of it as well, otherwise it has no mobility unlike staff. Ultimately staff has mobility, alacrity (mirage), might generation, damage. Then there's dagger spamming 1200 range piercing daze on every ambush... whereas rifle appears to only have mediocre power with some healing, with a somewhat gimmicky portal. Granted I'm not the target audience for healer gameplay, but this weapon feels quite pathetic right now. It could seriously benefit from quickness on something, maybe a bit of condi on the auto, and more damage. Edit - this is from a brief spin in wvw on rifle/staff both full power and cele. Power seems the natural way to go given no condi options, but then the damage absolutely sucks and I'd rather use any other weapon. I'll try rifle/GS and rifle/dagger next, though staff still feels better as a defensive weapon thanks to all the boons and mobility.

Immediate thoughts: Journey - hate hate hate the ground targeting on a low cooldown clone generator. Can't express how much I hate this, if I could turn on snap ground target to enemy for this skill only I would do it. 3 and 5 are fine. Everything else is ok. Ambush, meh it is the spraying ectoplasmic healing goo, but fine it looks flashy at least. Skill 5 I imagine most of the time the flip over won't be used outside of coordinated content in pvp, instanced pve and eg wvw roaming group. The cooldown incentive to not use I don't think is enough to justify the current function, so we'll see what happens. Phantasm is bloody amazing. Single best thing on this. But anyway, if things remain as they are most likely just going to mess around as a novelty and then straight in the bin, simply because of skill 2 being ground targeted...

I wonder if they might change barrier's visual effect a bit from yellow to something that fits with all colour schemes - like they did with alacrity from a pink flame to a white and rainbow flame after everyone got given it. Also rewatching the video I can see where people mention the possible skill 2 clone summon following that kneel - though the shot through the pink portal with massive aoe on the target looks quite visually intense for what usually are low cooldown skills, unless I'm not seeing the editing in the video correctly and that's actually a different skill. Hopefully the kneel is only when stationary, but can equally be used while moving.

That would be so cool. Illusionary ambush with this would look so stylish. Click click, boom! 😄

Ok audio seems nice also - I was worried it may be quite strong like hearing pistol phantasm all the time which would become annoying... I agree with the sentiment for some kind of mobility. Phase Retreat is a godlike skill, easily in the top ten of the entire class, and it would be nice if rifle could have something that offers this, as I really don't want to see things go down the line of only cele Rifle/Staff for mirage. On that note I'm really curious about the ambush. Dagger ambush is absurdly powerful in the context of previous balance patches, so while I expect that to be nerfed/redistributed one day, it's hard to see how rifle ambush can measure up. An aoe heal or defensive books around the player would be kind of boring, so hopefully it's a bit more fun than that.

Visuals look good. I can't listen to audio at the moment. Skill 3 seems kind of plain/pedestrian - as if it could be on any weapon? Will have to see in action to know how it specifically ties in with rifle as a weapon. Skill 5 sounds awesome, but I was hoping it would have a one tick gravity well style aoe pull as well. So far so good, looking forward to trying it! 🙂

It depends how much they can physically do in a year. If money is a limiting factor I don't mind paying a bit more until it isn't. But also would prefer that "bigger" means eg all classes get more new gameplay and comprehensive balance patches - more new weapons, skills, traits, elites etc. Rather than bigger meaning a whole map worth of content each quarter. Generally I like soto in theme and design more than any other expansion, and while the second chapter was a little short, I still enjoyed all the story, characters and atmosphere of Nayos.

Tbh iWarden still sucks so I'm not sure on your how much you might get out of it in pvp at the moment. But with 4 being our only pull (ignoring that new relic), that into ambush volleys is insane. And I like aurene's gaze enough to look past having one and a half weapon skills. xD I would love to but unfortunately have been seriously turned off mainhand sword since they sped up the blurred frenzy animation - not for gameplay but for how it looks off. 😞 Also it used to be silent/not voiced most of the time on asura female, but now every time there is a really annoying voiced shout that goes with it. I don't mind swapping to sword for mobility when needed but, don't like using it anymore. That and sharper images with pistol trait stacks absurd amount of bleeds for the effort, and having both deceptive evasion and self deception is fun to set up shatters between all the dagger pew pew. Though I can see the benefit of faster focus 4 cooldown from CI is nice. Omg can you imagine if chaotic interruption did the immobilise on interrupt - would be so broken with dagger.

Going to bring this up again requesting two features for action camera that shouldn't require additional autohotkey script to function. 1. Centre cursor at crosshair when toggling action camera on (so toggling off would ensure the cursor always starts from the dot - allowing predictable use for ground targeting). 2. Enable right click as weapon skill 2 when action camera is on (toggling off returns to normal right click function).

I just wish they would do something more interesting with it. The stunbreak was stupidly powerful, but right now it's so bland and boring when compared with IH.

It's quite mad. I've gone D/F D/P dom/duel/mirage viper with krait runes and max cheese with adventurer relic. Pistol cools down so fast sometimes it's ridiculous. Not optimised at all in the limited time I've had to play soto, but this ambush is so overloaded lol. Not tried the boon option for might stacking, which sounds like great fun, I'll make a template to mess about with that!

Dagger mirage is probably my favourite thing about this expansion. Haven't yet tested in wvw (in part due to playing on mobile internet across regions...) but can't believe they went through with this insane spammable 1200 range piercing daze from you and all clones with IH and massive bleed stacks. D/F is seriously fun to group and burst while also bringing the fashion, and you don't even have to worry about virtuoso problems like normal dodge and cast times on shatters. It's probably only balanced out by the auto being mediocre, and everything being stacked on the ambush. Tbh I reckon they will adjust it in the future given it doesn't seem to be in line with their direction on cc and damage. My only complaint is actually the animations - they're all pretty much the same. Ok ambush is slowed down but would be a nice quality of life update in the future to get some unique animations for dagger 2/3, and maybe even an auto chain for some variety.