Curunen.8729

wow! 😮 Maybe there is some hope.

One thing that bothers me now is up to 4 blue circles around the player every dodge. Yes I know you can turn off the area of effect rings in the options menu - but this also disables enemy aoes which is really stupid. Otherwise every single dodge it's really jarring to see these flat circles on the floor - detracts from the combat aesthetic of mirage. It was bad enough with one - I never liked it but coped with it - but now it's an eyesore. Either make a separate ally/enemy aoe ring toggle in the options menu, make something more visually appealing, or revert this non-thematic alacrity nonsense (give back deception cooldowns) and move the spec in another direction.

At this point I'm a bit worried what new shatters could mean. Sure in the past as with others we've given many suggestions, but it's likely whatever happens could be more annoying and worse than at present. And in general I'm not fond of adding an extra shatter, compared with replacing and keeping the cap at 4. I know chrono had 5 for the reason of only having an offhand weapon, but I actually liked when CSplit moved to F4 - and I think that simply shoving distortion back on chrono and adding it to virtuoso is a cheap solution. Would have been nicer if maybe they went down a path of supplementing non-2hander elite specs with an off or mainhand (ie give chrono MH pistol, mirage OH axe, virtuoso OH dagger), instead of the need to compensate chrono with the extra shatter (nevermind virtuoso where the extra shatter makes no sense). And then scaffold chrono and virtuoso in other ways which many people have suggested.

Seeing how brief and blunt the mesmer patch notes are, I'm further assured not to give a kitten because every time it looks like they don't want to get hands dirty with mesmer beyond putting some plasters on with the least amount of effort. Having that (singular) mirage change be applied across modes without anything else is ridiculous. I'll just continue to login for fashion wars every now and then. Maybe 2 dodges come back in the next decade, maybe not.

This hole of less interesting gameplay that mirage has been dug into over the last five years, now seems to be taking another step back to encourage doubling up on the same weapon and more passive reliance on clones. (I hate 2x same weapon builds with on swap sigils - weapon swap should be for variety not for "reloading".) And when are the 2 dodges coming back? Or are we going to get these little aimless nudges every patch for the next 5 years?

Hammer I really want a two handed weapon for once... We have 2H ranged, 1H melee and ranged, but don't have proper 2H melee with cc heavy spec - our version of Untamed.

I get that argument, but think that this could have been maybe a little more thematic or improving other areas without shoehorning in an additional shatter. Though I also get that this is the simplest solution, and history has shown that is usually the way things go here.

What an underwhelming patch. Null field/disenchanter/mantra - obviously the most important issues to deal with in wvw only. Distortion restoration - imagine if this never got removed from chrono and all efforts over the last few years were redirected to other improvements... Virtuoso distortion - let's just put it there because...? I thought the whole argument for chrono having F5 was to make up for only having an offhand weapon.

What the kitten. 3 lines of minor utility adjustments, and two bizarre changes - one a revert (oh yeah remember we got an extra Shatter in exchange for only getting an offhand weapon... could have just stayed like that and saved going round in circles), and the other I can't think of any words. I thought we were going for some attempt at differentiating elite spec F skills. Does nobody want to touch mirage? Will Star Citizen be finished and Half Life 3 be released before this happens? I hope there are more notes.

Ok "pve only"... So can we also finally get iMage down to like 20s in "pve only"? Surely a quick thing to do? Staff 3+4 welcome. Blink confusing, taking into account if traited plus alacrity. Mirage nerfs, not sure how chaos vortex nerf counterbalances 3+4 buff. Seems excessive, ok to encourage boon duration but I think too much swing. Axe, do not understand - it should be rewarding to play, already pulled teeth out when the power coefficients were nerfed...

I'll start by saying the contrast between this trait in pve and wvw (by extension pvp) is ridiculous. On one hand after the first activation in a fight it is effectively passive unreliable "luck", on the other hand it is truly perma reflect to the point where the constant activation sound effect pisses me off beyond belief. I don't know what's worse. One can't ignore the usefulness of the trait in pve but my god is it grating to hear going off all the time on every evade. People complain a lot about visual noise with flashing lights etc, and while on the whole this game's audio is great, similar issues with sound bother me just as much if not more. I mean, the trait is utterly stupid since the old nerf so should be replaced with something new anyway, but even making the reflect sound effect a bit less harsh, a bit softer and smoother would help a lot.

Yeah certainly would hope for more functionality changes, though the nature of the big patch makes me think nothing's significant is going to change for a long time (if ever sadly) so I'll take number changes at least. 🙂 Tbh iWarden could still do with improvement given how useless it becomes with more enemies around. Maybe the axe projectiles could prioritise current enemy target, maybe allies could get protection while standing in the bubble. Curtain should destroy projectiles as standard, so both focus skills have parity in this aspect. (On a separate personal note I hope one day iMage finally gets put on a 25s cool down after god knows how many years it should be.) But yes there will surely be some element of 1 step forward and 10 steps back nerfing everything around a problem before nerfing the problem itself. At least for mirage given the apparent disdain for axe and infatuation with staff, that series of builds may dodge a nerf. Though who knows, maybe scepter and GS ambush get nuked because the wiki implied they should.

5 trinkets are pve friendly, 4 of which are fairly straightforward (aurora, vision, ad infinitum, "free" amulet). Even coalescence looks more accessible with emboldened, and I believe given the transforming visual effect it's only a matter of time before a final pve ring appears to finish that off - maybe from strikes, maybe LW6. I'm personally holding off from conflux because I want to see what happens with the pve set first - ie if it becomes something like what the otter infusion does, but maybe a dragon.

This is a cool idea, certainly looks more fun than at present.

Core weapon buffs will be interesting, given comparison to ranger changes in this release.

A few fun times: - glamour mesmer - specialisations patch prior to HoT. - mirage on PoF launch, when despite the general power crept state of the game, you could play it more like thief porting all over the place thanks to low cooldowns etc. Granted many things were stupid (elusive mind...), but the general direction since then of forcing into a more dull ambush spam reliant on specific gimmicks is a shame.

1. Mirage regardless of state still most visually/aurally appealing. 2. There's so many would be difficult to like them all. 3. Yes I really would like a hammer mesmer, but given virtuoso has already filled some thoughts I had for that, now would be looking at heavy crowd control and support. We haven't had a 2H elite weapon yet, and already have sufficient ranged options but zero 2H melee. Unless they made the melee long/shortbow a reality (aoe/cone <600 range cc spec).

Yeah this is my issue also - one trick long duration invuln/evade which prevents buffs in other areas of the spec. And yes thematically it makes sense given chrono has the 1s distortion with CSplit, that mirage has 1s distortion (with ambush access) plus all clones becoming mirrors. BUT at the same time reduce Jaunt charge cooldown to 20s again, and potentially increase charges to 3 (may be too much though). Equally reduce Illusionary Ambush to 30s baseline, Sand through Glass back to 25 seconds. Of course buff Mirage Advance with eg 3/4s evade like axe 3 has. Then restore 2 dodges. So mirage would not have long duration distortion access and would need to be more aware of position to take advantage of chain evades via F4. Clone position as usual would be an issue so another possibility is on F4 to have all active clones first port to within 450 radius of player (random position like IA, maybe even detarget player) before turning into mirrors. Not great and yes using mirrors, but tbh I think reasonable in exchange for 2 dodges.

If pve mirage got normalised to 1 dodge there might be sufficient motivation to do something about the rest of the spec. But given how things have been going, I'd sooner expect GS ambush to have a 360 radius 5k aoe heal slapped on and turned into a healer... I agree with Waffles above best to hope is eg getting things like Jaunt charge cooldown restored along with other deception improvements that don't rely on alacrity to get "normal" cooldowns. Even 1s mirage cloak would be acceptable. Vindicator's existence makes it difficult to imagine Anet reverting this for mirage, though chrono self shatter did happen - but at a cost. On this note I would accept losing normal F4 for something different in exchange for getting 2 dodges back (and at the same time get rid of the signet/desert distortion nonsense that limits other changes from being made). Anyway, I put more faith in dropping a precursor from the next piece of unidentified gear.

I'm struggling to see the big picture. It would be ok if every couple of months but seems to slip back into massive hammer and then nothing for at least half a year. As others have mentioned, feels like going round in circles - ie glamours -> wells... But what about things like dagger skills having to manually rotate character to cast while stationary (when I think every other directional skill such as pistol 5 auto rotates character to face target while stationary). It does appear like being satisfactory is based purely on golem test. But fun/flavour/uniqueness doesn't get much of a look in. Edit - also senility as a name sounds meh, recall was cool. And stretched time as a name is equally meh.

I'm glad they ignored mirage this time around.

From an asura main perspective it seems kind of normal, the bookahs are catching up. 😛 Only thing I'm not keen on is the gaudy shade of green everywhere, when jade can be many colours. But then that's a subjective colour preference - much prefer purple/pink/blue.

HoT - gliding, elite specs, gen 2 legendaries introducted. PoF - mounts, more elite specs. EoD - antique summoning stones, affordable mystic coins, gen 3 legendaries introduced. So essentially gold and shinies... EDIT - ok mount energy booster and gliding booster are worth mentioning.

Thanks both. Yeah I also reached out to the shadow community and it does seem due to who they are being hosted by. I'll get in touch with shadow support to see if other possibilities exist in the future. Though oddly downloading the free to play launcher and then logging in on my account I can play the game itself. If that continues to work then all is good, can always access forums on phone etc.

Edit - game seems to work, can login and play so am happy with that at least. 🙂 ------- Is anyone currently able to play guild wars 2 on shadow? I've only started using shadow since a week and been unable to login to my gw2 account through it. I am using a samsung galaxy tab s7+, no vpn on the android side and able to login to the gw2 website through firefox on android no problem. Have the shadow app running alongside and unable to login to gw2 there. Following discussion with Anet support, I have just been told my login attempts through shadow are "coming from an ISP that is commonly used by VPN services and is a favorite of individuals who participate in malicious activity within our services. Unfortunately, we are unable to override this restriction. If you are attempting to access our services from this ISP, you will be unable to log in." I can understand this stance if it is seeing shadow's datacentre in this way, but a bit confused after reading reddit posts where people are able to play, and it sadly kind of limits things to geforce now or nothing - for the record geforce now works fine for me on the same device. Can this be resolved or is it impossible to play guild wars 2 on shadow now? I am also checking on their reddit and will be checking with their support. Would be a deal breaker for me as a major draw was to be able to play that on a tablet in addition to windows access - and the only other option would be to sell this device, buy a surface pro and use geforce now... (ideally not as prefer the writing experience on galaxy tabs for work). Would appreciate any feedback from people having tried this service recently.