Fray.3417

First of all, thank you for testing out the theoretical changes on current patch at the DPS dummy. However, I think that your analysis and conclusions are at best flawed and at worst fundamentally misleading for the following reasons: The current "proper" rotation does not simply camp staff without ever swapping back to axe after you get your clones out. When you categorise DPS tests as "Axe with 2 staff and 1 axe clone average" I have a strong impression that your test design is that you summoned your clones and then did autos with ambushes on cooldown. This is simply not how either of the specs are currently played. For example, axe clones also contribute another hit of confusion to Axe 3. Even at the most basic level of the rotation you do Staff 5 -> swap -> Pistol 4 with Shatter F2/F1 -> Axe2+Jaunt -> Axe2+Jaunt. You are swapping between Staff and Axe sets constantly and camping neither. The camping playstyle simply underperforms versus actively rotating your weapon skills and shatters. Phantasmal Duellist is an integral part of the Axe phase rotation, you are often taking taking Signet of the Ether for another pDuellist cast within lesser chaos storm, so you can even end up summoning 3 pDuellists in your axe phase. Stripping down to only auto+ambush and drawing a conclusion from those numbers as "a small dps loss if you still want to hit 50% alac uptime" is incorrect and nobody would be playing the build like that in practice without extreme DPS loss. You can't really "hack" your clones because Pistol 4 (phantasm), and to a lesser degree Axe 2 (Lingering Thoughts) inside ethereal fields, are integral parts of the axe rotation and to keep your staff clones you're not allowed to press those buttons. The current version of the build only keeps axe clones as much as possible because Staff 2 and 3 (Phase Retreat and Phantasmal Warlock) are not useful for DPS / Alacrity purposes. Clones die to random stuff all the time. You can't really model your "small dps loss" on the basis that you can keep clones out forever in a particular configuration of your choosing. The whole design of the class throughout the years has been that you should be actively shattering from time to time. Even Staff/Staff Mirage actively shatters when you have Phantasmal Warlock + Phase Retreat back up to shatter for damage then immediately get 3 clones back up again. Currently you can do that no problem, because if your clones die again before your next pWarlock / Phase Retreat, it doesn't destroy your 100% Alacrity uptime because it's independent from clones. The bulk of the ambush value is on the player, not the clones, with every other weapon. If they release this change, then if your clones die on Staff/Staff before your Warlock comes off cooldown then your Alacrity uptime suffers - you'd basically have to take Self-Deception to have a backup to generate clones with Deception utility skills. This encourages players to have the more passive playstyle of not shattering ever just in case you lose clones. This isn't even talking about multi-phase / adds-phase situations where kitten dies so quickly that you can easily end up doing a 1 alacrity ambush instead of a theoretical 3 clone one. Why would you ever take this risky spec over a safer alacrity renegade for your alacrity uptime? You wouldn't, so mesmer mains just get shafted. I see that you got a number of positive reactions to your post, but I think that you are ignoring the details of how either Staxe or Staff/Staff builds are played in reality and dismissing this as a "small dps loss" is unhealthy and misguided.

The problem with the staff ambush changes are that it just makes the weapon more unfun to play. It feels like having staff/staff full alacrity, axe/axe full DPS and staff/axe doing less alacrity than the former and less DPS than the latter was a healthy set of options. PUGs in the raid finder generally only allow for full alacrity role or full DPS role, so it’s destroying the “jack of all trades” option for mirage and only letting us have 2 PVE builds - both of which only let you have one mainhand weapon so you don’t get to enjoy weapon diversity. Why kill build variety like this when Staxe is already a rare sight anyway and shaft an interesting hybrid build? Now staff ambush will be worthless without 3 staff clones up. At least with other weapons’ ambushes, even with the mandatory-in-PVE Infinite Horizon trait, the bulk of the ambush value is coming from the player directly and any extra clone chip damage is extra icing on the cake. Tying so much of the ambush value into clone uptime in a climate where clones can die so easily to AoE cleave devalues angry mirage build using staff other than that one staff/staff alacrity build. Awful for the health of the class.

Anet, could you please not randomly delete Staxe mirage ("staff/axe")? It's one of the most interesting mesmer builds in a long time and basically reactivated my interest in the game. Is Staxe really such a common pick that it needs to be removed from the game? That's what this change does. No one will play Staxe over regular alacrity staff/staff and regular DPS axe/axe. Why do you want to delete this from the game when it's finally an interesting build for mesmer?