Micah.3789

I agree, and think this would be the healthiest design. They could even have the clones switch targets based on your attacks like other pets. Rather than make it strictly combat based, they could just keep the current effect that causes them to self-destroy when they fail to damage a target for an extended period of time. It would achieve a similar effect, but with less programming changes and we'd be able to carry clones through to new engagements if we were fast enough.

That doesn't really seem like a fair response to my comment, but I'll answer anyway. Damage output is balanced around golem benchmark numbers which is especially inequitable for slow ramp builds. The disparity is seen in most wingman boss logs. To be clear, the goal of my change wasn't to add burst damage, that was just an agreeable benefit. Mirage, especially with staff, actually applies a significant amount of confusion. It's just severely outclassed by torment and so does less of the overall damage. That's kind of the point. You seem to be ignoring my actual stated intention and project instead that I'm trying to fix a build. Confusion was a highly variable condition that overperformed at its best and was almost inconsequential at its worst. The solution we got was uninspired and resulted in a significant potency loss across the board. I had a creative idea that I think would have been better: it maintains the theme and flavor of confusion while making it more consistent without being overly conservative with its potency. Unacceptable may be a bit strong, but massive variability in performance is unhealthy for balance. It's unfortunate that isn't applied to all builds equally. 🙃

To be clear, my suggestion fully maintains confusion's function as a damage over time condition. In fact that damage should be buffed to be in line with bleed or poison. It's just the trigger that would change. On skill activation it would still do flat damage, but instead of being a unique effect, it would just consume an already applied stack of confusion and do its remaining damage instantly. Another option would be to have the trigger consume 1 sec of each stack of confusion instantly. So basically, all confusion stack timers would roll forward an extra second and do all that damage immediately. Neither of these options could be broken/OP unless the base condition scaling was too high. The overall (benchmark) damage would be identical regardless of trigger frequency, while the potential burst would still be way worse than just being power dps. It would be a lot easier to balance as well.

I've made my point on the actual topic clearly in my first comment on this post. I'll leave it at that and stop engaging with this drama.

This is a strawman to try to justify your stubborn rejection of the criticism. I've reread OP's posts and they clearly state they're struggling with being propelled into danger by forced movement pursuing a target, not failing to hit. I play them as well, and can very skillfully manage their behavior. I can also recognize that isn't desirable or healthy design, though. It seems you have a vested interest in continuing to push this as exclusively a skill issue. I suspect you get some degree of ego out of your ability to cope with poor design. So, dogging on others and arguing that this is good design simultaneously signals your skill and superiority. You're being obtuse and misunderstanding to justify your condescension. Forced movement as it exists now IS aim assist: tracking and pursuing targets with no additional input from you. The issue (as stated by OP as well) is that this sometimes forces you into danger which you can only mitigate by not using the skill at all. This maintains low input skill aiming and movement at the cost of more precise skill expression.

While it's clear by the exaggerations and melodrama that OP is likely lacking the skill to effectively cope with forced movement issues, that doesn't invalidate their complaint. I'm not pretending anything. I'm choosing not to focus on OP's credibility, and am instead addressing the complaint itself in good faith. OP specifically suggested more control over movement that is otherwise unwieldy. I agree and note that this would remove auto-aiming features of these skills which would make them harder to land, but smoother to use. It's embarrassing that anyone is taking this as an opportunity to dog on someone, even if it means arguing in bad faith that compensating for janky forced movement is healthy skillful gameplay. Like, can we move on from the fact that OP was raging a bit and just discuss this reasonably?

Removing automated movement/aim is the exact opposite of reducing the skill level. In fact, it would further widen the skill gap. Unskilled players would be missing constantly without assisted aim forced movement, while skilled players would be able to control their characters with finesse.

Confusion is a problematic condition to balance considering the incredible variability in trigger frequency depending on the content. My suggestion seeks to remove that inconsistency entirely while maintaining the theme of the condition. I suggest replacing the flat damage on skill activation with an effect that instead consumes one stack of confusion and deals its remaining damage immediately. This way, there's no variable extra damage. You're just getting the same damage faster. The base damage scaling could then be improved to be more in line with other conditions (probably match poison). Confusion would keep its skill activation punishment theme while gaining reliability across the board, without risking the encounter-specific overperformance we've seen in the past. The improved burst functionality of this design could even slightly improve the slow ramp time of builds like mirage, which is otherwise a serious pain point. It won't solve that problem completely, but it could help.

I'm really glad they're moving away from such extreme performance swings. I like staying on a character I'm invested in no matter what content I'm doing, rather than switch to whatever is massively overperforming in that specific encounter. I just wish that was implemented fairly. I do, however, agree that they overcorrected with mirage rendering it bad to mediocre across the board. Rather than returning its skewed strengths, I'd like to see its consistency improved. Speeding up the ramp up time would be a great place to start. A little exaggerated, but I agree that confusion is a problem. Punishing targets with damage for activating skills was a bad design choice in the first place. In competitive modes you deny your own damage by controlling your target. In all modes, you're dependent on the target to interact with your mechanic instead of having the control to proc it yourself, which leads to VERY inconsistent output (usually very low). IF they wanted to keep the design it should be balanced like torment: does good damage baseline, but does great damage when conditions are met. Instead of being a flat amount that activates per proc, it could be a boost to the tick damage within a small window after activating a skill.

Ground targeting would fix precisely that. Instead of following the moving target unpredictably, you'd land in precisely the place you intended to. You just might miss the moving target, which would be the likely complaint if they did implement something like this. Then the question is what Anet's priority would be: letting players control their characters more freely or keeping movement skills as automated as possible to avoid skill-based failure.

That has to be me. 😘

My goodness there's a lack of critical thinking in this thread. I read the title as "Remove Forced Movement from the Game" which seems to be intended based on the OP's elaborations, and yet most of these bad faith arguments seem to be responding as though it was "Remove Movement from the Game" period. Movement is of course super useful and often worth losing control of your character, but it doesn't feel great and can sometimes be excessively risky. So why not keep movement, but give some control back to the player? As far as OP's suggestions for fixes, I don't actually like any of them, but I do have my own. More directional movement skills could use ground targeting arrows or circles instead of being locked to target or facing. The arrow could be modified to stretch to the desired distance much like placing a circular ground target at a desired range. The arrow would max out based on the range of the skill so you could move anywhere up to that amount, including staying in place.

It's pretty clear you feel that your reason and critical thinking are superior to your audience, but then you ignorantly use benchmarks to validate damage and refute complaints about desirability? Take a look at wingman to see how mirage is actually performing. On a handful of golem-like fights it's around the bottom-middle of all especs, but then on nearly all the others it's on the bottom by a very wide margin. Some fights it's even below core classes. The only exception is Soulless Horror, where mirage in near the top by a very small margin due to favorable mechanics. Mirage's forced movement and lack of sustain/utility makes it more of a liability in instanced PvE compared to other classes. For skilled players, the extra dodges are little more than a convenience and cushion for mistakes. It's outclassed by CVirt's damage to healing conversion trait in instanced content, where weathering inevitable damage is more functional than having excessive dodges available for relevant mechanics. Based on performance and playability, mirage should be a higher priority for dev attention. It's evident based on history that they are either too incompetent or apathetic to even predict how their changes will affect the spec. Based on changes we've recently seen, they seem content to just keep slapping mirage down on the benchmarks without any semblance of a direction to address its functional issues. That perceived neglect has lead to a reasonably emotional public outcry. You're using the handful of people that overreact as examples to virtue signal and validate your pseudo intellectualism even though...

Mirage has very few benefits over the other Especs, and they're usually not very relevant to instanced PvE. Mostly, it has very good damage mitigation through regular evasion and it has pretty great mobility. Alac mirage also provides a massive amount of might, easily maintaining 25 stacks by itself, but that's pretty redundant with most healers. Really, the only unique strength I've found in mirage is the ability to maintain support and some damage simultaneously. That makes it a pretty excellent celestial hybrid healer. Problem is, the playstyle is VERY high intensity. So high in fact, that the build is relegated to non-meta obscurity due to low accessibility. Though for me, nothing in the game performs better as a boonhealer. Healing just a bit less than good meta healers while doing about 60% of a boondps' damage is an incredible way to ensure smoother encounters, especially while you're personally evading 50% of the time. You won't find a build posted anywhere, as I might be the only one playing it lol. Hit me up if you want to try it. I could even do a separate post if people are interested.

Ok. Seriously, last response from me on this. If you don't understand after this, I can only assume you're being intentionally obtuse. They were all expressly golem numbers, including my approximation of your build's upper limit. That's the fair way to evaluate builds. Actual encounters have too many variables to be dependable for statistics. Unless your whole team is experts, output will vary dramatically as you have to adapt and react to failures. Besides that, the encounter mechanics themselves also impact performance, though it's usually directly in measure to benchmark potential with some exceptions. Your ignorance and lack of competence is evident in that comment. You've never been in a group where people did benchmark numbers and are in disbelief that it's doable outside of extreme circumstances, and yet you feel qualified to debate build potential. Again, you're deluding yourself. Your skill is, in fact, the issue. You aren't able to express a build's full potential and therefore don't have the perspective to rationally evaluate a build you've made yourself. I'm seriously not trying to gatekeep or anything like that. I wish more people DID explore build craft, but not with this kind of pathological hubris. Build craft or even just constructive build discussion requires objectivity, which you clearly lack.