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.

I don't want to keep derailing this post, but a <10k dps bench is no where close to being a boondps. The builds I'm suggesting all can do around 24-28k dps which is just a little shy of the typical 32-36k that meta boondps builds typically do. Plus they'll do similar healing to your build If you're going to publicly theory craft and make build suggestions, you really should have more integrity about it. Ignorant or not, misusing build terms and making disingenuous claims muddies the water for those of us who want to have competent discussions and you may even mislead some of those less knowledgeable.

I see. So when you know you won't need much healing, you try to bring a bit more damage. Still, in that scenario you'd be better off with a boondps bringing a bit of healing than trying to squeak out more damage on an otherwise full healer. If you're interested in boondps that can bring enough healing for low pressure content I can think of a few that might be more effective. Off the top of my head: Alac specter with wells and scepter. Take traversing dusk and spam scepter/pistol 3 for damage/healing. Typical scepter/dagger when healing isn't needed. Pwr quick untamed with maces and nature magic/spirits. Pwr alac willbender with hammer and glacial heart. Even better with relic of karakosa. Pwr alac mechanist with med kit for emergencies. Pwr quick scapper with relic of karakosa. Med kit for emergencies. There are possibly more, but in all these cases the build makes very minor sacrifices compared to typical boondps to gain significant healing and support functions. They're also all on the higher end for might generation which is important if you don't take a typical healer.

I'm all for breaking away from the meta, but that approach would do less than 1/3rd the healing and damage of the respective meta chrono builds. Plus, it would have much less reliable boons than the heal build. I'm not trying to play build police here, but you'd be intentionally choosing a playstyle that significantly lacks potency. For perspective, I calculated the maximum possible healing your build could do assuming no over-healing and perfectly utilized CDs and got ~1,600 hps per person. That may seem decent without a basis for comparison, but I did the same calculation for my celestial hybrid mirage and got ~3100 hps per person. To be clear, this is purely theoretical max healing which isn't realistic, but it does give us an objective statistic to gauge relative potency. At barely more than half the healing of a hybrid healer, your build will often be a liability to your party unless others compensate and sacrifice their own potential. Ok, but maybe the damage gained could justify the sacrifices. Again for perspective, my build has a 15k dps bench while full healing, and technically does a bit more in real combat with confusion. Your build wouldn't get much over 10k dps even if you sacrificed even more boons/support by taking a dps trait line. I can see how you might technically have some success in low pressure encounters, but it's disingenuous to suggest this is a reasonably effective build option. If you don't believe me, test it out on the golem with at least moderate damage turned on. Better yet, take it into a boneskinner pug and come back with a log of how it went.

Just for clarity: When I said "hybrid" vs. "pure healing" I'm referring to damage/heal hybrid. As you mentioned, the PvE meta assumes that any healer is bringing either alac or quick and that goes for "hybrid" healers too. That's not quite what I meant. What I said was specifically in reference to someone who wanted to take a rifle on mirage healer, which is ill advised. But you're implying that mesmer can't heal without rifle, which is objectively false. There is a mirage healer build (staff x2), but it's not posted for the same reason there isn't an alacdps mirage on snowcrows right now: it's outshined by other builds without a redeeming quality that the meta favors. The damage potential, and therefore massive overall potency, could be considered a redeeming quality, but most community heal builds push maximum healing potency even when it's beyond redundant to the point of being wasteful. It's also important to remember that community posted builds are not exhaustive. Builds are posted because someone cared to make it for their own personal reasons. Many potentially useful builds are left unexplored simply because they have no sponsor. I could certainly post a celestial hybrid heal mirage build, as it is incredibly potent to the point of carrying others, but I've determined that the skill floor is simply to high to be of value to the general community. So I instead share my knowledge more directly with those who are interested.

I don't use rifle at all so I don't have experience with the ambush. In my opinion it's ridiculous to even try. Mirage is inferior to chrono as a healer in almost every way except for one major exception: it can do substantial damage while still providing full support. If you wanted to use rifle and heal as a mirage you'd still have to take staff as well to provide alacrity. To have any hope of maintaining it, you'd need to swap on CD and maximize concentration/BD. If you do all that you lose out on mirage's damage potential and just end up with a significantly worse and harder version of heal chrono. It would be technically manageable, but would be pretty painful to play. Instead, I play with staff x2 to comfortably maintain alacrity even in celestial gear. The healing from trait synergies alone is more than enough for any PvE content in the game even with this lower healing power. In fact, it's pretty comparable to some of the more modest output meta healers, except that it's all PBAoE healing. It's a pretty sweaty rotation and requires a very solid understanding of all your procs and synergies, but it can provide full support while still benching 15-18k dps depending on the exact loadout. That's the only way I see mirage heal actually being a consideration. Alacrity on all ambush skills would completely fix this problem, but until then I wouldn't entertain a pure healing (non-hybrid) mirage healer.

Your own logs will be skewed by your rotation preferences. To be clear, I'm not saying regen CAN'T do significant amounts of your healing. I'm saying that if you're letting it, you aren't actively using your other heals effectively. Technically speaking, you could heal some content with no other healing but regen, but it would be very uncomfortable and force your group to play more defensively. Simply put, the more you rely on regen, the less safety you're actually providing. Again, I'm not claiming it can't do more than 10-15% of your overall healing. I'm suggesting that if it's doing more than that for you, you're likely not utilizing your other heals effectively. To prove my point I'll list the hps values of some of the more common chrono heal skills compared to regen. The values listed are per person. For skills, it's assumed they're being used on CD which of course is just the maximum possible, but not completely realistic. Similarly, the value for regen assumes all ticks are received at full value which is even less realistic. I'm using full minstrel for these calculations, so 1572 healing power and 35% outgoing healing modifier. Regeneration: 440 hps Friendly Fire: 1,725 hps Journey: 905 hps Abstraction (Inspiring Imagery): 681 hps These are just the rifle skills since mantra, clone, and shatter healing have highly variable CDs. They do contribute massive amounts of healing, though; If you use Mantra of Recovery on CD with the charges as I do, you'd generate a total of 18,825 healing between the mantra itself and the procs of Restorative Mantra x4, Illusionary Inspiration x3 (with Ego Restoration), and the Relic of the Flock. That's 18,825 about every 10s. That alone is potentially 1,882 hps and much more reliable than regen. Regen's potential is clearly dwarfed by other sources of healing. If it's doing... ... then you aren't pressing your buttons.

This is just not true. Regen is at most 25% of a healer's potential hps (assuming max bonuses to regen potency) and that would require every single tick getting full effect. Realistically, if regen is doing more than 10-15% of your healing, you aren't giving enough input and your group is spending too much time in an unhealthy state. If regen were actually so powerful, Relic of Dwayna would be the default on every healer, but as you mentioned yourself, it's not. Perhaps you're looking at the overall healing in the tooltip instead of considering the actual healing per tick? Regen is easily overcapped and pretty much never actually generates the healing indicated in the tooltip. While it's true that most content is pretty laid back in terms of healing, there are absolutely encounters with more intensity. Maybe "oh crap button" isn't the most accurate term, but high volume responsive healing is required (or at least preferred) for quite a few encounters. First, "res skills" are very much a crutch and aren't really a factor for healing builds except when trying to carry players or compensate for not healing. That said, chrono has enough healing to forgo Restorative Mantras and instead take Medic's Feedback to turn it into a revive. Additionally, rifle healing can revive allies when targeting them and barrier can prevent bleed out. As for alacrity, are you alac healing or referring to the self alacrity from Flow of Time? If the latter, you should be getting enough from your alacdps combined with your occasional shatters. If you're alac healing, you can rely significantly on phantasms for your quick/alac generation. Skills like Phantasmal Warlock (staff) even produce two. Just like any other class, chrono isn't going to be the stand out choice for everything, but it does have its strengths. For starters, it has incredible utility tools: portal, reflect dome, mass invisibility, and incredible cc. Combine that with a potent spread of support effects like aegis, stability, and incredible condi cleansing to rival even Healbrand. To top it all off, heal potency to rival even druid. Simply put, chrono is the all rounder. It's not bad at anything except maintaining boons without a target, and it's very good at everything else. It can even swap between quick/alac! It's really the only healer that can comfortably be used in any PvE content, but it's not necessarily claiming the title of "best" in any in particular.

Mesmer healing potency is possibly the highest in the game right now, but it's spread between a multitude of small procs and skills. You have to really understand where all your healing is coming from and how to time it which requires a lot of thought and input. Compare that to something like warrior or druid where it's mostly directly responsive skills; you press the big button, you get the big heal. I main a heal mirage and use 2x staff and celestial gear, but I still have no problem healing BS or VG. So certainly a chrono with rifle and heal stats should be a breeze. Oh and you shouldn't directly compare weapons on different classes. Warrior has pretty poor healing without staff, whereas mesmer can heal VERY well without rifle. So if rifle was comparably powerful, the whole mesmer heal kit would be overtuned. Beat me to it, but I have a bit to add. If you full cast Mantra of Recovery, immediately burn all its charges and synchronize with other instant cast heals, you can generate absolutely massive burst. I'll use VG as an example (cele/trapper mirage heal): I'll start casting MoRecovery when I see the green circle getting tight and shatter just after the attack goes off, but before I'm finished casting (don't want to waste clones). After MoRecovery, I'll cast Phantasmal Warlock while burning its charges and MoPain's as well. After the last MoRecovery charge, shatter again right after with full clones. So that's MoRecovery, a Flock proc, 2x shatters, 5x illusions, and 6x restorative mantras. So, within 1-2s of the green detonation, I'm doing a total of 22,544 outgoing healing even with only 739 healing power. And that WHOLE thing can be done again every 10s! Imagine running actual healing stats AND having rifle to follow up with. Point is, if anyone feels that chrono (mesmer) healing is too low, it's certainly just a skill issue. Though an understandable one, because it does have a much higher skill floor than most other healers.

This is definitely the better choice statistically if you're attached to rifle chrono specifically. If you take more healing/support traits and skills, the damage suffers entirely too much; like even worse than celestial hybrid healers. With pure damage stats, all those support choices lack potency as well. So basically, all the synergies just fall flat and you end up with significantly less overall potency which defeats the purpose of hybridizing in the first place. If you really want to play a chrono with some hybrid potential, celestial stats with scepter and staff would be a lot more potent in both damage and healing. It would be mostly condi damage though, and would probably be a bit weaker than mirage. Would be easier to play though. Then you could make use of Chaos' condi damage and boon support traits simultaneously.

If they decoupled Alacrity from clones and therefore Infinite Horizons, it would be even better for heal Mirage. Then we might be able to generate enough alacrity in a single staff to comfortably allow for a secondary weapon like rifle.