godfat.2604

We used to have much less boon spam and much stronger boon strip, with slightly higher damage and worse healing, which was enough to kill a stack of zerg in under 5 seconds if they're standing on red circles, even with just target cap of 5 . Players will be dying fast enough to kill the next 5 targets, so I don't think target cap is an issue. I would welcome them to raise the target cap if it's feasible, but the thing is this usually creates a lot more computation (similar to collision) on the server, so I doubt their server can handle that. I think at this point we couldn't really point out a single reason why boon spam is such a big problem right now, because ANet kept making changes to make this worse, so all of them really added up. Just give a few examples: * Much stronger healing nowadays * Much more boons nowadays * Much less boon strips nowadays * Quite lower damages nowadays Given that it's clearly their intention to keep doing this, I suppose this is their intended gameplay, and we're just shouting to the void. I didn't enjoy pirate ship meta, but this is going to another extreme and it's ridiculously boring in a different level. I never thought the stupid ball meta can become reality.

Let's say I agree with this for now, I think a very important aspect is what your build does bring. I think for the most builds unless built to handle this in a very defensive or mobile or stealth way, there are too many more win buttons (as you called) which are almost the same. I am guessing your build has way more those escaping tools than most builds so you see a bigger difference. To me, there are just too many other ways to kill me, and this one isn't more deadlier than the others yet harder to pull, so it doesn't make sense to kill me this way.

As far as I can tell, the OP's argument is based on having a lot of stun breaks, CC chain is not really an issue because they can break stun multiple times. However being moa'ed will remove their stun breaks thus becoming an issue. I do see this difference however I don't think it's a big difference, comparing to like a long CC chain with 3+ CCs. This game has so many CCs that I see they're similar enough... and it's really not hard to chain many CCs either.

Here are my suggestions for Rifle skills based on general PvE and WvW experience: 1. Friendly Fire: Make it bounce between enemies and allies. Single target is a bit painful to use. 1.5. Effervescence (Ambush): Clones need to be able to heal, too. Add alacrity so we can pair it with Staff to finally escape from wielding staff twice. If we can update the trait so that any ambush can give alacrity, then instead of adding alacrity, change Mirage Mantle to give Superspeed instead of Fury. 2. Journey: I don't feel like spamming this skill especially when it's so slow. Make it instant cast and increase the cooldown to 8 seconds. Scale the numbers accordingly. This reduces clone generation but let's solve it with the Phantasm skill. Make it also apply swiftness because Mesmer is lacking means to apply swiftness. 3. Inspiring imagery: I like this skill. Happy to keep it as is. 4. Phantasmal Sharpshooter: This skill is so bad, so my suggestion is bigger. Having CC and dealing 0 damage in competitive modes is stupid. Move this CC to skill 5 Singularity Shot. Make it 2 ammo. Reduce cooldown to 15 seconds. Make it bounce between enemies and allies. Make it able to target allies (so we have a way to apply boons from Chronomancer without an enemy target). Apply barrier and resolution when hitting an ally. 5. Singularity Shot: I don't like that this skill does nothing when the singularity expires. Accidentally collapsing it will increase the cooldown, which feels like a punishment and that's a bad gameplay experience, too. Make it similar to Inspiring Imagery instead. If it expires, apply vigor and swiftness in the area. If we collapse it instead, in additional to creating a single use portal, stun enemies in the area (move CC from Phantasmal Sharpshooter to this skill), and also flip the skill once again. When the flipped skill is used, blink to the portal and remove it. This provides a delayed Blink for mobility on Rifle. Do not increase the cooldown when the portal or blink is used. We lose vigor and swiftness if we collapse it already (like we lose might and fury if we denote Inspiring Imagery early). If this is making Rifle overpowered, numbers can be tweaked accordingly. Some skills might be overloaded, and in that case we can remove or move some functionalities around.

I am indeed thinking that after the update, it can be possible that Chrono might be possible to replace Firebrand as the stability support. It's hard to really tell without testing, but it might be worth to try. For the sake of discussions, I am throwing up a quick draft: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?PiwAw63lVwcYUMLWJOuWttWA-z1IY1ol/M6WBkzUQjHiwsFeAA-w Considerations: * May consider using Focus with Warden's Feedback for pulling and more reflections. Losing staff isn't a big deal, I am just thinking that Chaos Storm and the new Chaos Armor might be useful. This might not play well with Tempest in the same party though. * Mantra of Resolve can be used for more condition cleanse. Or maybe Mantra of Pain for mights? Or Well of Action? From my experience it's almost impossible to enjoy the last pulse though, everyone is constantly moving after all. * Of course no boon strips at all in this fully defensive support build. Maybe Null Field can be counted as one, but it's nerfed once again (sigh) We can even consider core Mesmer, because having Illusion trait line can be useful to let us shatter more and Shatter Storm can give us 6 mights quickly. With Tides of Time and potentially also Well of Action, that's like 16 mights Empower at the beginning of fights: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PiwAw6ZlZw+YgML2Je0TerSA-DWJYjRHfZUdKkeFo7JAAA-w Considerations: * No more Gravity Well, but Time Warp isn't so bad now. No Continuum Split to double it, but that's what we need to sacrifice for reduced cooldown for Shatters. If Rifle can be a support weapon, it might be able to push Mesmer to be a real defensive support. Looking forward to close range healing shotgun.

I just hit into this. It's stuck and can never progress.

There are actually quite some exotic equipment which won't become soul bound even when equipped, beside Forgotten Seal which is indeed one. So the tech is there for a long time. I think this is a conscious decision made by Anet, which is pretty typical, forcing players to farm new contents as much as possible. I would love to see if they can change it because I also have a lot of toons and love to experiment, but it's not something I would have high hope. Edited: Guess I'll share one. If I remember correctly, this set won't soul bind: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lunatic_armor and this weapon: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dreambound_weapons and backpack: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sclerite_Karka_Shell

Thanks for the quotes. I admit I didn't pay full attention but I never noticed where they/them is used to refer to the commander, so I was wondering. Reading the quotes here I do remember! This completely slipped my mind because I was always playing the stories with my friends, and we have 3, so I just felt natural to be referred to "them" in this case. I didn't realize this is specifically referring to the commander :sweat-smile: Perhaps I am also very used to play RPGs where the main character has quite some companies to form a party. Even in Guild Wars 1 most of the missions are supposed to be played in a party as well. Maybe the other way for Anet to fix this is to give the commander a company. Probably too late for SotO but maybe consider that in the future story telling. There are so many ways to address this as a lot of people already suggested in this thread and other (deleted) threads.

I think that's the skill from Focus Phantasm: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Phantasmal_Warden Which casts: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Whirling_Defense_(phantasm)

Can we have a thread for the last balance patch as well? (Edited: I think for most of us, that's probably more important than upcoming new features) I know you're probably not going to read it, but I suppose one can hope, or at least make it more likely that you might try to read. (And act. Yeah just reading without actions is not very helpful)

I like this. This should make the DPS more consistent that allies applying random boons on our clones will affect less. I would want to keep the boon steal and apply the stolen boons to nearby allies as well. This will not make much difference in PvE but in competitive modes this can add interesting play. If it’s too strong again numbers can be tweaked, like gain reduced durations. I’ll prefer we remove alacrity from the staff so other weapons can have a chance. If that’s too much work I am ok if we just revert first. I don’t expect they would do anything though. The upcoming patch was supposed to fix all those… They’re probably not convinced it’s a problem to begin with obviously.

Yes, that’s why I mentioned you and hope this can give people some chance to read again what you said if they missed the point. I do not like the idea of mirror weapon though, unless you would also add some extra skills on top when this is equipped because I hate doubling the same weapon. This game gives us 2 weapons for a lot of reasons and double staves or double axes just take those away. Giving alacrity to staff and buff it to the roof so that even crippling ourselves by losing another set of weapon skills can still have advantages is the beginning of Mirage curse I would say. I hope we can end this for good and start properly balancing between all the weapons. It makes 0 sense that Mirage staff is so much stronger than Mirage scepter. The rest of your suggestions are not too exciting for me but they’re fine. That’s another proof that there are so many easy ways to fix it, if a bigger rework is not on the table. Heck. Their broken “fixes” even took more work for no good reasons.

You don’t have to. Add traits that add more damage (on ambush or not), competing with other traits that add supports (on ambush or not). Keep in mind that all numbers can be tweaked. This is sorta the rework I was mentioning, that we change what ambush does and one important thing you’re probably missing here is, support also needs to have DPS that Valfore keeps talking about. There are two kinds of support, one does still need to have good DPS, and the other should be able to heal. Mesmer in general can’t heal, thus to support it also needs to provide good DPS, which you’re going to miss a lot by lacking Infinite Horizon unless you’re also adding a ton of DPS on the support trait you’re adding to compete with Infinite Horizon. I am not really against this but it’ll be odd and it’ll also lose the iconic Infinite Horizon which makes it less feeling like a Mirage.

I am convinced a few years ago that Infinite Horizon should be made baseline like Illusionary Persona, otherwise there’s no way to make something competing with it and still balanced. Unless they want to rework how clones and ambush works, and now I don’t see they’re up to any rework anymore… There are tons of ways to fix this, and yet they refuse to do any of them, just keep on breaking it over and over… This is so hopeless and I am amazed I quit the game due to bad balance once again.

They said they were banned, and I guess only temporarily because later on they used the main account to comment for a few times more, and then stopped and turned to this alt account again.

I don’t understand why we need to go through this again, nerfing unpopular Mirage only because it’s strong in only a few PvE raid encounters. Or benchmarks. I thought we had already convinced them they should not balance around that, and I guess I was wrong, they’ll never change. At this point I think I am giving up. Why bother… It’s ok, I am playing some other games now. Of course they also conveniently forgot about Mirage having only a single dodge in competitive modes.

There used to have a trait similar to that, introduced on 2015-06-23 and removed on 2018-02-06 (earliest version in this page): https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Protected_Phantasms/history (I can't recall prior to that) 1 second is likely not enough to fully finish their attacks, but it's still something. Of course, even with that Mesmer back then was still just a Veil or Portal bot. After it's nerfed into Aegis then it's completely useless in large scale, and now we don't even have Aegis for Phantasms. Similarly, Ranger pets and Renegade Kalla summons all have the same issue. I doubt Anet would ever care to address it. I do welcome surprises though, for sure.

I do not think this will work in large scale because as far as I know, if phantasms cannot complete their attacks, they cannot be converted into clones thus cannot be converted into blades, and of course phantasms die under 0.5 seconds before they can even start performing their attacks in large scale. It might work in smaller scale though. Yeah, I think the balance is pretty unbalanced that it's clearly balanced around PvE and they just let the balance of the rest rot. The other way to slightly improve blade generations might be changing Psychic Riposte to generate 2 blades at a time, and reduce cooldown to 1.5 seconds. This will make it generate 4 blades every 3 seconds, slightly more than the current 3 blades every 3 seconds, at the cost of relying more on evading and/or blocking.

Glad that you like it. I played Berserker a bit and it’s really not my taste. Very boring to me. Comparing to Virtuoso, I need to react much faster which is more fun to me. Rain of Sword is not good in small scale, so replacing it makes sense to me. When I was playing in smaller scale, Rain of Sword was mostly used on cleaving the down, because they can’t move. For stocking blades, Psychic Riposte should be the main source. I don’t think anything else will work at all. You certainly need the unblockable effects as well. This is something that I think Anet should tweak. For example, doubling clones/blades generated from the weapons, and dagger is like it’ll never hit, which needs rework. I still run dagger but use it at point blank, or again, cleaving down. You can also consider sword which gives you a leap, useful for mobility.

Ok, I suppose that makes sense. Sounds like it’ll be harder than the story mode, if there’s any…

It’s a bummer that it didn’t get renamed to Happy Cloud mode. That’s always been what I was/am calling it. We talk to the happy cloud to get into the happy cloud mode, yes? Exploration mode is so boring. It says nothing.

I assume this is talking about WvW group play since Chronomancer with a shield is mentioned, which is the only build commonly recommended for WvW group play, even when it's more a niche that we won't want to have too many in a squad. I believe so far the only other option is glass cannon Virtuoso, which I have been playing for quite some time now. This is the build I am running with: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?PiwAEh3llyWZWMVmLOOLZRLA-z1QYhom2DaHio3BpZIUPBqUBmOABsHeAA-w Mantra of Concentration can be swapped for something else if you got enough stability support in your party. After Mantra got reverted back to be able to charge, this is a powerful stability skill with 15 seconds cooldown. Note that the tooltip for Power Break is wrong. Instead of granting 3 stacks, it's actually granting 5 stacks. Anet forgot they buffed it before in WvW. My overall conclusion about Virtuoso is that, after they fixed Psychic Riposte, it becomes good from being just viable. I can much more reliably hit with Bladesong Harmony and Bladesong Sorrow. The burst if done right is pretty good, at the same time stripping quite a lot of boons. It's not at the level of Scourge or Spellbreaker, but Virtuoso's damage is much higher than Scourge now, not to mention it's mostly strong burst. The weakness beside susceptible to conditions is, it doesn't have good melee cleave. If the squad is melee heavy, other classes might work better. This is more or less a pirate ship build.

General speaking, the most optimal party is 3 DPS, 1 Quickness and 1 Alacrity, and one of the boon providers will be hybrid DPS, and the other is hybrid Healing. Alacrity Mirage can do good damage, so it’ll pair with a Quickness Heal. Quickness Chrono can also do ok damage, so it’ll pair with a Alacrity Heal. However, Alacrity Chrono can’t really do good damage, nor heal, thus it’s less desired. Depending on what instance you’re playing, this can be fine.

They likely forgot to also revert the tooltip: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Restorative_Mantras/history It was "Heals allies around you when you finish preparing a Mantra." Or maybe they totally forgot that there's a difference and just blindly reverted to the previous code. I don't know, this kind of obvious errors should be easily spotted if one ever tries to use and see if it's working... However I hope they don't just fix the tooltip, because it's really not very useful if it's after preparation. I would love to have 3 charges, if they can be generous. We can either add it to Restorative Mantra, or remove another useless traits which we have a lot, and add Harmonious Mantras back: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Harmonious_Mantras I think that's what you're referring to? I don't think we ever had 5 charges, but this did give a damage buff which can stack up to 5 times. Honestly this won't be my priority (not something we're really missing or need right now), but I do welcome it.

For context, I am thinking in PvE and WvW below. I am not happy with this revert. I am talking about now that Restorative Mantra is back to be triggered after preparation, rather than on spending charges. I think their logic is, One preparation has 2 charges, if they remove preparation, and trigger this on spending charges, it should have 50% effectiveness so 2 charges will be the same as triggering once after preparation. In short, it's 100% effectiveness when it's after preparation, and (100% / N) effectiveness where N is the number of charges when it's on spending charges. If we only talk about the total output, it's the same, however we lost flexibility now. I never liked the old Restorative Mantra because 2.25+ seconds delay for healing the allies (for self it's relatively ok) is just way too slow. For healing, I think we either need to have quick burst healing, or good sustain pulsing healing. When Restorative Mantra was on spending charges, we can easily burst healing for quite a lot if we have quite some charges on hands. Now it's just impossible to burst any healing. Even if we constantly prepare Mantra of Pain, it takes 2.25 + 1 + 1 => 4.25 seconds for each cycle, and we likely can't do much else due to channeling. Plus, we now need a target to get rid of charges for Mantra of Pain! (Power Spike). It's like the nightmare that clones are fully relying on targets coming to Mantra now, except this time it's that we cannot get rid of them without a target. How do I suppose to prepare Mantra of Pain at the start of the battle if I can't get rid of it before the start of battle? I suppose I have to change the skill to get rid of it... My proposal: * Make Restorative Mantra triggers on spending charges, just like a patch before this. I welcome that we also trigger this after preparation, then it would be 3 times for each cycle. * Nerf the coefficient accordingly would be fine, like, 50%, just like a patch before this. To be fully clear, this proposal is a package, if Anet want to take the nerf, they also need to take the first buff.