godfat.2604

Tooltip for Mantra of Concentration / Power Break in WvW is wrong, and it's a joke that preparation stability (4 stacks, Mantra of Concentration) is less than spending a charge (5 stacks, Power Break. Tooltip shows 3 but it's 5). I think they forgot they buffed Power Break in WvW, and didn't buff Mantra of Concentration accordingly, and somehow the tooltip is also wrong. To be clear, I am expecting them to: * Fix tooltip * Buff Mantra of Concentration so it's at least the same as Power Break in WvW I do not expect them to nerf Power Break based on the incorrect tooltip. I think the tooltip is incorrect because it's exactly 5 stacks before this patch.

It’s just my guess, but I assume what this means is that Solar and CMC shared much different ideas about what is a good player experience, and this change was probably also quite controversial within the balance “team”. I feel very complicated, because I did love the old mantra and I also miss the 600 toughness to tank damage while chanting, however on the other hand, I do agree it’s more complex gameplay and can be annoying to use. What I am certain is, it was a giant nerf to remove preparing effects, and I am very happy to be “buffed” by getting that back, as well as some group effects we don’t have back then. I would be also fine if they just buff mantras without getting preparation back. It’s just so freaking weaker comparing to Firebrand mantra that I am really unhappy about. On the other hand, I am also quite fed up with the spamming everything gameplay they had introduced over the years, and mantra without preparation certainly contributed to that, too. So while this is sort of a silly revert, I do think it’s in the right direction. We can see how to fix the clunkiness next, and I do see people are already suggesting that. (Like, make it less likely to accidentally use the last charge, or somehow still make it auto-charge when it’s not prepared) Lastly, mandatory to request mirage 2nd dodge! 😛

If we put all 9*3 => 27 specializations out there excluding core (which is inherited weaker anyway), Mirage might not be at the bottom in WvW roaming, because it's a Mesmer after all, and Mesmer is the better roaming class to begin with, even when it's weaker than Thief. From that perspective, of course it won't be the worst, but still certainly not dominating, and if we only compare with roaming classes, Mirage is still below average I would say. This is also excluding the idea of one trick meme pony that can kill unexperienced players easily, which can easily happen on Mesmer, and can't easily go further than that. All that being said, I don't even care if Mirage is stronger or weaker comparing to other roaming classes. Having only one dodge in 2/3 of the game modes, is inherited broken in my book. Make this consistent first, and we can talk about how to make it more balanced. Not sure why this is hard to understand for some people. Maybe they don't play PvE, or don't play competitive modes, or just don't care enough because they don't play Mesmer often enough to feel the inconsistency, or simply don't care being treated in an unfair way. I do see some people only care about being strong or weak, and don't really care about designs at all. In that case, I am afraid we'll just have to talk past each others :shrug:

An Untamed main said so.

Latency is a real thing, hard limited by the speed of light. This is not sci-fi. The longest distance on Earth is on the other side of the globe, which takes 67ms for the light to travel. We measure ping by round trip, so the minimal ping in theory for the furthest region from the server is 134ms. That's only counting for the speed of light, without counting everything else to convert and transmit and correct the signals. My ping to NA servers in PvE is about 200ms ~ 250ms, and in WvW about 250ms ~ 350ms (not sure why there's such big difference when there are a lot of players). I seemed to recall that to EU it's 300+ms in PvE, so I disregarded that quickly. That's 10 years ago, might be different now but I didn't bother to check. It makes much less difference in PvE, but in competitive mode with this ping I have huge disadvantage against a low ping player. Watching videos can clearly see that. There's no way I can chain skills like that, and it does show looking at the DPS meter. I can't really measure what is equal skills, but I will guess with equal skills, in large scale WvW fights, a low ping player can do about 1.2x ~ 1.5x DPS comparing to a high ping player, based on my experience. I envy people who can break stun while being pulled in half way. That's impossible for me. At the time I see I am pulled, I am already pulled, and probably also dead. Too often I cast Distortion, which is an instant skill, it did not trigger and then I was dead. I was reading the fights in the past 300ms after all. I didn't know I was dead. I am not trying to complain, don't get me wrong. That's life living here, and a lot of other places sharing high ping, connecting to a server further away from us. If there will be an Asia or Oceania server, and my ping connecting there is under 100ms, I will happily transfer over there. Of course, I don't know if the cost hosting those servers can be justified, for old and new players, that's not a question we can answer, probably not even Anet. However, to be inclusive to people who live further away from the servers, the answer is certainly yes.

I tried very hard to not do anything when I got the buff and before using bladesongs, and I think it worked less of 50% of times. Sometimes it’s me still can’t fully control myself, sometimes I can’t tell why it still didn’t work. This trait is like gambling, I hate it. Yet, it’s 100% the only grandmaster trait worth to take in competitive mode.

Thanks! There are a lot that I am happy to discuss, but being a regular reader, sometimes I am really unsure if it might be worth to take time to write down my thoughts 😅 It takes so much time to convert random thoughts into logical languages. That is surprising to know. I always assume it would be coming from Bladeturn Requim because this skill can strip so many boons provided that one can clash and follow the enemies. Bladesong Harmony can strip quite a lot of boons, too, but that really requires the enemies stacking in a line or really tight, and it also needs to be fired closer to the targets. I don't often get good opportunities for this. I generally fired it for range spike rather than when getting closer. That said, if Psychic Riposte can be fixed, my experience can be quite different I suppose. This is probably quite different from my experience. Granted, I can't really tell which skills strip the boons unless I am paying attention to the numbers when I used the skill. Is there a way to read this from ArcDPS? My gut feeling tells me that my Phantasmal Berserker just won't hit. I wish we can move back boon strips to Mind Stab. I also didn't use Sigil of Absorption because I don't think I have enough CC to utilize that. If it's under a tight fight, I generally camp greatsword because otherwise my DPS will drop to the bottom. I only swap to focus if I know there's going to be some down time, or I absolutely need to use focus. I wish Phantasmal Warden can be reverted back as well, even though that probably still won't make it work in a tight fight at all either. Did you mean focus 5, or did you take Warden's Feedback from Inspiration for reflection? I would guess you meant for focus 5, because taking Inspiration will greatly reduce the damage. The damage is so low that it can almost be ignored. As for running inside the enemies, certainly that I am assuming with a Firebrand + another healing support. If I am running without support, I'll keep away with the melee train and only use it for defense. I did enjoy watching my DPS skyrockets to the top for the first 10 seconds. It's sad that it's going to drop pretty quickly as the fight continues, but at least down contribution can easily remain at the top. I am not sure about your experience, but I would suggest just camping greatsword, because even just 1111111 has better damage than using dagger, and there's no damage with focus. Of course, if you need pull then you'll have to swap anyway. Or maybe you can consider using scepter to replace dagger. One more block you can trigger for Psychic Riposte, and Confusing Images while very slow, it has some damage, better than never hitting dagger... At first I run no stunbreak nor cleanses, too, however lately I replaced Sword of Decimation with Mantra of Concentration after it's buffed, mostly because I noticed I needed more stabilities, and Sword of Decimation didn't do a lot of damage anyway. It's certainly nice to add it to the chain of burst, especially for hitting on the wall, but whatever, if I have even better support 😛 Speaking to cleanse, when are they going to buff Mantra of Resolve? It's so bad comparing to the other cleansing skills other professions have...

I really wish this could be the case, unfortunately given the current status, at best I think it's just viable, or acceptable, not really good comparing to Scourge, nor Spellbreaker. From my experience, what Virtuoso can do the best in zerg is the extremely high burst/spike damage. If I have 5 blades, and Psychic Riposte is not bugged, I can easily get a few down every time I cast all the bursting skills. However the damage cannot sustain, so if the fight lasts longer, my DPS would generally drop down quickly comparing to other typical DPS classes. I think the main problem is that Anet don't know where to put Virtuoso. I bet they didn't even really think about that, because Virtuoso is a pretty clear PvE profession, even the designer behind it admitted that they only knew about PvE. Being slightly viable was probably just a side effect from that. There are so much we can do to make Virtuoso better, yet they never really did anything beside introducing the bugged Psychic Riposte, making Bladesongs a bit more reliable (when it's in beta, it's extremely easy to cancel them), and that's probably it. Granted, without those, Virtuoso would not even be viable, so good improvements I suppose. If I could make changes, I'll suggest the followings. Note that I would welcome any ways to make it better, not necessarily using my suggestions. I just want to provide some inspiration if one is looking for it: * Rain of Swords should hit much harder, and also causes cripple in additionally * Sword of Decimation should have faster cast, given that there's animation delay, it's actually slower than just having cast time. Or we can remove the animation and make it faster, but it would be better to keep the tell for counter play, so just make it cast faster. It can also add a few stacks of vulnerability, and remove a boon when hit, 2 boons if target is disabled/controlled/down. * Psychic Force is not useful in zerg. Maybe it's useful somewhere else? Otherwise I'll suggest reworking this. * Merge Blade Renewal and Bladesong Distortion into one skill. Perhaps gain 1~2 blades whenever hit during the period. * Bladeturn Requim should hit much harder. Like maybe 10 times harder. Remove channeled block. * Bladesong Dissonance should hit for 5 targets by default. Cast time should be removed because there's already projectile traveling time. Trait should improve this skill so that it stuns. * Thousand Cuts should hit much harder, and much wider. Also add some conditions if not removing a boon. Duration and interval can be tweaked accordingly. * All of the dagger skills should be reworked, as stated multiple times by a lot of people. I do still use it, because it hits extremely hard when fire at point blank. All of the skills can be reflected so all of them don't work most of the time, but if it hits, it really hits pretty hard. Useful to cleave down (some down have skills to destroy projectile so don't work on them), or burn the NPC lords/guards, but that's it. Some movement skills as suggested by others will be nice, or we can rework how the whole projectile works. Or maybe make Psychic Riposte work on all the blade skills, including dagger. This might be overpowered but just an idea. It won't solve all the issues it has because it's still an extremely slow weapons which is easy to just side steps if not fired at point blank. If all of above are implemented, it will be over tuned. Just some random ideas for inspiration. I'll share some of my experience. Indeed in SMC it's one of the places that I can hit top DPS much easier than elsewhere. I did not use Feedback, nor do I really strip a lot of boons though, because most of the gameplay I had did not involve with heavy melee, therefore Bladeturn Requim doesn't really hit most of the time. Virtuoso is a strong pirateship glass cannon. Every time when we went into melee, my DPS rank dropped very quickly after the first burst was done. Top DPS skills change quite often depending on the fights. Typical candidates: * Spatial Surge, greatsword auto attack. Yes, this skill can be the top DPS skill when the fight never went into melee, or very seldomly. This is because this skill is very fast, and has 1200 range, great tagging skill, reminded me the old Guardian lootstick staff. This doesn't really mean anything beside that the fight was probably very boring though. It's mostly just tagging, no one will die from just that. * Mind Stab. The damage is not bad, and it's fast, cooldown is low. When this skill is the top DPS skill, it usually means that again, there's very little pushing, and mostly just pirateships firing at each other. However, this is a great finishing skill because it's fast. Chain this skill after the burst (better be the last skill because this skill has quite some aftercast), it can often take some enemies down. Not that this means DPS though, it's more a bursting skill. I also wish we can get boon strip back on this skill. Phantasmal Berserker is not reliable at all. * Rain of Swords. Even though the damage is quite bad, when clashing this is still often the top DPS skill because it pulses after all. If the enemies didn't just walk away, that can accumulate. Think of this skill as a much weaker version of Well of Suffering, and that's it. * Thousand Cuts. Despite being a even weaker skill than Rain of Swords, it can still happen that it's the top DPS skill. When this happens, it usually means that... Rain of Swords was cast in the wrong place or wrong timing, or the fight was too short that Rain of Swords can only be cast once. If there's anything better than Rain of Swords, it's probably the instant cast, very little tell than Rain of Swords, and it's unblockable, however that's it. If I can use Gravity Well in Virtuoso I'll pick Gravity Well any time. * Bladesong Harmony. This skill is not reliable at all, so for a prolonged fight, it's unlikely it would always work due to the bugs in Psychic Riposte. If the bugs are fixed, this skill might be reliably the top DPS skill. It's extremely strong with 5 blades and each hit will strip a boon. It's very slow cast + animation + projectile flying time, so it's not very easy to pull off though, requiring some lucks or waiting for the opportunity. If this skill is the top DPS skill, it usually means the fight was very short, or enemies were scattering around thus other actual pulsing AoE skills weren't effective. * Bladesong Sorrow. This is a weaker but more reliable version of Bladesong Harmony. It can also hit hard even though weaker than Bladesong Harmony, but it's faster to cast and the projectiles are also faster, making it much more reliable. If this skill is top DPS skill, it probably means Bladesong Harmony didn't hit, or one forgot to use Bladesong Harmony first. I regret a bit that I spent too much time writing this. Hope it's worth it!

There's probably misunderstanding here, so I would try to clarify my imagined implementation when I say adding unique skins to PvP and WvW legendary armors. To add unique skins to these armors, I would imagine they just change the current legendary armors to have the new unique skins, so be new or old legendary armors, they will unlock the new one. I think it's a mistake that Anet made both Mistforged one and non-Mistforged one able to upgrade to the legendary version, because now there are actually 2 different kinds of legendary PvP and WvW legendary armors. How do we deal with this fairly? I propose we merge the Mistforged one and non-Mistforged one into the same legendary armor, and then change that with the new skins. What if someone made 2, both Mistforged one and non-Mistforged one? It's a weird decision and I doubt if anyone had done that, but if there are, refund the materials for one set, because now there's only one set with the new unique skins. To better understand this, bullet points to separate scenarios: * People who have non-Mistforged legendary armor: Now this legendary armor will use the new unique skins, and that will be unlocked. The previous skins remain unlocked * People who have Mistforged legendary armor: Now this legendary armor will use the new unique skins, and that will be unlocked. The previous skins remain unlocked * People who have both armors: One of the legendary armor will be converted to the new one, and the other one will be refunded with materials. All the previous skins remain unlocked Does this make more sense to you now? This should not be the case, because if they want the new unique legendary PvP or WvW armor skins, they need to make the corresponding PvP or WvW legendary armors, not just the skins, and no discounts. People who have only bought the ascended ones, will remain with just the ascended skins, Mistforged or not. Hopefully they didn't salvage their precursors, if they want to upgrade. If Anet want to be generous, they can try to give them one piece of the precursor based on which skins were unlocked. They would earn salvaged items for free this way, which I suppose it's not a big deal. I totally think it's fine if they just have to buy the precursors again.

The whole presumption is that unique legendary armor skins will be added for PvP and WvW. If this is not the case, the whole reasoning falls apart. However, if unique skins for PvP and WvW is added, and if we provide an option for a discount, I believe it should be available to all kinds of legendary armor skins, not just for Envoy, otherwise it'll be inconsistent and unfair. I wouldn't be against this option, just don't think it's worth to go with this path. Yes, it's different. Aurene weapon skins are their own variants. Envoy armor skins are not a variant of PvP or WvW armor skins in the current status. Lore-wise it probably won't fit either, even though I wouldn't care about lore. This is true, even though using the same two-handed weapons is a bad design, it's still a valid use case. Indeed it only becomes useless for the 3rd two-handed legendary weapon, and the 4th (or 2 is enough?) one handed legendary weapon. That makes sense. I'll prefer to put my bets on adding unique legendary PvP and WvW skins though. If the same options can then be applied to all legendary armor skins, I have no problem with that, just think that might be quite some work, especially if there will be a whole new 2nd generation legendary armors, those might also need a discount option, too!

Whatever that is called doesn’t matter, the point is that it needs some different recipes or mechanisms, which is adding complexity to all the future legendary armor sets. And I think it’s also clear that all the legendary stuffs are considered one of the important gold sinks in the game. I really don’t think Anet would like this idea. That is true, we don’t know if Anet would ever do that, but I think it’ll be silly if they don’t ever, even when it might be late, considering that they even announced the 4th expansion. On the other hand, we don’t even need to go that far. Just when they add unique skins to PvP and WvW, the same thing will show. I assume you support adding this option to both PvP and WvW skins, which works, too, just more additional work for all future legendary skins, and we left out legendary weapons for the same thing. Of course, consistency may not be that important, but this will be another inconsistency introduced if it’s only for armors.

That’s the presumption, of course. No one can say “we” want or “we” don’t want, because no one can represent any other except themselves. There are certainly people “want” it, and there are certainly people who don’t need it. Players come and go. Poll 5 years ago, surely can’t represent what the current players think either. Again, for the sake of consistency, and showing some love to the cornerstone game modes, that should be done, unless Anet really want to abandon PvP and WvW, which is actually pretty evident and convincing, sadly. That will not stop me from asking them though, unless I also decided to quit the game due to being abandoned.

I do not like the idea of giving a discount for specific skins provided that one already has the other legendary armors. This makes things complex and to be consistent, all the legendary armor skins will have to provide this option. This might not matter given the current status that PvP and WvW legendary armors don't have their own unique skins, so such options for them are not needed. However, once this discount option is provided, in the future when PvP and WvW get their own skins, the same discount option should be provided, which makes things unnecessary complex and more expensive to implement. I understand where this is coming from, because legendary armory eliminated the motivations to have multiple same weight armors. However, this has been done and we're not going back. Moving forward, we shouldn't think about "legendary armors", but just some unique skins that also grant you legendary level quality of life improvements, if one doesn't have it already. Think of it as unlocking something, rather than actually getting some physical items (not really physical, but you get the idea). This is completely the same for legendary weapons, where we even reached to the 3rd generation. I look forward to PvP and WvW unique skins, and the whole new 2nd generation legendary armors, which should have unique skins and similar costs with 1st gen, just like weapons.

I don't think this is necessary, but I won't say no to any new features. However for meta achievements like this can easily hit into the same issue like the one we have with Legendary Armorer as well. What if then there's a new set of legendary armors? Should we include the new one for this meta achievement? An easy solution would then be the same, just rename it so nothing exactly needs to change. Maybe call it 1st generation legendary armor. The other problem I can see when this happens is, if there's a new set of legendary armor, that should be promoted (new shiny! Driving the latest hotness is an important tool to make the game alive), but if that doesn't contribute to this meta achievement, that's a bit counter productive, which can give me dilemma that if I should keep spending my time and resources to this old meta achievement, or the new shiny legendary armor? Adding this new shiny legendary armor to the meta achievement is out of question because we should never invalidate the effort of the ones who had done it, nor make it more difficult for the new comer so newer people can never catch up. A moving achievement is a bad achievement. Or maybe make it so that any of the 3 sets of legendary armor would work? That's also weird and confusing. Of course, this is all assuming that Anet might be adding new set of legendary armor, which might never happen. However in the long run, I don't see why not. It's likely fine for PvP or WvW to not have a new set, because contents there are less about level design, we don't need to promote new maps/levels, or less needed overall. For PvE, outside of legendary insights, they're bound to older PvE raids and/or meta events in the past. It's a common practice to add new rewards for new levels/events to drive people into new contents in PvE. We can change so that new levels/events can finish the older achievements so that we don't need to add new set of legendary armor, but that's again complex to implement and can invalidate efforts for people who had done it the hard way before. Adding new shiny is the way to go for PvE.

* Rename this to be Envoy Armorer, update descriptions and category accordingly. Calling it Legendary Armorer is very confusing and it causes unnecessary arguments to include other legendary armors. This opens up other new sets of legendary armors as well. * Add actual unique skins to legendary PvP and WvW armors already. Again, both do not need to be animated at all. Cost is not an issue. Think about generation 3 legendary weapon skins. So much cheaper to make, a brilliant idea to reduce cost for designing a bunch of skins. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like that, but that does reduce cost for designing them, which can be justified if Anet really can’t afford that. * Maybe we can also add similar achievements for PvP/WvW legendary armors. I don’t exactly care, but for the sake of consistency and showing some love to the cornerstone modes, it makes sense to add. Better late than never.

Huh, thank you! I have been wondering under what circumstance that it wouldn’t work, and so far I hadn’t figured it out, and it annoyed me a lot. I’ll keep this in mind. Knowing this will help a lot, so I can waste less opportunities. Honestly, if this is the case, I would imagine it’s intended to work this way, just with poor wordings and the buff should immediately go away with any other skills, rather than lingering there to confuse people.

On the update of 2019-07-16: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates/2019-07-16#Mesmer Chronomancer lost Illusionary Persona, quoting here: On the update of 2020-07-07: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates/2020-07-07#Mesmer This was given back to Chronomancer, quoting here: I quit Chronomancer during the period. The same can be said to Distortion, except that it took longer time to be given back. I hope we can say the same to the second dodge for Mirage soon.

At first when I was trying Virtuoso at beta, I did feel pretty bad without Illusionary Persona. However perhaps that's by design from the very beginning, I started to think it's fine. My guess for why people didn't make a fuss: * Technically, Virtuoso didn't really lose Illusionary Persona, because it never had it. Illusionary Persona became baseline before Chronomancer, so both Chronomancer and Mirage had it from the very beginning. We can say it's only about the feeling of losing or not, but we can also say it might be one of the core designs of the spec. * Clones are easy to be cleaved down to deny Shattering, Illusionary Persona is an important trait to ease the shortcoming. Virtuoso can't lose blades thus Bladesongs can't be denied this way, making it less important with Illusionary Persona. * With the cast time, travel time, visual tell, Bladesong Dissonance is not going to hit players anyway. Even with Illusionary Persona it won't help too much :shrug: I seriously think this skill should be reworked. At least make it a stun for example. For sure, so I am not saying that we should actually make a proposal, even though that would be nice to show the ideas. No free work for Anet. My point is just wordings. Just replace all "remove" with "rework", and I am sure that's also what you meant, so we can be more on the same page. We had suffered from too much removal, so we got pretty sensitive seeing that. Fully agreed. I was extremely disappointed about the well designs, and their recent "rework" was still awful, contradicting to their own words and promise that it's difficult to use for the last pulse, yet they still put Superspeed on one of them, while moving the Superspeed from last pulse to first pulse for Scrapper :rofl: If this is not bias, what it is I really wonder. I would be fine with this if this is still an instant cast. Also, this will be a big nerf overall so the rest of the kits should be greatly improved to compensate. I like this. Why no improved version though? Perhaps it can reduce cooldown or reduce cast time. How do you decide the illusion target given that wells are ground target? By the way, I really wish we can keep the clones alive without a target. It might make Mesmer becoming too strong in general, but happy to give up something for this. I am just so tired of constant resetting between battles. Virtuoso did solve this issue, and I wish something can be done for other specs as well, otherwise in PvE it's just very painful against trash mobs. I can accept if it's a trait I guess, so it doesn't need to affect all builds. Do you mean it'll heal for each pulse? That would be quite good. I like this. This way the damage from shattering can be less back loaded. I like having more protection and resolution in general. I hate that without taking Inspiration it's very painful against conditions, and taking Inspiration means a great loss of damage. Honestly I don't really like Continuum Split either, because it can be quite unreliable. However, it's a signature skill which I don't really want to lose either. It's an important flavour. I'll put your defiant stance at the place of Distortion, and rework Continuum Split in a way that it can keep the flavour. For example, it can just repeat the following skills with 50% (or whatever X%) effectiveness, similar to Chronophantasma. I know you probably do not like doubling up, but perhaps by losing the flexibility by casting on the same place/target can balance it out. And it won't be possible to use reset skills to reset again, because it'll have nothing to do with cooldown. For this I'll prefer to have faster cast and/or faster travel time. A lot of skills can cast from behind but I don't think it's healthy. I will prefer to rework all the skills which can shoot from behind, but this level of rework is probably not going to happen.

If I remembered correctly, they mentioned that they want to think of a way to give 2nd dodge back, which can be tweaking other skills/traits, but not really by reworking Mirage Cloak itself. I might be wrong though, of course. On a side note, I recalled someone mentioned that Anet also once mentioned that given Mirage Cloak can be casted instantly and at any moment, given how it’s implemented in the current engine, they can’t put more restriction on it. Vindicator’s dodge is different that we can’t jump (dodge) while channeling something else. That’s several years ago so it might be different now though. It’s a giant nerf to my PvE Celestial and Seraph Firebrand. Not saying that I think it’s a bad rework at all though. I think it’s a needed change. We can go on more but I’ll stop here because this is not a guardian forum. Rework is definitely something some would like and some would hate after all.

If Anet has good ideas about how to rework Mirage Clock and/or Continuum Split, and they’re open to changes and ask us feedback before applying it, I am open to any kind of rework. Firebrand rework is an example. Please instead of saying removing something, say reworking something. It might be obvious that if we take something away, we should be giving something back to compensate, but this is probably not something in Anet’s mind and be careful what we wish for, they can remove something and be done with it like how we lost 1 dodge on Mirage. Remember how we lost Illusionary Persona on Chrono? It’s given back. Remember how we lost Distortion on Chrono? It’s given back. The list went on and on…

Not sure if this is new or known, but I only noticed today when I am shattering, my Mini Jade Bot had an effect looked like getting boons. Clicking on it showed that it's superspeed. I further noticed that every time I shattered, it did get 5 seconds of superspeed. I confirmed this by swapping to another trait, and it no longer got any superspeed when shattering. This is pretty funny because Mini Jade Bot can lag behind when I just run forward, and granting it superspeed will make it catch up on me pretty quickly. I also tried that this also applies to other miniatures, not just Mini Jade Bot. I did not test if there's any other traits/skills might have similar effects, and I assume Miniature did not really count as an illusion otherwise it should be known abused immediately. Fly harder! You this cuddly fatty kitten 😛

I admire people who tried hard to come up with some more radical rework ideas, sadly if those ideas didn’t try to cope with all the game modes at the same time, some are going to be very unhappy and in the end Anet will just respond to the loudest majority. The example for this was Sneak Gyro in WvW. If it were made stationary but the same stealth duration, it can still be useful in WvW. Now it’s just a dead skill with the absolutely awful duration. That’s what PvE players want. Don’t touch it in PvE, feel free to kill it in other modes. Guess that’s just reality. I don’t think it’ll happen and tons of people will cry, but yeah maybe could use some laughs for a week. Or maybe just add it as a fun mode, why not? Bring the guild hall arena where it’s running with PvE settings! I had a lot of fun with release Chrono and release Mirage, and release Spellbreaker! Also release Scourge, and probably also the early 2 dodges Vindicator, laughing to see how long those can last at all… It’s as if they’re never tested. Now CMC is the lead, who designed Untamed and Catalyst. Before that, it’s Solar who designed Mechanist, Virtuoso, and Harbinger, and the former 2 were/are dominating PvE, while having 2k hours in Firebrand. Coincident? Probably. Favouritism or bias? Probably!

Back then there were so many people playing WvW, EotM was advertised that we can play while waiting for the queue to pop… I think Anet removed the rewards there to avoid spreading WvW population thin. I don’t know. Maybe we should drop the idea of home borderland, and use unique maps for the regular WvW match up. Alpine, Desert, Eternal Battlegrounds, and EoTM. Clearly borderland maps favour one side more, which can be unfair with regard to point per tick, but I suppose we can tweak like we did for the Desert. When Desert was released, it’s supposed to give each side one keep for each map, not like right now one is supposed to own all keeps on the map. I am not saying that was better but I think there are rooms for changes.

I actually like core Distortion better, due to Virtuoso missing Illusionary Persona (Mesmer itself counts as a clone), I can’t use Bladesong Distortion without blades, and that can be critical especially after I just used shatters/bladesongs. I think the main problem for Virtuoso is that it also has Blade Renewal, which gives 3 seconds invulnerability (channeled) on a 40 seconds cooldown, and also 5 blades so if Bladesong Distortion wasn’t on cooldown, that’s another 0.75 * 5 => 3.75 seconds of invulnerability. Or one can use Bladeturn Requiem for 2 seconds block and then triggering Psychic Riposte, gaining 3 blades and then chain Bladesong Distortion for 2.25 seconds of invulnerability. That’s 7.25 seconds chained defense, without counting signets spam with Blurred Inscription. Of course this means all resources spent on defense, too. My suggestion has always been the same as a lot have brought up from the very beginning when EoD beta ran. Merge Bladesong Distortion, Bladesong Requiem, and Blade Renewal into one skill so it cannot be chained. Add new skills in the holes so Virtuoso has other tools to do something else. Rework Blurred Inscription for sure. It still needs a lot of rework and given how it interacts with PvE, I doubt if Anet would rework much if anything, sadly.

Except that Distortion was never changed since released, thus I don’t get the “new” idea over there, when it comes to being invulnerable while being able to “burst”, I thought it’s been clear that’s Distortion. Granted, maybe that wasn’t explicitly mentioned, and instead of using questions over questions, it should have been made clear from the beginning. If anything new, Mirage Cloak is closer to Distortion even though it’s evade not invulnerability. At least that’s newer than Distortion, and the idea was similar.