Panda.1967

You gave the WORST example with a bad faith argument. Pointing out that Racial skills “add bo new build options” is a bad faith argument. First off, they do add build options, but they never get used. This was addressed in their post, objectively bad choices are their own problem. Racial skills were deliberately made into the objectively worst skills for every single class precisely to ensure that they are never actually used in any theory crafted builds so that no one would be pressured into playing specific races… it was a horrible design decision and killed off literally thousands of builds. Also, no… we didn’t see this in GW1 and we don’t actually see this with Weapon Mastery either. Step put of your personal bubble with your theory crafting friends and actually observe what people actually use in game for once. The vast majority of players use their own unique builds not theory crafted builds. In GW1 there were thousands of theory crafted builds, and everyone had their own versions of them even. I enjoyed crushing theory crafted meta builds in GW1. For a while I had even build up a bit of a reputation for it with my elementalist, Mae Ignatious. (Yes, I was the immortal elementalist who got Elemental Attunement nerfed) I remember one time running a mission with a group that kept trying to get me to run the meta build… they screwed up and pulled three extra groups of mobs and got everyone but me killed, they kept yelling at me in chat to die so we can reset, instead I solo killed everything and rezed the group… Not only was I pushing more damage than the meta build, but I also was a lot more survivable. Do you know why? Because I dared to try different combinations out with various different skills and personally found ways to combo some abilities to great effect. There are trillions of build possibilities in GW1, and it is pure hubris for anyone to claim they have narrowed it down to even a few hundred optimal builds… to this day there are still several trillion builds that have never even been used. There is no telling what insanely broken combinations could still be hiding undiscovered in that game.

I think you may be underestimating how survivable clones actually are in PvE… I made the suggestion from a PvE perspective, I don’t play PvP… clones can survive in PvE for a good 20-30 seconds while taking direct hits from elites. If they were to get Chaos Armor, they would 100% survive better while it is active and spread conditions quite effectively… also, currently Chaos Armor is reliant on your opponent attacking you, and not your clones. In its current form it is more effective in PvP than in PvE because if your opponent in PvP is fooled by a clone they will immediately know which one is the real you when you activate it and they may choose to attack you and suffer conditions… but in PvE, mobs don’t care… they will keep attacking the clone and you will most likely completely waste the cast of Chaos Armor. If Chaos Armor was to apply to clones too however, then it doesn’t matter if the mob attacks you or your clone, they will suffer conditions… and as draxynnic said already, it doesn’t matter if your clone dies with chaos armor up, if they got hit they applied conditions, and those are conditions you wouldn’t have gotten with how the skill currently works. Giving Chaos Armor to clones is also even more effective when mobs use cleaving attacks, which quite a few of them do. Currently they hit you and gain a condition… if your clones had it too they would gain a condition for each one hit to a maximum of 4 conditions from that cleave… this is very good for PvE… from what little I know of PvP, people tend to avoid using cleaves when doing so can be harmful to themselves. Also… please explain how you think spreading chaos armor to clones promotes a passive playstyle? Taking advantage of a mob attacking your clone to stack some extra conditions on them is pretty active to me… your clones aren’t automatically gaining chaos armor every 20 seconds, you have to actively choose to give it to them by activating the skill. I can see your point on On Clone Death traits (though I don’t agree with you at all)… but on this… no… this is far from passive. If you somehow thought I was suggesting to passively give clones chaos armor, you may wish to reread my suggestion… I suggested combining Phantasmal Warlocks and Chaos Armor… there is nothing passive about it… the “passive” I mentioned would merely be a passive effect of the Warlocks while they attack enemies… they would attack enemies and allies (or clones) within a radius of them would gain chaos armor until they expire… the combination was suggested to try and resolve multiple issues with the staff at once…

If I remember correctly they didn’t actually remove the traits completely… they were each baked into different Phantasms… I remember commenting on the news post about it hurting a lot of mesmer builds since we can’t really use Phantasms in the same way we use clones…

I have similar attachments to many of my characters… I even have one that I wish I had made as a different class… but despite that fact, I still don’t see this as a good idea… plus Anet already talked about why this will never happen years ago when they addressed why there aren’t , and never will be, any race change options. To add one would require them to redo ALL of the coding for classes, races, and the core personal story from the ground up with race/class changes in mind. The way these were programmed doesn’t give any possibility of changing them once a character is made.

Personally I play every race… But, I understand this sentiment completely… Charr are my least played race because of their size and movement… they don’t trigger motion sickness with me, but I can see how they could with others… for me its the fact that it is very hard to tell where they actually are standing… doing jumping puzzles I always overshoot or undershoot jumps because I can’t tell where their feet are going to land or thought they were at the edge when I jumped but they actually weren’t… in combat I can’t tell how close they are to an enemy and often when they look to be outside of an AoE they really aren’t… and any time there is a confined space their bulkiness makes it difficult to target enemies or tell whats going on around them…

Or the oh so helpful “unlock this Mastery to be able to do that” when you so much as fly within 150ft of anything you haven’t unlocked the use of yet… that pops up and covers part of the UI every single time until you finally get the mastery unlocked… I don’t need to be reminded that I don’t have Leyline flying yet for the umpteenth hundredth time… once was enough, and I can only get XP and mastery points so fast…

Ele is not trash in PvE… its amazing… sure there is a learning curve to Ele… but quite honestly there is a learning curve to most classes… the easiest classes to play are Guardian, Ranger, & Necromancer… followed by Warrior, Engineer, & Mesmer… with Revenant, Thief, & Elementalist having the highest learning curves…

And how many times did you kill it? 500… hm… 500 kills 1 death… yup OP nerf it…

Don’t forget… I haven’t actually posted in the Mesmer forum for a few years now… so its kinda funny that I’m the only one he says he’s seen posting here before… I do main Mesmer… and I was very active in this board years ago… but lately I prefer to just play the game… especially since ANet doesn’t seem to actually care about any of our feedback anyways… the only reason I’ve been active here again recently is because my computer is temporarily unavailable, I just moved and have been unpacking things this last week… woo phone posts! I also play Condi/Celestial… and I’m the only one he seems to think is qualified to speak… his case is falling apart pretty hard… also I am exclusively a PvE player… I HATE PvP…

Tradeoffs were not all negatives… most espec teadeoffs are trading out the core mechanic for a stronger version. Reaper trades Death Shroud for Reaper Shroud, Chronomancer trades out Shatters for Chronomancer Shatters, Firebrand Trades Virtues for Tomes… these are all improved versions of what they traded out… specs only had negative trade offs when they gain something more… most negative tradeoffs have been removed now though, but some do still remain.

As others have said… build templates and equipment templates exist… sure you can’t swap both in one click… but its not that hard to press one extra button…

I have 3 elementalists… A Tempest running Scpeter/Warhorn with Arcane/Water specs… mainly built for healing, but does solo OW content fairly decently… A Weaver running Sword who I keep switching between Focus & Dagger for offhand, she’s spec’d Fire/Air… she pulls damage but she is glass… & A Catalyst running Earth/Arcane currently using Hammer but I plan to use Pistol on her when the update hits… I’m still experimenting with her build… I know Earth spec is suboptimal for any elementalist… but I want all my elementalists to feel unique from eachother already have a heal/support and a glass cannon DPS… so I’m experimenting with a CC/Tank build…

Ok… that makes more sense… I haven’t had much time to play since SotO so I haven’t been paying much attention to the wizards vault stuff.

Are those flipped? Or does it really award more for the daily than the weekly?

Terrifyingly… SotO may have actually already brought one of them back… Balthazar… in the first zone on the Elona fractal island we see the Throne of Balthazar… and its empty… and the concept behind that fractal was what if Balthazar won… if we’re lucky the empty throne simply means he wasn’t there when that part of the fractal materialized in the real world… otherwise he’s escaped somewhere and may turn up again in the future…

Soulbeast still loses their pet when merged, and untamed trades out their pets automated skill usage. From the wiki: “Your pet will not use their first and second skill automatically, you will have to command them to use it manually through F1 and F3.” I haven’t played the Untamed spec myself yet, so thats all I really have to go off…

Nah… they are more like the breakfast club… not really a true clique because they didn’t really have anything in common… Logan is the Jock who keeps pining after the Prom Queen who has him perpetually friend zoned… and he keeps pulling stupid stunts to try and get her attention that keep landing him in detention… Rytlock is the punk everyone thinks is a delinquent or bully but he’s really just a misunderstood softy… Eir was one who’s always in detention for disrupting class and coming and going whenever she wants. Caithe is the goth girl who got caught with a knife on campus. Zojja is the Sience fair champion whose experiments blew up part of the Gym… the Science Lab… part of the cafeteria… and a hall bathroom… See… a bunch if misfits who just ended up in the same place at the same time… as for Dragons Watch… honestly more kf the same…

I started playing with GW1, a day or two after it launched… been playing the game off and on ever since… I preordered GW2 and all of its expansions and have been playing it since Alpha… I’ve taken a few breaks over the years, some long some short… the first thing I would do is address a few design flaws and balance mistakes with a few classes… for example, Memsers will have clones nolonger shatter when the target they were summoned on dies, but instead will persist until you exit combat if you don’t shatter them first. I’d also do a major rework to Engineer Turrets, Elementalist Conjures, and Guardian Spirit Weapons… these three skill types have been in a bad spot since the game launched and have all been the victims of absolutely terrible reworks and unnecessary nerfs… For Turrets I would ensure that they scale damage with your stats, as well as change their flip skill to their respective Overloads with Detonate as a combo skill usable while Overload is on cooldown. I’d also have each turret skill reevaluated and adjusted to make them more useful. Conjures would have their durations removed when used by the Elementalist but instead have charges returned, however charges will only be expended when using skills 2-5 and will recharge 1 every couple seconds much like Firebrand Tome pages… I will make sure they have a reasonable amount of charges so that it doesn’t feel restrictive, the goal is to give the elementalist more use out of them. However, when used by anyone else they will function as they do now, flat 30sec duration. I’m not quite sure just yet what to do with Spirit Weapons… I just know they need a major rework… I’d also put a focus on updating other core skills and weapons to bring them up to par with what we see from especs.

I used to be on that hill too… and honestly I want to stay on it… but everything they add to mesmer just keeps adding more and more to the shatterspam playstyle… I was genuinely excited when Mirage was announced and I heard how it was supposed to play… but the reality of the spec didn’t live up to the hype and outside of one specific build it just doesn’t get enough benefit from keeping clones out… and they didn’t do anything special with its clone mechanics to even help facilitate a playstyle that keeps clones out… ambush skills encourage it, but clones still shattering on target death, no unique alternative to shatters that plays into keeping clones up, and Axes of Symmetry only retargeting Axe clones and not all clones… it eventually broke me…

Elementalist doesn’t run that many builds… you use all 4 elements in any build… though some builds will favor 1 or 2 elements more than the others… you have to learn to play the Attunement swap piano when playing Elementalist.

For the first 2 months after launch… pickup radius was increased to 2x the size of the bundle after that.

This is actually exactly why… I remember reading a dev post stating that back on the old forums… Engineer and Elementalist were both deliberately giving the least access to combo finishers at launch because they both had the greatest access to setting up combo fields. Though they never answered why Memser also had almost no access to combo finishers or combo fields…

The only way to make this work properly is to have ranged weapons do equal damage to melee weapons within melee range and then have their damage scale down as they move out of melee range based on how much DPS a melee build would lose from the average encounter mechanics that require them to move that far from the target. This means if no mechanics require melee to move beyond a certain distance from the enemy, then that distance is the maximum distance that ranged weapons damage decreases at, any distance beyond maintains that same damage. To do it any other way is just punishing ranged builds simply for being ranged. Any additional loss of DPS melee may experience because they moved too far is an individual skill issue and should never be used to determine balance.

This needs to happen honestly… sadly it most likely never will… Land Spear could happen one day though… since ANet keeps wasting effort on designing new skins for Spears, Tridents, and Spearguns… and yet they make no effort to fix underwater combat… some day they may finally give in and make underwater weapons into land weapons and just let all weapons and skills be used underwater…

Warriors still had a better spot than Mesmers with their bursts though… they don't lose all of their adrenaline the instant their target dies… and they can even build up adrenaline outside of combat… we can’t… our target dies, our clones are gone… out of combat clone skills generate no clones… Virtuoso is amazing in that it changes the rules… and when it was announced I made a bigger push for giving Mesmers persistent clones… just wish ANet cared enough to listen…