Ciel.8705

With the introduction of Mechanist, Engineer is finally the most well balanced class for PVE in GW2 history in my opinion. We finally have a class that can spec into different roles like; power/condition damager, quickness/alacrity support, and healer. I applaud ANET's effort and thoughts that have put into this class and I truly wishes that other classes can receive similar treatment. Is Engineer really perfectly balanced? No, as there are still issues for PVP & WVW and maybe some part of PVE that could be better improved on. But at where it is now for PVE it is a great start and it is disheartening to see people cheerleading for nerf Mechanist instead of calling for better balancing of their/other classes to achieve what Engineer as a whole have achieved.

F1 to F3 : Cast time made shatters feel clunky, making it not flow well with the skills. Also as a master of blades, Virtuoso should be able to execute their blades with grace instead of "Give me 1/2 to 3/4 sec to throw my dagger stacks...". With the cast time in place, it is just ungraceful. Rain of Swords : The pulse damage does not reflect the skill name & animation. The damage from this skill should be more rapid (think ranger's longbow 2). The slow pulsing damage and low damage per pulse make this skill laughable and easily avoided without much consequences. Instead of a 5 pulse damage why not make it damage rapidly (x10~x20) at lower damage per tick, so that it feels more like "Rain of Swords" instead of "Pulse of Swords". Jagged Mind : A poor designed trait to incentivized condition build when most of the condition damaging weapons and utilities do not use "Blade" to trigger this. The only "Blade" are the F1-3, Psionic, Dagger 1-3, Greatsword 2-4, Which means those are the only skill benefitting from the trait itself and of all the mentioned ones only F1-F2 benefit most from it. The lack of synergy of this trait with weapons skills, utilities and other core traits is just bad. Other feedback and suggestions : Condition traits on Virtuoso currently is not even worth taking, considering Mirage does a better job. These traits are better off converted into traits that benefit Virtuoso's Psionics & Weapon Skills which isn't available in Core Mesmer Traitlines. F1-3 & Thousand Cuts are projectiles without Projectile Finisher and yet gets punished by reflects. The lack of counter play as the Virtuoso is sad. Illusion related traits and floating dagger should be updated. Gaining floating dagger should be considered as summoning illusion. Bountiful Blades trait can be rework to benefit not just Greatsword in general, since the name is about blade why not make it also benefit blade related skills.

Just try any phantasm at Octovine and find out for yourself or even search the forum. You will find that phantasm either don't spawn or spawn and does nothing against bosses like Octovine. There are many others bosses that causes phantasm to have this issue for a long time since HoT release. I mained mesmer since HoT till now. There are many post that highlighted this long standing issue, but Anet Devs never gotten around to give us an answer or fix.

As End of Dragon is coming early next year. I think it is about time Anet look into fixing phantasm issue with open world bosses/bosses with weird hitbox. Currently, phantasm either can't spawn or spawn but does nothing (idle & despawn) against bosses with weird hitboxes (example: hitbox aren't on ground level). One of the most prominent boss that has this issue are Auric Basin's Octovine and Fractal's Sunqua's breaking the rock part. There are probably more than the ones I mentioned. Fellow mesmers please comment if you have encounter similar issues with any other bosses below. Anet devs if you are reading this and still have no idea what I am talking about, then please use a mesmer and try hitting Octovine in Auric Basin with phantasm. This issue have been brought up countless time and has been ignored again and again! Anet it is time to fix it before we welcome even more new players and mesmers in the world of Tyria. Threads that highlighted this issue has been ignored over the years (Just some of the threads focusing on Octovine but this issue isn't limited to Octovine. I am sure this has been reported through in-game bug function countless time too):

Doesn't say you can't look it up on BLTC ;)

Mesmer phantasm has been useless when used against Octovine in AB since H.o.T. release till now(Almost 4 years already!). I remember there were thread talking about it before, but there weren't any official response.Will Anet ever address this issue? Because as a Mesmer, the only contribution we can do is Auto-attack and attack using skills that aren't Phantasm and do the mechanic to remove Octovine's shield. Which I feel that it makes playing as a Mesmer in Auric Basin really boring.If this is an intended design, then it is just a really bad design...