OriOri.8724

Virtuoso should have a mobility skill and a cripple/immob other than that weird utility that's trivial to walk out of, since its supposed to be a long range DPS spec but currently has no way to stay at range/disengage. OH dagger would be 2 new weapon skills that could provide both of those and just overall give more flavor to the spec

That's not possible unless its bugged, since psychic riposte has an internal CD of 3 seconds. You cannot proc it more than once when using F4. Which isn't even mentioning that its possible to have written the trait in a way that distorting through attacks also procced it. And even that is beside the point since it comes back to you trying to make this work as a tanking rotation, when the spec is supposed to be pure, selfish DPS. A tanking rotation shouldn't even be a thing on it

No class has trouble eliminating mobs quickly in PvE. If that's really the best argument you have for virtuoso being well designed I don't know what to tell you. Mesmer mains are criticizing virtuoso not to be mean to ANet (which seems to be what you're implying?), but because we can see how much potential this spec has if the work is put into it to make it cohesive and have a better design. The idea behind virtuoso is great, a mesmer without dealing with clones, and a dedicated long range power DPS spec. The implementation of that idea is simply not good. As it stands now, virtuoso is half baked, and its strongest synergies with core mesmer are in a support traitline, on a spec that is supposed to be nothing but pure, selfish damage. That points to the design being grossly unfinished and unpolished. Does that mean you aren't allowed to enjoy the spec? No, you're free to enjoy it. But you enjoying it does not a good spec make

At this point I almost want them to reverse the blade mechanic entirely. Have bladesongs and "blade" weapon skills generate blades, and then have the psionic skills scale off of how many blades you have when you use them. At 3 and 5 blades you could even add new effects to each psionic skill, idk. Haven't really thought this out at all, but it already feels like it would be a more cohesive design, and it also fundamentally changes mesmer f skills, which neither chrono or mirage did

I don't think its clear that they do know its bad. Reading through the changes made for beta 4, it sure sounded like ANet didn't even recognize that virtuoso's core design is lacking in multiple pretty big ways. They didn't even acknowledge any of the feedback about this, or about how its kit does not match what role they intend it to fill. It seems like they think its in a good spot. Also, its not too late. They had months between the first beta and the 4th, and multiple other specs got pretty large reworks done in that time. The time and the staffing are there, the desire is what's missing. That's not a bug, its by design. A bad design choice imo. And yea, like you found out, the new increased blade generation is pointless if bladesogn cooldowns aren't reduced in order to actually use them up. Which is beside the point anyway, since virtuoso is supposed to be a pure, selfish DPS spec, you shouldn't be pairing it up with inspirations at all. It should be full damage, and the fact that inspirations has the highest synergy with virtuoso is telling of how poor the current design for the spec is.

Again, ask the devs. From the moment the first beta dropped I've been confused as hell about virtuoso, because the spec was not coherently designed. And then they ignored all our feedback in favor of giving us more blade generation, which isn't even useful if bladesong cooldowns aren't lowered anyway. Seems like the most logical answer is there's no one on the design team that actually cares about mesmer anymore, and they just don't give it any thoughts whatsoever. Of all the new elite specs, this one had the least cohesive design, this one had no changes to the core f skills (and the change to the clone mechanic is tiny, and sloppily done imo), mesmer remains the only class to not get a 2H weapon in any elite spec so far, and they then ignored all of the feedback from mesmer players about what changes we'd like to see in the spec (no changes to bladesongs, no removing a half baked condi traitline on a power dps spec and replacing it with utility focused traits, no changes to dagger to make it actually usable at range, they kept the condi traitline in but didn't address the fact that no more clones means that staff and scepter lose a huge amount of their condi damage potential, no tools added to keep enemies at range (no mobility, no cripple/immob, nothing)). There just isn't anyone left on the design team that cares about mesmers, so its given far and away the least amount of effort, and it shows

Actually making blades interact with core mesmer skills and traits is a big change yes, and one that should have been done before the first beta honestly. But its ultimately bugfixes, not actual changes to virtuoso. It doesn't address any of the myriad of issues with bladesongs either. If ANet wants virtuoso to be a shatter focused DPS spec, which they claim was the intention behind it in that mightyteapot stream, then they need to improve bladesongs, a lot. Reduce/remove the cast times on them. make F1/F2 not be projectiles at all. Lower the cooldowns on them so that the increased blade generation isn't literally wasted while you wait for bladesongs to come off CD. Actually change the bladesongs to not be just reskins of core shatters, but make them new. There's so much that needs to be done, design wise. But Anet ignores our feedback

Ask the devs, not me. I don't like the idea of it being selfish DPS. But that's what the devs have publicly stated they want it to be

Virtuoso is supposed to be a selfish DPS spec, as confirmed by the devs. There's nothing wrong with trying stuff out, but the mere fact that a healing/sustain build is one of the first thoughts in terms of how virtuoso is designed and how it interacts with core mesmer should be a huge red flag to the devs that the design is extremely flawed Psyhic riposte is dependent on the enemy taking a specific action. You can't activate it if you can't evade/block an attack. Even if it can be used for a spike, it needs to be rethought. Bladesongs need to be not projectiles by default, which already negates a lot of the need to have psychic riposte in its current form in the first place. And bladesongs need other work too. Lower cast times, and faster travel time for the blades when you do cast it

kitten changes, ANet clearly didn't listen to any actual feedback from the first beta. Like countless others have said, more blade generation doesn't address any of the design issues with virtuoso. Bladesongs are still worse than core shatters in every single regard. There was no cast time reduction, no increase in blade speed, no making them be not projectiles by default (not even a trait to do that), no cooldown reductions to differentiate them from core shatters, absolutely nothing. Dagger still has plenty of issues at range because of the design of its skills. If they want it to be the shatter spec, they haven't done anything that supports that. The shatters are objectively worse than core shatters, and they are on the same CDs.

That's kind of exactly what I talked about though. Instead of ever addressing chronophantasma itself (which, although broken on release did actually fix a really big design flaw with core mesmers phantasms), ANet nerfed everything that chronophantasma could affect if it was taken in a build, and they ended up neutering mesmer in the process. This isn't chronophantasma's doing. This is purely the result of balance changes being done without touching the skills/traits that actually break a build.

Chronophantasma didn't do anything to core mesmer. What happened was ANet nerfed everything in core mesmer, and everything that wasn't busted in chrono in an attempt to balance HoT release chrono, without ever addressing the reasons it was so busted. And then eventually came back and fixed what made it busted in the first place without ever reverting the nerfs to unrelated core mesmer. Its the same pattern to mesmer with every major balance patch

Not really. There are some pretty significant changes between DX9 and DX11, and its a lot more involved than setting a flag to "use DX11" and not change anything else. Also, you misread his statement about not changing the renderer. He specifically said they aren't making significant changes to the current renderer, which is on DX9. The new one is still a single thread, but the performance improvement was large enough that they didn't need to go through the effort of making it multithreaded. As time goes on, they're going to keep updating the new renderer to be even more performant as they are able to make larger changes to how it works after they are confident that its visually identical to the current one (which was their primary goal, to keep GW2 looking the same as it has for the past 9 years). DX12 would mean that anyone on windows 7 would no longer be able to play GW2 (once the old renderer is retired), which is still a sizeable number of people. Vulkan is also significantly more work to port to since its a fundamentally different architecture for doing graphics than DX is. Its a lot more work, would mean that they can support fewer platforms, and the benefits of switching to it don't justify the extra cost of implementing it

There should definitely be boons immediately and on each tick of the well.

A target in stealth does not exist as far as your targeted skills care. This change would be pretty broken, as it would allow sw3 to tell you if an enemy in stealth is next to you or not, which defeats the purpose of stealth.

The cast times on spectres wells are comparable to the cast times on chrono wells. Well of gloom has a high cast time for a heal skill yes. But at the same time, well of gloom has self healing, AoE healing, AoE cripple, a shadowstep, and can grant you stealth if you take shadow arts. All on a 20 second CD. The skill is absolutely ridiculous in how much kitten it does. Chrono's wells do half of that, on far longer CDs. Well of eternity has an initial heal with significantly lower scaling than gloom and lower base heal, AoE heal on the last pulse only, and can remove a grand total of 3 condis if you stay in the well for each pulse. On a 30 second CD. Scepter wells are absolutely broken. They do way too much crap

I'd much rather get OH dagger too, along with updating dagger2 so it works properly at range and can still hit people

0? Anet wouldn't go through that much effort to do the skills and traits and effects to have it be a placeholder. That's such a weird assumption to make

Core mesmer got the rework because it was far and away the class with the worst mechanic and implementation. And its still more or less near the bottom. Just because its already been reworked doesn't mean its perfect and shouldn't be touched again

Sword 2 is fine as it is

There are some big problems in virtuoso in regards to its own traitline and skills not having good synergy with itself. But outside that, it doesn't have good synergy with core memser right now. That will hopefully be addressed by Anet, including fixing some bugs with it. But even if that synergy with core mesmer is increased, virtuoso still feels bad to play as a mesmer. And that's the key that a lot of non mesmer mains seem to be missing. The spec might seem fun to someone who doesn't play a mesmer, but to mesmer players it was incredibly jarring. The bladesongs are worse than shatters in every regard: we lost instant cast on them in exchange for incredibly long cast times; we lost the ability to target anyone with them (like players behind you); we lost the ability to do a shatter without any clones out (which core mesmer, chrono and mirage can all do); our shatters turned into projectiles that can be blocked or reflected now. Even one of the "main" selling points of virtuoso, being able to keep blades while out of combat, is not as much of a good change as it seems on the surface. A mesmer can generate 2-3 clones incredibly quickly, so its not like being able to carry over a handful of blades between fights really changes anything. In the cast time of a bladesong, a core mesmer could already have 2-3 clones out and have cast a shatter anyhow, so this doesn't add anything to mesmer. Your photo is a tempest icon, so to try and give you some idea of how the virtuoso felt to mesmer players, imagine if the new ele elite spec added a 1/2-3/4 sec cast time to changing attunements. The core ele mechanic would feel like absolute kitten to play with, and that's what virtuoso feels like.

Its been in the game for years now, and has already been updated in a balance patch. If anet wanted it to affect poison they probably would have added it to the trait by now, so I doubt its supposed to reduce poison duration

Yea, the mastery lines from ice brood saga really weren't that much fun. I like the idea behind the essence manipulation masteries, and the "strategy/gameplay"(?) behind essence imbued enemies. But having 3 identical mastery tracks for that just felt bad to me. That on top of 1 mastery track only being useful in bjora's marches, 1 mastery track only being useful in dragon response missions, and 1 mastery track centered around drizzlewood coast just made the entire mastery track in ibs feel unfun. Edit - One small change that would have made it feel better, to me at least, would be to only have 1 mastery track for the essence manipulation, and have it apply to all essences. Would take away a lot of the grindiness and sameness of the IBS masteries

Well that's what its supposed to be. But the spec as a whole doesn't really mesh with that archetype.

Of all the legitimate complaints that exist about mesmer skills and traits, signet of illusions is what you picked as an example?