Hirosama Nadasaki.6792

My personal philosophy is uniqueness makes balancing easier and more attainable. If you're comparing apples to oranges, the comparison is rough and subjective, so you get a lot more wiggle room to develop cool stuff while maintaining an equivalence. If you're comparing apples to apples, a single digit higher is already an imbalance.

Welcome to the club.

Mesmer with no shatters would at least be more unique than Virtuoso. Silver lining here is Virtuoso set the bar so low it's gonna be hard to kitten it up harder.

Open world is quite forgiving and non-demanding, either choice you mentioned would work for most content, along with other condi mesmer options that might suit your fancy. If you're struggling with bosses and such Mirage will give you the extra survivability you want. You said you're doing OW for legendary farming. If that's the case, my recommendation is to switch around e-specs often. The biggest hurdle of legendary farming is the grind, more-so than the difficulty of it; switching around builds will keep it interesting and stave off burn-out. Having just one set of condi+vit gear will do the trick, since you can fit multiple mesmer builds with it comfortably, no need to get multiple gear sets. Play around with Mirage first as it'll give you the most survivability, switch to Virtuoso when you're bored of it, play around with chrono or core later when you got a better idea of how to build mesmer, swap around and keep it spicy during the long grind.

But.... Virtuoso doesn't fix that either? Condi firebrand deals pretty much the same damage as condi virtuoso while also having utility.

I don't think anybody in this thread was under any delusion that anet would suddenly do massive mesmer reworks based on forum input, they don't even do small number changes based on forum input. But like I said in my first post, doing these is pretty fun, and for others I imagine it's good for venting, thinking about could-have-beens. Who knows, it might even help illustrate some common feedback points, such as how the fact Virtuoso is cloneless isn't what people are upset about.

I'm not sure if this is what OP intended, but in my own view I think aiming for an unique role for each E-spec might not be feasible in the long run. It's definitely something important to consider if possible, but much more important that that in my opinion is making sure each spec plays differently, even when filling the same role.

While I have absolutely zero expectations that Anet will pay attention to either mine or your rework concepts, I do have a lot of fun coming up with these, so here are my takes. Chronomancer Mirage Virtuoso

Condition outdamages power while also having slightly more survivability, but you're gonna struggle with sustaining yourself regardless since it's a glass e-spec.

Based on these, I think what you're looking for is a sort of bruiser/juggernaut gameplay, where you got the defense to go up to the enemies and scrap with them directly, and the offense to dish out as much as you can take. If I'm right, I think you might enjoy Reaper. Obviously you're gonna trade some damage for that tankiness, but last I checked Necro and Reaper still deal respectable damage with a good build, and probably most importantly I think it'd feel good to play for you.

My brother in Christ they don't do frequent balance changes for any mode, PvE OR PvP. And when they do they miss the mark 95% of the times. You think them raising a couple numbers twice a year in PvP is a sign of love or something? That number raise was probably for something that didn't need a raise at all, and is just gonna perpetuate some balance issue. You got this mad vendetta against PvP for some weird kitten reason when really it's just Anet being bad at balance in general, nothing to do with PvP.

Given that it's on the illusion line, and that since the trait is being baked into scepter by default so it doesn't need to be about scepter anymore, I'd like a trait that decreases shatter cooldown by maybe 1 second for each clone you summon while having maximum clones out. Couple that with a tweak to virtuoso that lets you replace blades when stocking past the 5th, and boom, you got an amazing new trait that even synergizes greatly with virtuoso.

"Precious PvP" when spvp is a rotting corpse that they didn't even bother taking outside to bury. If you think balance in organized PvE is bad I assure you it's not because of pvp, because it sure as kitten isn't better there and they have not cared about it being better for several years

I can't really source it since I don't remember where I heard it, but I heard the original mesmer dev returned to the team around the same time EoD released. If that's true, hopefully we may see some improvements soon (though it kinda feels like a last hope).

In line with a comment I made in another thread, having this variation isn't inherently bad design. When it comes to designing skill requirements for classes, there's really only two criteria you should absolutely meet: the effort required to play a class should be proportional to the performance it can produce, and the lowest skill requirement class should still be relevant to the game. In other words, as long as the hardest to play class gets proportionally the best results when played optimally, and the easiest to play class can still pass all performance checks in the game (i.e. it is viable), then there's no foul play at hand. You'd be able to play any class you like, but get rewarded for putting in the effort into the harder classes. Easy classes/builds should of course be an option, but they should perform worse than harder ones, otherwise why bother putting in the effort at all? That being said, catalyst doesn't perform well enough to justify the amount of effort you need to put into it. Regarding autos, like you said optimal play wouldn't rely on them, so there's no real reason to have them be so weak either. Having autos be a bit better wouldn't really make catalyst stronger, it'd just make it less weak.

I disagree. High skill ceiling is a perfectly valid design option. The issue here is that high-effort should imply high-reward; in other words, playing catalyst (and elementalist as a whole for that matter) optimally should result in a higher dps or some other metric of efficiency than certain other classes, because to play cata/ele optimally is a lot harder and require more effort than said classes. However, for some ungodly reason Anet took the optimal performance of cata as an absolute, without any context. Was catalyst benchmark too strong? If you remove all context, then yea it probably was. But if you consider that to reach that benchmark in a real-combat situation you'd need to work *so hard*, know the class *so deeply*, and have the fight itself align into a situation *so specific* that it'd be downright impossible to actually hit those numbers in a real fight, then no, not at all, those numbers were fine, or at the very least not deserving of that big of a nerf. If you design a class to be more difficult than most to play optimally, it should perform better than most when played optimally, this is game design 101.

Zero synergy with the rest of the class seems to be the name of the game for this expansion's e-specs.

Bouncing so fast between /jk and /srs that you reached a quantum state.

When I first saw catalyst I was quite excited, it seemed like some sort of techno-mage and the concept of gathering energy and using the ball to release made me think it'd be like "switch attunements to gather energy over time, then spend all energy on a big aoe burst", kinda like a caster bladesworn even? But then it was just... a field. You make fields. They don't even do damage they're just there for the combo fields, man I deflated fast. Virtuoso and Catalyst are definitely the two least interesting specs out of the bunch for me.

To be honest, with shatters having been central to mesmer since.... ever, virtuoso isn't doing anything different, it's just the same but now you don't have clones, that's all. That being said, at least it didn't get nerfed first patch out like catalyst did, I definitely commiserate with my fellow elementalists.

I'd absolutely love to have a dedicated healer mesmer e-spec, healers are always my favourite role to fill in rpgs, but honestly trying to make chrono a healer on the same level as druid or specter would feel rather tacked on and shoehorned in my opinion. It'd end up unstable and hard to balance, probably becoming either overloaded like firebrand or overnerfed so it doesn't excel on anything in particular, unless of course it got a *deep* rework; traits, mechanics and all. I really don't like how chrono's main role has been bounced around so much, from tank, to boon support, to pDPS, all the while anet keeps nerfing all sides leaving the job teetering on the brink of irrelevance, adding heal to that without reworking the rest of the espec might just push it over the top and have a-net nerf it to nothingness. I'd much rather they streamlined the espec, in particular the traits, to focus on at most 2 aspects. They clearly can't handle more than that.

Infinite Horizon being a minor in particular is something that I've been wanting since Mirage release. It's just way too central to the mirage identity not to be a thing. Another thing that could be interesting for Chrono is if they split the traitlines into pure support, with alacrity and quickness but low dps, and an offensive/debuffing traitline with things like slow, chill, and danger time but little to no support, so you can choose to either be a really good support with low dps/cc, or a really good dps/debuffer but selfish gameplay. Would at the very least solve the debacle of chrono having dps and quickness/alacrity all under one roof.

Honestly, I think chrono might be the hardest to correct, cuz the concept of chronomancers is something really hyped up and unique so they gotta work twice as hard to deliver on the idea. Compared to a class theme that's just flinging magic blades around it's more of a challenge to live up to the expectations. Hell, I'm getting more of a kick out of the Virtuoso concept in Elden Ring than in gw2 right now. Of course if the idea is just to make it usable rather than interesting then ya, chrono's a lot easier to salvage then.

oops, didn't notice new patch notes were already mentioned here.

The playstyle is barely any different than core mesmer, especially compared to other especs like necro to reaper or scourge, or engineer to holosmith. Visual effects are quite pretty yes. Having an interesting theme is worthless if the theme is poorly executed, as it was. If anything I rather have a dull, well executed theme than an interesting but poorly developed one. An interesting theme that's not explored properly will just leave people wanting and wondering on what could have been. And most importantly, the fact that other e-specs in the expansion are kitten doesn't make virtuoso any less kitten. I have tried a number of the other e-specs during the betas and found them severely lacking too, but that sure as hell didn't make me feel any better about virtuoso, it just made me feel worse about the game as a whole.