Imagine if Virtuoso got even a fraction of effort that bladesworn/vindicator/catalyst got.

[Kaioh.7598]

8 hours ago, Daishi.6027 said:

Hot take: Virtuoso PvP would be fine in competitive modes if it had the mobility that was gutted from Mirage, and could fire blades behind itself.

We lose quick mirror blade combo, Distortion is now a block, We lose IP, We can't stagger dazes on F3, and we still have to deal with the lame lines of core that takes 2 to get 1 thing to work effectively. (except for maybe stealth on chaos if we put our utilities into it)

Meanwhile in exchange we get a supply of 2 extra ammo for our F1-F4 skills, and keep in mind there is no actual genuine power increase; 3 blades Bladesong Harmony is equal to 3 Illusion mind wrack. Which means we don't actually get 2 ammo supply; we get 1 since we lose IP.

In addition we lose the weakness that comes with clones garbage AI (can't be cleaved or manipulated with LoS, etc), while gaining all the weaknesses of projectile combat. 

Everything above is a arguably a net negative, and at even if it were a net positive Mesmer is no longer a worse thief; it's a worse ranger with less evasion... Where I guess we can spec into benefits for being close up with ranged weapons, which need I remind you we only have one baseline melee weapon. 

I get that A-net doesn't want to give us dodges, because look how well that turned out for Power Mirage. It's clear A-net doesn't really want to give mesmer frequent stealth just long cooldown stealth. However, it needs some way to survive, it needs a way to feel fun in the ebb and flow of combat and be somewhat slippery. So what it needs is teleports and to be able to fire blades without facing the target.

I look at it this way: If a Deadeye can do massive damage and hold that position over an incredibly long period of time from stealth, whiff; then try again. Virtuoso can have soft survivability and fling blades at it's targets while trying to play keep away; balanced by the fact that it can't instant burst, Reflect counters, and targeted ranged attacks will still land unless clever use of terrain. (also this would still need to be better than blink+unnerfed jaunt) Then even if it doesn't offer anything for PvE it would still be fun to play and as effective as it currently is in a damage role.

This hits the nail on the head for me. I think a good elite spec design would offer a trade-off where some aspect of the core profession would be sacrificed in order to gain access to something new and powerful.  The fact of the matter is that in its current design, Virtuoso gives up too much, without really gaining anything in return. 

Core Mesmer has so much of its strength baked into its clones, and it’s going to take a lot more than two extra blade charges to compensate for losing them. 
 

It’s going to have to be a pass for me. Hopefully chrono/mirage can remain competitive against a potential power creep 🤷🏻‍♂️ 

Edited September 27, 2021 by Kaioh.7598

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

You are more than welcome to have Dragon Trigger instead, because all the thought that went into that was how to make it utter garbage in competitive play.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

simple design is better than gimmicky new mechanics. Virtuoso is far better than vindicator and bladesworn

[Lincolnbeard.1735]

57 minutes ago, Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

simple design is better than gimmicky new mechanics. Virtuoso is far better than vindicator and bladesworn

Is it tho?

Again helseth couldn't kill kitten with Virt.

Already saw Vaans winning some fights with bladesworn.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

18 minutes ago, Lincolnbeard.1735 said:

Is it tho?

Again helseth couldn't kill kitten with Virt.

Already saw Vaans winning some fights with bladesworn.

Design wise yes, virtuoso is one of the best specs so far. Balance doesnt really matter at this point because its beta. And i was doing huge damage with virtuoso, not sure what builds helseth was using.

[Leonidrex.5649]

12 hours ago, Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

Design wise yes, virtuoso is one of the best specs so far. Balance doesnt really matter at this point because its beta. And i was doing huge damage with virtuoso, not sure what builds helseth was using.

I played and it was tragic.
I think if they fix all the bugs, and make skills work virt might be playable, usable meme build that can troll up to p1/p2.
But against good players it will be unusable 

[Lincolnbeard.1735]

13 hours ago, Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

Design wise yes, virtuoso is one of the best specs so far. Balance doesnt really matter at this point because its beta. And i was doing huge damage with virtuoso, not sure what builds helseth was using.

What's good in the design? It's not a matter of balance. Bladesworn is a matter of balance, change numbers such as damage, faster resource, and hitbox on the ranged dragon trigger thing and it's good to go.

Virt on the other hand you can change numbers all you want, it will always be flawed because the whole concept is kitten.

As for helseth he tried a bunch of builds.

And no, you werent doing huge damage, you were doing tops and if all stars aligned and everything crit 12k 5blades F1

I can do the same with two clones and IP, faster, more reliably and with better both sustain and sustain damage.

 

Edited September 28, 2021 by Lincolnbeard.1735

[Reteiel.7063]

Wouldn't it be more interesting if you could, for example, fire one blade at the time and then shatter them for different effects based on the types of blades fired?

Doesn't have to be anything too complex but as it virtuoso seems rather lackluster, which sucks cause the concept is interesting.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

3 hours ago, Lincolnbeard.1735 said:

What's good in the design? It's not a matter of balance. Bladesworn is a matter of balance, change numbers such as damage, faster resource, and hitbox on the ranged dragon trigger thing and it's good to go.

Virt on the other hand you can change numbers all you want, it will always be flawed because the whole concept is kitten.

As for helseth he tried a bunch of builds.

And no, you werent doing huge damage, you were doing tops and if all stars aligned and everything crit 12k 5blades F1

I can do the same with two clones and IP, faster, more reliably and with better both sustain and sustain damage.

 

Bladesworn is terrible design. You have 2 different special weapons you have to swap to, and one of them needs to be charged up with a stationary channel. Im not saying virtuoso is perfect but at least its designed to have counterplay and doesnt force some gimmicky mechanic on you. And i guess i must have been seeing things when i could burst an average of 30 stacks of confusion and 1 shot necros.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

5 hours ago, Leonidrex.5649 said:

I played and it was tragic.
I think if they fix all the bugs, and make skills work virt might be playable, usable meme build that can troll up to p1/p2.
But against good players it will be unusable 

I agree that it still needs a lot of work, but the people who call it useless never understood how to play/build it.

[Esorono.1039]

As someone who flips between pretty much all the professions on a drop of the hat and has pretty much every profession at level 80 with multiple builds for each, I feel I can safely say, they are all pretty much all equally as bad. Most aren't even competing with their other two specs, and more so competing with their core spec, some of the core specs are doing better than their EoD E-Spec. They are flashy but don't really have any sustenance to them. Like for example, Dragon Slash looks amazing on first glance until you realize the set up required to do it, and what you have to give up to achieve it. Vindicator looks amazing, but almost all of its traits exist to patch up a problem itself created, and is clunky with the dual utility specs. I haven't played much of Catalyst, but just from playing around with it for like an hour that it was the worst E-Spec, hammer was slow and clunky, its third skill on all of hammer's attunements lasted for too short of a time, its class mechanic is to create a combo field which it is already good at doing to begin with, and its traits are focused mostly around auras which is what Tempest does.

The first three shown may be simple, but they did open up some options the professions did not have before. Virtuoso does not have to rely on AI, which is a good thing in certain situations. Harbinger and Willbender get mobility which isn't something they had much of before this. Sure the first three also needs a lot of work, especially Willbender, but in terms of having their own identity, I feel the first three feel more complete in a way of 'What does this profession not have that would be useful to it?' rather than this batch which is 'What would be flashy and different?'

They are all terrible compared to the PoF and HoT specs though. I'mma pass on all of them in their current state.

[Lincolnbeard.1735]

2 hours ago, Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

Bladesworn is terrible design. You have 2 different special weapons you have to swap to, and one of them needs to be charged up with a stationary channel. Im not saying virtuoso is perfect but at least its designed to have counterplay and doesnt force some gimmicky mechanic on you. And i guess i must have been seeing things when i could burst an average of 30 stacks of confusion and 1 shot necros.

Naa, bladesworn is fine as long as it channels faster and/or the damage gets higher and it is actually fun to play.

Virt has couterplay yeah, in fact it is all it has.

You could put up 40 stacks of confusion and it is a bug since F2 hits twice when you're inside the enemy model.

 

When the best GW2 player called it trash... according to your own words guess he just have to understand it and l2p.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

1 hour ago, Lincolnbeard.1735 said:

When the best GW2 player called it trash... according to your own words guess he just have to understand it and l2p.

Well im the best virtuoso main NA so yep.

[Lincolnbeard.1735]

2 hours ago, Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

Well im the best virtuoso main NA so yep.

Impressive! That's like what, a EU gold tier 1 Virt!

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

23 minutes ago, Lincolnbeard.1735 said:

Impressive! That's like what, a EU gold tier 1 Virt!

now you are just being jealous.

[AXLIB.8425]

the amount of people defending virtuoso's mechanic is honestly disheartening. as of right now, virtuoso is just soulbeast without merge. imagine soulbeast but instead of merging with a pet, they only get to choose a pet that don't participate in fights and only get to use the same skill the pet already have but with themselves. the only good thing about dagger replacement of clone is that it persist out of combat, not the worst but there is a problem if you are only selling a fix for the inconvenience you created and nothing else, instead of actually addressing the problem in any meaningful way

Edited September 28, 2021 by AXLIB.8425

[Mik.3401]

8 hours ago, Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

Bladesworn is terrible design. You have 2 different special weapons you have to swap to, and one of them needs to be charged up with a stationary channel. Im not saying virtuoso is perfect but at least its designed to have counterplay and doesnt force some gimmicky mechanic on you. And i guess i must have been seeing things when i could burst an average of 30 stacks of confusion and 1 shot necros.

Yeah I agree condi virtuoso can be powerful against people who don’t know how the game works, but so is any other glass build let’s face it. Chrono can obliterate some unexperienced teams but still it is just non-existent in ATs or higher ranks because it just doesn’t have sustain and has too much counterplay.

I think what Mesmer needs is an actual  competitive build besides power block mirage which is just so boring at this point.

Especially in the current, stacked meta putting out a Mesmer without clones with long cast times and obligation to take a distortion utility skill (one other obligatory utility is blink - yay so much for fun variety in builds) is just brutal. Choosing it for a match is like a suicide mission if you play against someone at least decent 

Edited September 28, 2021 by Mik.3401

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

1 hour ago, Mik.3401 said:

Yeah I agree condi virtuoso can be powerful against people who don’t know how the game works, but so is any other glass build let’s face it. Chrono can obliterate some unexperienced teams but still it is just non-existent in ATs or higher ranks because it just doesn’t have sustain and has too much counterplay.

I think what Mesmer needs is an actual  competitive build besides power block mirage which is just so boring at this point.

Especially in the current, stacked meta putting out a Mesmer without clones with long cast times and obligation to take a distortion utility skill (one other obligatory utility is blink - yay so much for fun variety in builds) is just brutal. Choosing it for a match is like a suicide mission if you play against someone at least decent 

Virtuoso definitely has big weaknesses and i doubt it would be meta. Its more like DH than anything, very good in ranked & unranked but easy to counter with a bit of coordination.

[draxynnic.3719]

On 9/27/2021 at 6:14 PM, Levetty.1279 said:

I was talking about PvE but in PvP Virtuoso is still bad. Problem with Virtuoso in PvP is that it does less then core Mesmer. All it has is damage so for the damage to justify everything it loses in PvP then Virtuoso would have to be able to run around one shotting things at 1200 range. Do you really think they would let a class run around instantly deleting classes from 1200 range for long?

Well, the rest of the discussion seemed to be pretty much PvP focused. But I'd say that Dragon Slash being good in PvE only because they've scaled up the numbers to a degree that could never even be imagined in competitive isn't exactly a mark in favour of bladesworn being well designed in comparison.

 

I don't think Virtuoso needs to be able to run around one-shotting things at 1200 range. The target would probably be somewhere around the capabilities of longbow ranger.  

On 9/27/2021 at 6:14 PM, Levetty.1279 said:

There is no synergy, no interesting ways it combines with other skills or traits. In the comparison to flow you are forgetting all the on summon traits that don't work properly with blades. We'll presume bugs get fixed but then we are back to the topic of Jagged Mind which does what sharpened edge should do for Virtuoso so we can only presume a lot of traits are now not meant to effect blades which in turn means a lot of core Mes stuff is just useless on Virtuoso.

Then the traits need to be fixed so that they do work. This isn't a problem with the overall design concept of the elite, it's more work needing to be done on those specific traits that aren't working.

 

Jagged Mind, and condition damage on virtuoso in general, is problematic, I'd agree. But again, this doesn't mean the whole thing is broken. And you're much more likely to get improvements by focusing on constructive criticism because ArenaNet hasn't tossed out an entire elite specialisation and started anew based on "it sucks, I hate it" feedback yet.

On 9/27/2021 at 6:14 PM, Levetty.1279 said:

You are forgetting with IP we can use on shatter traits whenever we want.

The only shatter trait that matters if you're dry-firing shatters apart from F4 and there isn't an enemy within 240 is 

On 9/27/2021 at 6:14 PM, Levetty.1279 said:

Bladesong damage is a design issue. Both how much damage per blade and as I said about PvP above in this post.

Which I discussed previously. Damage per blade is roughly comparable to damage per clone with regular mesmer. Regular mesmer treats itself as a clone, and thus is equivalent to four blades if in melee. And if the clones survive, which isn't a question that has to be asked at all with daggers.

On 9/27/2021 at 6:14 PM, Levetty.1279 said:

Problem is that Virtuoso doesn't do anything that core Mesmer doesn't do either. Except add a weapon with a bit of close to mid range cleave and 3 new weapon skills don't make an elite spec.

* Can carry resources for shattering from one fight to another.

* Not affected by clone hate.

* F1-F3 shatters do not require going to point blank range to have full effect (because IP).

* Less lag time between activation and effect for F1-F3 when at long range (unless you're running chrono with Time Catches Up, haven't done that comparison)

 

Broad themes: Avoids the weaknesses of relying on clones, more oriented towards longer-range combat (no, having a spread skill that can do more damage at close range doesn't change that, it's fairly common for ranged weapons to have one or two skills that offer just a bit of a boost at closer ranges).

On 9/27/2021 at 6:24 PM, Yoci.2481 said:

People who I've never seen post on the Mesmer forum before come here and write whole essays explaining to us why Virtuoso is actually fine and we are just stupid for not seeing its greatness. Seems legit.

If that's directed at me, I take breaks from the forums occasionally, particularly when there's nothing much interesting happening and I have other things to do. So sue me.

 

If we were to play that game, I could point out that many of the people claiming that other elite specs are great compared to Virtuoso are pretty much nonexistent in other profession forums, and if we were to assume that post history indicated anything about play history, that this implies a certain lack of perspective regarding the state of other professions. But I prefer to avoid relying on ad hominem arguments.

 

The ugly truth is that all of the EoD elites have problems. Virtuoso's, though, mostly appear to be tuning issues (although now that I've got a bit more free time than I've had over most of the past month, I should really see if I can chase up what Helseth has been saying, since it hasn't come up in my feed organically yet). Personally, I found it to be the most fun and the second most powerful of them (although the latter is not a high bar, I think ALL the EoD elite specs were weak in PvP compared to established builds). 

[Mik.3401]

12 hours ago, Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

Virtuoso definitely has big weaknesses and i doubt it would be meta. Its more like DH than anything, very good in ranked & unranked but easy to counter with a bit of coordination.

Sort of yeah, DH has trapper rune at least though which makes it viable. 
 

Maybe a way to fix virtuoso is to give it traps I think I hit the nail on the head here haha

[Lincolnbeard.1735]

7 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

 

Which I discussed previously. Damage per blade is roughly comparable to damage per clone with regular mesmer. Regular mesmer treats itself as a clone, and thus is equivalent to four blades if in melee. And if the clones survive, which isn't a question that has to be asked at all with daggers.

* F1-F3 shatters do not require going to point blank range to have full effect (because IP).

* Less lag time between activation and effect for F1-F3 when at long range (unless you're running chrono with Time Catches Up, haven't done that comparison)

 

No it is not. 3 clone shatter (without IP) = 5 blades. If all stars align. More often than not you'll be critting 6k which is  less than 2 clones shatter.

The no requiring PB range one is brilliant and shows how few you know about mesmers.

For one you'll burst less without the setup from F3 which is impossible on Virt, since F3 serves as both to bonus damage and to stack vulnerability. So no you won't have the full effect never.

The other thing is you still need to F1 from PB range because Virt F1 is trash that can be sidestepped.

And last but not least you need to be on melee still since ranged weapons suck on Virt.

Less lag time between activation and effect. - No, first cast time which mesmer doesn't have, second flying time, and last like I said before it's purely a clone positioning issue.

[otto.5684]

Personally, Virtuso is my favorite of the new elites so far. It has issues, but people forget that this is beta. 

[Levetty.1279]

12 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Then the traits need to be fixed so that they do work. This isn't a problem with the overall design concept of the elite, it's more work needing to be done on those specific traits that aren't working.

And as I said, every indication points at them not wanting the traits to work with blades.

12 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

* Can carry resources for shattering from one fight to another.

* Not affected by clone hate.

* F1-F3 shatters do not require going to point blank range to have full effect (because IP).

* Less lag time between activation and effect for F1-F3 when at long range (unless you're running chrono with Time Catches Up, haven't done that comparison)

*Really not that big  of a deal since traditional Mesmer PvP builds build for instantly getting 3 clones out and shattering. Any builds that didn't tended to benefit just as much from having the clones out attacking as from shattering

*Nice in theory but since they didn't replace clones with anything its similar to getting rid of your car and walking everywhere so that your not affected by road tax.

*Not really less lag time since the projectiles are so slow.

12 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

no, having a spread skill that can do more damage at close range doesn't change that,

Dagger is more like Engineer rifle then Ranger Longbow like you brought up before. 2 only works at melee range, hell it doesn't even have the full 5 projectiles of  something like Ranger Axe meaning there are big gaps in the area it hits the further away it goes, and 3's speed means it really only works up to midrange. The Auto attack is 1200 range but is closer to a tickle then a punch.

 

12 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

And you're much more likely to get improvements by focusing on constructive criticism because ArenaNet hasn't tossed out an entire elite specialisation and started anew based on "it sucks, I hate it" feedback yet.

There has been lots of constructive criticism in several threads and on reddit. Just because you don't want to read it doesn't mean it isn't there. Honestly though beta or not we shouldn't need to tell them that "core but with half of its tool kit ripped out" isn't an elite spec. 

Edited September 29, 2021 by Levetty.1279

[Levetty.1279]

On 9/28/2021 at 2:21 PM, Esorono.1039 said:

Virtuoso does not have to rely on AI, which is a good thing in certain situations.

Why does everybody forget about Phantasms? I don't hate them but they cause far more problems for Mesmer then clones ever did. This wouldn't be a problem but it seems Anet has forgotten about them too. A phantasmless or illusionless spec would make far more sense then a cloneless spec.