Expanded Weapon Proficiencies Beta Feedback: Mesmer

[Arknoodle.6914]

Love the rifle, heal Chrono feels awesome in pve

Only request would be to make the portal from rifle 5 usable in down state. 

The hero play of saving an out of position player kind of falls short when they die during the projectile travel time and heal necros can reposition multiple down states, seems reasonable for Mesmer, the master of portals, to be able to do it also.

[glenndevis.8327]

Yeah I kinda wish the rifle 5 portal would be usable when downed. Either that or the portal needs to last longer and the skill needs to fire faster.

I also kinda wish that the phantasm was a ground target ability that spawns a phantasm that maybe pulses healing or barrier or something supportive.

[Lincolnbeard.1735]

From a wvw  standpoint:
The blast skill is the only decent one.

Tried rifle 4 into quickness on weapon swamp gs combo, 4 takes so much time to hit that one might even take a kitten while waiting.

[Micah.3789]

After testing and reading all the feedback, I have some suggestions to fix the skills:

Skill 1: AA is fine, but maybe reduce the healing just a smidge? Mirage ambush should have a boon extension or provide alacrity.

Skill 2: - Lower the healing and increase the CD to 8s
            - Remove the regen (it invalidates the chaos traits)
            - Speed it up
            - Summon an additional clone if you hit an enemy. This will help with clone generation, but require conditional play that makes it less abusable.

Skill 3: - Lower the healing
            - Have the pool pulse the boons over 4s. If detonated, heal and grant all remaining boons, but this adds 8(?)s to the CD.

Skill 4: Mostly fine, could be faster.

Skill 5: Kinda janky skill. Aside from overhauling it entirely: Give the mesmer the option to activate the portal the same way an ally would, therefor not teleporting. This would instead generate a clone and not increase the CD.

Thoughts?

Edited November 29, 2023 by Micah.3789

[Psycoprophet.8107]

Rifle 5 is far to niche. Make it so mesmer drops portal at ground location AND at its feet allowing 2 way portal, increase portal limit to 3 people. This way skill would actually see use, right now it's almost a waste of a skill 5. Improve its clone generation and add alacrity to mirage ambush. Rifle would be viable and fun with these changes.

Edited November 29, 2023 by Psycoprophet.8107

[Curunen.8729]

On the side note of mirage and alacrity, I still find it annoying that all deception cooldowns were nerfed and then "remedied" by shoehorning alacrity on one weapon because of the nonsense homogenised role system in instanced pve that has developed (fair enough it's better than everyone going berserker, but now there's a different kind of monotony). And that mirage was moved away from its initial intended function as a highly evasive damage dealer being a hybrid of mesmer/thief, to justify virtuoso's existence...

Anyway, back to rifle - surely there should be scope to allow the player to decide how to use the weapon via stats? Why can't there be greater scaling with healing power, or damage stats so that you can build for dps or for healing? I don't understand why weapons like this have to be forced into one use only, when shouldn't the point of the stat system be to give the player this freedom.

Edited November 29, 2023 by Curunen.8729

[Ravenwulfe.5360]

Why is the ambush skill for a mirage just a fury granter? Shouldn't this offer up a more important buff like protection or an alternative way to apply alacrity at this point? I don't get this idea that ANet wants to give support power to classes that are lacking it or lacking it in ways, but give weapons that are not supplying the support abilities everyone is demanding of their support - IE quickness, alacrity, protection, and even aegis. having the ambush on the rifle just be a fury generator doesn't seem to be good for anyone at all.

Clone generation needs to be addressed as well. So far this seems subpar for mirages, which rely on ambushing, decent for chronos and... not sure what for virtuoso.

[Teknomancer.4895]

Re skill 5, one option to replace the portal that might be interesting would be targeting downed players as has been mentioned many times here, but instead of beaming them to you, you swap places with the downed player and throw a few stacks of confusion on nearby enemies. Just be ready to change to your secondary weaponset as soon as you arrive, or whatever downed them might get you too. 😜

Also, I'm a little confused by all the Mirage remarks in here. The stand-still-and-ground-target rifle just seems incredibly ill-suited to the highly mobile Mirage design, almost as wrong as giving a glassy ranged Virt a melee hammer. Just...why? I guess I just don't understand why people would think it would be good, instead of impeding one of the espec's key features?

Edited November 30, 2023 by Teknomancer.4895
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[Teknomancer.4895]

On second thought, never mind. Just DEL skill 5 and drop the warrior's Rifle Butt skill in there as-is, but with like sparkles and pink butterflies and kitten.

[ShadowKatt.6740]

27 minutes ago, Teknomancer.4895 said:

On second thought, never mind. Just DEL skill 5 and drop the warrior's Rifle Butt skill in there as-is, but with like sparkles and pink butterflies and kitten.

The weird thing is that of all the skills on the rifle, and I'm still formulating my thoughts before I drop my own opinions in here, I actually want to keep that one. Is it useless? Eh.....yeah, yeah it is. I want to see it improved, however, not replaced. I wouldn't mind seeing it be just a Lesser Portal. Regular portal is 5000 range and 20 uses. I would be FINE if they reduced that to a quarter, 1250 range and 5 uses, and I think that would be just dandy. It's thematic, it's useful...ish. I think it's fine. I think there are far more egrigious problems with the rifle than that.

[Teknomancer.4895]

1 hour ago, ShadowKatt.6740 said:

Is it useless? Eh.....yeah, yeah it is. I want to see it improved, however, not replaced.

Singularity Shot definitely deserves a rework and eventual use as a new Utility skill, but it's just not ready for prime time and IMO it doesn't really make sense as a weapon skill. I like the core idea but it's just not done cooking yet. The fact that there are so many good ideas floating around here for improving it speaks to that, I think.

Part of the problem with the rifle skills is that despite the obvious overthinking that went into them, they don't really feel Mesmeric. More identity-flattening at work, I suspect.

Anyway they apparently got so hung up on Inspiration and Illusions that they seem to have forgotten all about Chaos, which is definitely Our Thing. I'd rework the lot as follows:

1. Friendly Fire: Keep it (including the low dmg), add a random condition to enemies (to slightly boost overall DPS), convert to cone AoE blast instead of single-target. The ability to perform different actions per target's alignment to the player already exists in Mirror Blade, so differentiating target type in a cone AoE instead of a bounce shouldn't be terribly different.
2. Inspiring Imagery: Moved from slot 3. Keep it, extend duration to 3 sec. to allow for more tactical use, randomize boons/condis.
3. Journey: Moved from slot 2. Keep it, but create the clone at the target location instead. On flip: Trade places with the clone, inflict X stacks of Confusion on nearby enemies.
4. Phantasmal Sharpshooter: Increase spawn speed, firing speed and DPS. MORE POWER!!!
5. Rifle Butt: Stolen as-is and unchanged from Core Warrior's rifle, but add pink sparkly broken-glass butterfly GFX/SFX and grant yourself Chaos Shield on impact. Maybe reduce the strike dmg a bit to compensate for the bonus effect.

Because Chaos is the Mesmer's friend the random condis can help make up for this thing's pathetic damage output, the flip skill gives it some tactical mobility by using the existing mechanic from the MH sword (even using the same skill slot), and stealing the Warrior's near-perfect but woefully underutilized Rifle Butt skill gives it at least a little bit of self-defense utility.

Edited November 30, 2023 by Teknomancer.4895
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[glenndevis.8327]

Honestly the only thing the rifle portal needs to become decent is be usable when downed.

Like I get what it's intended to be and I LOVE the idea. But with the way it's implemented it's almost never going to be used that way.
1) It's slow (first you need to fire it, then once it's there you need to activate it again to make the portal)
2) if you wanting to use it on someone who's out of position they're probably too confused or panicking or not paying attention to be like yeah right lelts click this portal to be where i have to be.
3) people die too fast to be able to use it to save & get them to your location before they down.

Some ways they could fix this:

If they'd allow players to use the portal when downed that would increase the usefulness and make up for the skill being slow. 
Even better, when you reactivate 5 on a person who's downed or if they get downed on the radius of the reactivated 5 they get forcefully teleported  if they really don't want to allow players to interact with anything when downed.

ALSO If a living person takes the portal they get a heal or if a downed person gets teleported the skill slowly helps revive the downed person.

I think they've been way too careful with this skill limiting it in so many ways so players won't be able to abuse it in an weird way to the point it's nearly useless.
Especially considering the barrier on the first use is actually pretty decent so IF you ever feel the need to save someone it's most likely going to be on cooldown and by the time it's up they're most likely either already ran back to the group or already down/dead/safe.

[Varis.5467]

From a wvw group and roaming perspective:

As a mesmer, a class with no dedicated support spec, unlike the Druid, the Firebrand and even the Spectre, I don't want to support my team-mates by bailing them out one at a time. 

If I am providing 'support' as a mesmer, I want to set up wins for my team, ideally ending with the enemies' retreat if not defeat so we can carry out the objective before encounter. 

It achieves absolutely nothing if I am just 'bailing' someone out from a point or just being a half kitten healer (and also a sitting duck with zero damage) . 

[Fractal.9214]

22 hours ago, ZephidelGRS.9520 said:

Skill 5: Please also add in the function where if you shoot it at a downed ally, they're instantly teleported to you without needing their key input. This will only work on downed allies to prevent trolling. Also Mesmer doesn't have a res pull, this will be the perfect place for it. 

I actually really like this idea of it being added in. It could easily serve both functions without breaking anything. Manual portaling as is for those niche situations it might find use, but being able to pull a downed ally would be beautiful, just make a downed body within radius take priority and only manual portal if there's none. It'd help a lot in certain floors of fractals for sure that way (i.e. spinny axes of "screw you if you down in this circle")

[draxynnic.3719]

13 hours ago, ShadowKatt.6740 said:

THEN GO PLAY THE CHRONO! I'm sorry, but I just...I've read all the comments here and this has pushed me to the breaking point. When did the Mirage become the ONLY kind of Mesmer worth playing? Why does everything have to cater to the Mirage? When did this become the way Guild Wars works? It used to be that one of the great things about Guild Wars was diversity, and when one build became overwhelmingly mainstream it was nerfed back a bit or broken completely, but lately that's changed. Alac Mirage, whatever it is that Firebrands do, these have been dominant for so long the entire game has congealed like festering pus around them, and rather than nerfing them they've only been made stronger, and rather than the community seeking balance they've encouraged it.

I don't really care if the rifle gets Alacrity or not, but I WOULD like to see Alacrity stripped from every profession and spec in the game save for the Chrono where it belongs. The fact that people are actually complaining that it needs to be added so they can go play Mirage instead I think speaks volumes to the sheer depth of this problem because clearly people don't -want- to play the Chrono, and rather than make the Chrono better, we should just throw more boons at Mirage. Why not give the Mirage time rewinding too, and even throw in the Virtuosos daggers for good measure, just so we never have to use another build again.

Just tired of it.

You want to go back to the times when one out of every five endgame PvEers had to play chrono. Kek.

[Shaman.2034]

Heal quick chrono with the rifle is an absolute beast in PvE. The only part of the kit I think is lackluster is the portal on 5, I'd rather let it expire without flipping it to keep a lower cooldown on the AoE Barrier. The only thing I would consider adding is a way to revive allies faster, like how ele staff geyser can be traited to do that, but it's a very strong weapon already and pumps out a huge amount of burst and sustained healing. One single button supplies 100% Fury uptime, another single button supplies 100% Regeneration uptime, it's super easy to use and very effective. If it shipped exactly how it is now, I wouldn't complain at all

[Iustitian.9176]

- Skill 1 (Ambush): No channel bar while using and activation duration is only 1/4, but i need 1.5 seconds. Also it's too strong in comparation to greatsword ambush skill.
- Skill 4: No Projectile Combo Finisher info in tooltip

[Xzygy.1452]

WvW Zerg perspective here.  I'm a multiclass support, have played everything in the current meta extensively.  I design many of the builds for my guild and am constantly testing new ideas to find what others have missed.  For example, we had a highly effective willbender support in place of firebrand until alacrity share got split off and place in the same line as a core stability trait.  It had more cleanse, more than double the healing, and still maintained high stab uptime.

First off, there is a major design flaw with core mesmer that can't be addressed by a weapon, and if it were, the weapon would be massively overpowered in small scale pvp and probably pve.  Clones simply do not function in large scale fights, they vaporize immediately.  While there is a trait to give phantasms distortion, there is no such option for clones.  As a result, the only build that works well in the current meta is a chrono that shatters without clones for strip.  A simple solution to this would be for clones to gain distortion until shattered after they're killed.  This would eliminate the misdirection element, as the graphic is obvious, but preserve the core function of the clones as a mechanic so that shatters could be used consistently.  To my knowledge, there isn't counterplay that involves intentionally damaging clones or phantasms for resource denial, both are either ignored except to avoid the hit/shatter, or they killed passively with AoE.  Also, phantasms should spawn with distortion by default for 100% of their lifespan.  I should not have to trait to make my spells work.  Again, there is no intentional counterplay being damaged by this change, no meaningful decisions removed.  Without addressing this flaw, mesmer zerg play will continue to be degenerate in nature, as it relies on 0 clone shatters as a core source of strip.

Additionally, the combination of ranged attacking clones and melee focused Mirage rifle ambush means that we will not see Infinite Horizon played  consistently as a way to bolster healing throughput by stacking ambushes.  Recommend that you cause the clones to port to melee, or to the mesmer before they use their ambush.

In general, the multi-press abilities cause delay of critically important effects, as does the phantasm.  Healing is by definition reactionary, so there being delays on all primary healing sources precludes meaningful skill use and results in spamming a rotation of unnecessary heals, trying to predict incoming hits.  I would very much prefer that the effects be combined into one.  I like the attempt at introducing decision-making, but this is not how it plays in real fights.  I almost always 323, where I would separate the two abilities if I felt like I could rely on them more consistently, or if the ability either lasted longer, or left behind a residual effect that could be triggered for the duration of the cooldown in exchange for increasing the cooldown.  That might only be useful when stationary, though.

The phantasm stun is entirely ineffective.  Aside from it taking lethal damage, often before casting its effect, stuns need to be primarily used reactionary.  There's a cast time, then there's a summon animation, then the phantasm fires, then the travel time, and it's a projectile, then the stun. There may be a way to stack effects to make it useful, like timing it to land a shatter, but this is not a support function, and because clones can't be relied on, I'm not using these except 0 clone shatters to heal.  I'd really like to see this phantasm fire an arcing shot onto an area that cleanses conditions and not stun.

The 5 ability is very interesting, but I have yet to have anyone actually make use of it.  As is, I primarily use this when running away to shield myself and other players, then pop it to provide an escape for someone further behind than myself.  I've tried to use it proactively, but it relies on the person to click it, and they rarely notice it fast enough to take it.  I've watched many people die right on top of it without taking it, which is very frustrating.  I'd really like to see this effect changed to port a downed teammate to me.  This would preserve the rescue feel of it, while making it more consistently useful.

While I know this is beta and numbers are still being tuned, I feel that this feedback is also useful.  Cleanse needs to be increased significantly (20%+) for this build to be on par with other cleanse in wvw.  Healing needs to be about doubled for it to be on par with other cleanse according to my meters, **OR** give us another source of stability.  On heal maybe, since the other two are mobile.  Either make this viable for cleanse or make it a viable alternative to firebrand for consistent stability generation.  Rifle 4 or 5 would be excellent choices for this, and would provide us with 3 primary sources of group stability (Mantra, Distortion) with shatters used for small stab, like on a wall or while doing a ranged poke.  If this is done, the healing would need to remain about the same, the cleanse would actually need to be reduced, but we'd finally have a FB alternative.

I hope that this is useful feedback.

[Daje.4689]

Overall: As others have mentioned, this feels like weapon for Chrono only, but even there could be tuned to be more fun. Needs extra mobility, more damage, choice between strike/condi, or another oomf to be fun and fit non-chrono supp builds.

• There is zero synergy with virtuoso - no blades, no bleed, no blocking, strike damage out of range of Mental Focus trait. 
• For support Mirage the ambush needs to either grant quickness or alac, or provide a unique strong-suit regular aegis, regular stability, or something else that is super powerful. If it granted quickness around the user I could see it being an alternative or swap for staff. The high burst healing is nice, but Mirage traits don't offer boons to support a support build.
• On Chrono support:
  • It is difficult to keep up clone generation to spam shatters for boons, but there are few reactive choices: spamming abilities off cd rather than saving phantasms or time sink for when cc is needed. Quickness feels a little better than Alac imo, but both face the same issue.
  • From a player perspective, 100% boon upkeep will always win out against having cc available on demand.
• On Non-full-support:
  • phantasm cc is fun if not fully practical. The damage is slightly too low and speed of attacks also too slow for it to be practical or win over alternative options, and it offers no self-mobility.
• EDIT: Aside: These BETA tests should give characters legendary gear. It would make it easier to test builds and allow players who have never engaged in legendary gear to see what they are missing.

Individual skills:

Friendly Fire: Enjoyable but the damage is too low for non heal-focused builds. Ambush looks cool but fury doesn't fit gameplay goal. 

Journey:

• The animation is currently off, whereby the portal follows where the gun points, causing it to fly around as the character moves the gun.
• Pipe-dream: As a healer, it would be amazing if you could force clones to target an ally. (if no enemies were hit, the clone targets the lowest hp ally that was hit). That would also give the gameplay choice of (do I avoid damaging enemies to put a small focused healer on my ally)
• As the clone generator, a small bit of mobility might fit best here- a tiny blink backwards similar to staff for example.

Inspiring Imagery: The best designed skill - I would have no changes. The choice of "do I sacrifice might and fury upkeep in order for a large heal and chaos aura and blindness" is definitely worth considering the situation for.

Phantasmal Sharpshooter: Cool idea but a strict downgrade from pistol offhand. CC doesn't matter for support chronos due to phantasm spam. Low damage and easy to dodge attack makes it also week for non-supports. I would keep keep the animation but give it more damage or something else .. a push/pull? I'm not sure but it is missing something

Singularity Shot: Similar to Inspiring Imagery, I do think this is a well designed skill - however I think the portal duration should be increased since players are slow to respond and it only allows 1 player anyways - I don't see any reason not to have it last longer.

Edited November 30, 2023 by Daje.4689

[ACrowley.7698]

I like the concept!  But.... 2 things I don't like:  The CC on the phantasm, and the lack of block.

So 4 of the new rifle abilities are healing.  I really, really like that finally a mesmer will be able to play a proper support role. I've been waiting for this!  But isn't 4 heal abilties overkill?  Please change one of those 4 abilities into a block skill, so mesmer can stay being a proper tank in raids.  I know devs don't seem to care about raids at all anymore, but the player base still does.  So give the rifle a block, please.

Keep in mind as a boon support mesmer, we would be spamming those phantasms to upkeep our quickness or alacrity. So if you tie CC to an ability we are spamming to upkeep boon uptime, it's going to be hard to save it for a CC.  Why not put the CC on something else, like the clone?  Maybe this isn't a huge deal, because mesmer has other CC abilities. And this CC isn't that big... but there are times in the game we DO NOT want to CC, and times we need to save our CC for mechanics.  And putting the CC on an ability we need to spam off cooldown to upkeep our boons is a bad idea. That's what I think.  Please consider changing it.

[ShadowKatt.6740]

1 hour ago, ACrowley.7698 said:

 Please change one of those 4 abilities into a block skill, so mesmer can stay being a proper tank in raids.  I know devs don't seem to care about raids at all anymore, but the player base still does.  So give the rifle a block, please.

Evade would be better. For starters, we're mesmers. Mobility is kinda our thing, what with teleports and blinks and such. Something akin to Phase Retreat would be better, or given the portal guns proclivity already for teleporting, maybe swap us with, say, our furthest clone. I know that we have blocks, on the sword, the shield, and the..scepter...for reasons, but thematicly, some kind of evade would be more fitting.

[ShadowKatt.6740]

Alright, I think I've played around with this enough to give an opinion on it, so as with any proper analysis lets lay down some foundation. Firstly, all of my testing has been in PvE, and most of it in the Silverwastes which I felt gave a good mix of both solo and group play, and baddies of decent strength and resiliance(or excessive strength in some cases). For gear, Straight Celestial. Not exceptionally good at any one thing, so the rifle is what it is. Obviously with different armor, different stats it will be better at different things. But this is a baseline. I, as people have so effectively referred to it, camped this rifle. I relied on a staff in melee but otherwise maintained the rifle whenever possible. I did not shatter a great deal, only when opportunistic, relying on clones to stack damage and more importantly healing. And as stated I played both solo, with a partner, and with larger groups. So lets get into it.

Weapon overview and opinion

Spoiler

Friendly Fire: For starters, lets get into the Autoattack, Friendly Fire. I've never been a fan of split abilities. The idea of an attack that both harms enemies and heals allies at the same time is hardly new and usually comes with a tradeoff on both of them. I don't like that. Either pick one or the other and do that well, instead of doing both mediocre. That being said, it doesn't seem to function too badly. It stacks damage and seems to give some decent healing, to the point where my partner was able to facetank champions without worrying about their HP almost exclusively because of the constant healing. The damage wasn't that great BUT it's the basic autoattack. It is neither expected nor really desired to do that much damage; it just needs to be able to contribute, not excel, and it seems to do that. My only real complaint that comes with Friendly Fire are the clones. Clones serve a defensive purpose of hiding the mesmer by turning every fight into a deadly game of whack-a-mole, so it's generally accepted that a mesmer wants to autoattack to blend in with their own clones. Clones, however, always attack slower giving anyone with a keen eye the ability to pick out the real mesmer. However, the rifle attacks nearly twice as fast as the clones do making the mesmer blatantly obvious. This isn't the biggest problem, but it does run up against the theme and mechanics of the mesmer, and would be easily remedied by either slowing down the rifles AA (which would be less optimal) or speeding up the clones (more optimal), and numbers could be adjusted appropriately.

While we're discussing this though we have to talk about Effervescnece. I build my Mirage to capitalize on Ambushes, with more vigor for more endurance regen and other ways to refil endurance. On the plus side, the clones know that it's a 600 range ability and will do their best to make sure they're in range to use it, and it seems to do okay. Much like Journey though, discussed below, the damage is lacking making it difficult to take down targets even with multiple clones and multiple ambushes. This could be tuned up with gear, of course, but even then I expect that it would be underwhelming. Very pretty to look at, but all flash, little substance. The healing is the primary function, however I find that with the healing on the AA already being high enough to sustain multiple allies, the ambush is essentially gravy on top of a whole pile of healing. It's excessive, but if you need a burst of healing, there it is.

Journey: This is, as far as I see it, the bread and butter of the rifle. It's got the shortest cooldown, it has your clone generation that you need, and its your first damaging ability. So the good. It's got a decent cooldown that lets you use it often, and with a little utility clone generation can help you get up to three clones quickly enough, which is where we want to be. Now that's pretty much the end of the good, lets get to the bad. The clone generation isn't automatic. It is reliant on hitting either an enemy or an ally in order for that to happen. And on top of that it has nearly a full second lead time. In group play this isn't usually an issue since there's almost always going to be something to hit, but against single targets it's basically useless. Against a moving target it is absolutely useless, rendering your most used ability (off AA) situational at best. When it does hit, the damage is, frankly, pitiful. Again, this is an ability built to heal granting over 4x the healing as the damage it's doing AND regen on top of that. As with Effervescence, the word Excessive comes to mind. The other ability of Journey is the cripple it applies to any foe it hits. However, as stated above, with almost a full second lead time, it's difficult to actually hit something with it unless your target was standing still. So you can easily cripple targets that were already not moving, but you can't stop the targets that are. There is a desperate rework needed here.

Inspiring Imagery/Abstraction: This one's a mess. Looking at it it's obvious what the intention was. Another split ability, this one granting might and fury after a delay, making five targets inside its radius hit harder through more damage and more crits OR triggering early for a little damage and another burst of healing. Already we have Effervescence that gives a burst of healing and Journey that, when it hits, gives a burst of healing, and now we have another ability to give a burst of healing. It's now beyond excessive and becoming redundant. But that's the second ability, let's go back to the first. Granting Might and Fury....AFTER a two second delay. Before those two seconds this ability does literally nothing. That means that in the middle of a fight, where you would need it, much like Journey this skill is absolutely useless on anything other than a stationary target. If the battle is moving at all then there is zero chance of actually landing this, forcing you to detonate it early if you want to have any effect at all, so lets look at the secondary effect. Again, a fairly paltry about of damage and somewhere in the area of 4x that in healing, another burst heal bringing us up to 4 if we count Effervescence. To be the most fair I can be, it also blinds, negating the next attack income, and weakness which gives a 50% chance to do 50% less damage. A coin toss, not even guaranteed. SO it begs the question of where and when you would ever use this ability. Against a stationary target, targetting a stack of players to add Might and Fury to a group that is probaby already capped on Might and Fury, otherwise trying to land a lucky application on a smaller, more mobile group of players, or on a single target for barely passable damage.

Phantasmal Sharpshooter: The only purely offensive ability in the kit, but not one as bad as I think others have made it out to be, though far from perfect. Being purely offensive it has only two aspects to get into, damage and effect, so lets break it down. In terms of damage....it's bad. The phantasm does less damage than either Journey or Abstraction at more than double the casting time, but this could be easily remedied; this is the beta test of course. The second ability is is conditional applying 10 stacks of Vulnerability and 2 seconds of Daze. The former part of that is meaningless; in any group content there will automatically be 25 stacks of Vulnerability on a target, and adding more doesn't affect anything. The Daze is the more important part. Since stuns are used as interupts having a more than 2 second lead time on an interupt means it's not interupting anything. It cannot interupt. It physically cannot do it, which means that the only remaining use for the Daze is breaking Defiance bars. Of course, while defiant the target will take less damage from the already paltry damage the sharpshooter has, and after the defiance bar is broken the daze has no further effect, which means that at any given time the Phantasmal Sharpshooter has either a partial or entirely negated effect.

Singularity Shot/Dimensional Aperture: Another dual phased ability like Journey, this one is at least a bit more functional. Like Journey you shoot at the ground, hopefully where your allies are and upon landing your shot you grant your allies a decent amount of barrier and 4 seconds of resistance, which pauses all conditions on them including CC effects. And it's unblockable. In terms of utility support, this one is actually phoenomonal. It does what it wants to do and it does it well. No complaints. But then we get to the Dimensional Aperture. By collapsing the shot it creates a single use, one-way portal from whereever the shot was back to the mesmer. On paper, this ability sounds great proving an escape route for the target of your choice. In practice though this has almost no use. For general use it's all about the Barrier, throwing it into a fight to give the people in the stack more hit points to burn through. The resistance is generally more of an after thought, but it does have it's uses. HOwever casting a portal into a stack of people is only going to pull people out of the stack, which is antithetical to the purpose of stacking. Where you would really want this is to help someone escape, say if they were in the warpath of a charging monster, or outside of cover during a large AOE blast attack. However, being a ground target, and a secondary application of the ability, in additon to the largely chaotic flow of battle renders this ability utterly useless. Even others that have tried to use this in sPvP or WvW have commented that in coordinated team play it's either too slow, too awkward, or simply imposible to use when and where it's needed. While thematicly it's the perfect mesmer ability, functionally it has no use.

Overall, the rifle was supposed to be a support tool, not even a support weapon. What we got was healing, healing, healing, and a lot more healing, when it could actually be used. Some abilities are so delayed they'll never actually be useful. Others are so niche they'll never be used. While it's obvious that the aim was to make a gun that could sustain a party in combat ironicly that's all it does to an excessive degree, to the point where through the auto attack a mesmer will be able to keep their whole squad in fantastic health....but outside of that singluar effect have absolutely no use whatsoever. The rifle has no defensive attributes if the mesmer themselves are targeted. It has no blocking, no mobiilty, leaving the mesmer entirely reliant on their party to protect them while they support the party. While making a support weapon was an admirable goal, this rifle has gone so far as to push the mesmer into position of forced reliance if they chose to use the rifle, or else switch to something else which ends the support they were giving in the first place.

Suggestions and Improvements

Spoiler

First admission, I was disappointed when I heard this was going to be a support tool. I was very excited when I heard we were getting a rifle because I imagined having my own clone rifle squad. I even had some fanciful delusions of becoming Commandos, but realisticly I knew that we were never going to get -that-. Still, a strike weapon with some useful CC and mobility options would have been great. Instead we got this. I've made my opinion clear how I feel about splitting the numbers between damage and healing. I think it's a bad idea, BUT if you're going to do it you could at least split them evenly. If an ability is going to do 1000 damage, at least let it do 500 of each. Instead we got a split more like 200 damage and 800 healing. THis is a constant across all abilities. My mesmer as I type this has about 21k HP, but most bosses have hundreds of thousands to millions of HP, and this rifle does absolutely nothing to contribute to that. On top of the pitiful damage this weapon doesn't just heal; it OVERheals. The sheer amount of healing it can put out is ridiculous. Now, these are things that can easily be tweaked, but I would beg that the damage be brought up to at least parity with the healing. A mesmer with a rifle should not be, and I wish this was hyperbole, defenseless.

As for the abilities themselves, and ignoring numbers from this point forward, I think that the auto attack is fine. It damages, it heals, I wouldn't change it. I do think that Effervescnece being half the range is a bit weird, but I understand it going from a single shot to a spray. I wouldn't change it.

Journey needs to be entirely reworked. The delay needs to be gone, or it needs to have guaranteed clone generation, or both. If the intention was to use this to both harm enemies, heal allies and give your allies room to escape while the enemy was crippled, that is all entirely useless when it cannot hit the target. As fast as the rifle can shoot through the portal, that shot should be coming down on target. I accept that this is also a ground target skill and that the idea is probaby to lead the target, and that introduces a whole host of other issues. Myself, I use snap targetting because I find the ground targetting to be exceptionally difficult to use, but I am also not the only person to mention this. Better players than I have struggled with this ability and that should be reason enough.

Inspiring Imagery and abstraction need to be gone. The two second delay on some meager buffs OR some meager damage and burst healing is just awful. Rather than having this split ability, have it do ONE thing and do it WELL. If the goal was to buff, then have it shoot an ethereal shield that buffs on pulse so even if combat moves it provides at least SOME benefit. Or alternately if the healing and damage was the goal then do that, bringing the damage up to parity with the healing and turning it into a blast projectile. But pick a lane either way.

The phantasmal Sharpshooter is a fine concept but it needs to be reworked. If it's going to be offensive, let it be offensive. Give it some damage. And if you want it to interupt, it has to be fast enough to actually interupt. This is a problem shared with the Phantasmal Mage, but at least the Mage also has a lot of Fire and Confusion damage. The Sharpshooter has nothing. The Warrior Kill Shot does big damage. Gun Flame does the same, and Fire damage, and Interupts. Malicious Death's Judgement does big damage, and pierces. And all of them have less than a second activation. The sharpshooter needs to fall in line with those, especially if it's going to interupt.

And that leaves Singularity shot and Dimensional Apeture. Singularity Shot is fine, wouldn't change it. I don't like it personally but I wouldn't change it. Dimensional Apeture needs to be better. The use of Portals in combat was toted as a tactical advantage the mesmer could exploit going all the way back to the Mesmer trailer, but in reality it was never really useful as such due to the duration of the portal. Great on paper, less so in practice. And the rifle portal is worse than that being one use, one way, and only 5 seconds long not even being able to take advantage of Temporal Enchanter. But it doesn't have to be. If we want to keep the portal on the rifle, just make it a lesser version of the Utility Portal. Given that it has half the duration, simply cut it down to half the uses (10) and leave it at that. It can still use the mesmer position as one mark, and the ground target as the other mark, and already it's better. It doesn't take much.

However, all of this still leaves the mesmer very vulnerable. I've offered my suggestions on how I would fix the abilities that are already there but we still don't have any kind of block or mobility. One thing I would suggest as a remedy would be on Journey. In fitting with the name I would give the addition of a secondary application that would let you trade places with your farthest clone. This would be unreliable since all your clones could be grouped together, but if they're spread out it could let you move far. Let it drop targetting, much in the same way Phase Retreat does. To better facilitate this the initial shot could spawn a clone a set distance away from the mesmer, giving them the opportunity to follow up with a jump to that clones position, giving the mesmer an avenue of escape in case the heat gets turned on them.

TL;DR, or Summary

Spoiler

The rifle was supposed to be a support tool, and it's that to an extreme. it's too supporty, to the point of having almost no offensive or defensive capabilities. The abilities as they stand are generally partially useful at best, and completely useless at worst. It's clear that the devs wanted to make but what works on paper doesn't work in practice. That doesn't mean it's a lost cause though. Even if it's not the strike weapon I wish it could have been, with a few tweaks it could actually be a decent weapon to support in both terms of healing for your party AND helping to take down whatever you happen to be targetting at the moment. It needs the damage to be brought up to parity with the healing, even if the healing needs to come down a bit. Right now the rifle is overhealing, so it wouldn't hurt it at all. It needs some kind of mobility for the mesmer so they can escape when they get in trouble. And the abilities need to be retuned to make them more responsive and actually useful.

 

[itchyeyebrows.1520]

Posting for the Mesmer Beta. 

The rifle skill effects are ugly, which is the opposite of the beautiful and luring Mesmer. Anet, please fix it before the release. I've been a Mesmer main for 8 count em 8 years and I have enjoyed every weapon since today. I don't need to describe how amazing the Mesmer is do I??? Mesmer's are magical, magnificent, a wonder, a marvel, and so they need a weapon to match! When Anet made Virtuoso it was chef's kiss, Mirage 10s across the board. But RIFLE!? To me, it looks weird and not thoughtful. The skill 2 effect looks like a loogie is being shot out. Also, the effects color doesn't match, the purple is too dark compared to the greatsword and other elite weapons. I'm also surprised that my Mesmer is holding the rifle on each skill, I was looking forward to my character playfully tossing or dancing with the rifle as a skill like the greatsword and staff.

Skills 2, 3, and 5 are the worst visually imo.

A way I would adjust skill 2 is to make the portal more like a Mesmer portal, taking inspiration from portal teleport skill. Where instead of shooting a bullet through a portal, you would instead shoot a bullet that opens a portal that rains down bullets.

For skill 5, again take inspiration from portal teleport skill. That little ball to teleport is just not aesthetically pleasant to me.

[Every day pon.5386]

I can see Rifle Mesmer being used as a side weapon cycle if it had a stealth/reposition/iframe, as without such makes pairing Rifle quite difficult to justify! Still holding out for Horn Mesmer BTW 😂 

[Galeskyring.9617]

Rifle is sadly very clunky and the utility of the portal is far to rigid and nearly un-usable...

That said, rifle has provided miralac an opportunity to make a big comeback!

Harrier+ Water rune + sigils of energy and transference + relic of the monk

Staff/rifle

Chaos 2 2 3

Inspiration 3 2 2

Mirage 1 2 1

 

From what I've tested thus far this build provides some nice boon upkeep and healing, while it has no quickness really to give it can upkeep alacrity quite well so that swapping off to rifle for heals allows for enough time to swap back then resume using staff ambush to reapply alac before it falls off. In addition it maintains regen very well along with giving out vigor and fury and might as well as alac between rifle/staff ambushes, staff 4 and rifles 2 and 3-flip. Additionally you can elite skill jaunt inside of staff 5 or staff 2 inside of 5 to get chaos aura triggering a trait to pass it to allies which in turn grans them regen. Depending on how the final version pans out later when rifle is officially released this good be a good build for heal/boon support mesmers. I've even seen at least 6k heal hits on rifle 3 flip without the use of food or utility when healing allies.

 

I've yet to figure out a good set of utility skills for this build personally, but it does use the mirage healing skill and utility false oasis and crystal sands along with jaunt, during my tests I used mirror image to produce more clones as this also triggers an inspiration trait to heal on creation of illusions.