Spears and Mesmers

[Gesbo.6420]

16 hours ago, st elmos fire.2987 said:

If you manage to finally get the clarity buff you get a single actually good skill that you can use once. Magnificent. After that you need to wait for skill 2 cd before you can even dream of getting another taste of clarity. 

That's not entirely true. Mental Collapse would reset Mind the Gap regardless of being used with clarity or not. Not only that most of your ccs are 3 seconds or more. Yes you would be waiting but you would have a slower more brewery type ofncombat weaving auto attacks here and there. 

[ZephidelGRS.9520]

Since no one posted about it yet, but it’s confirmed that Fencer’s Finesse will NOT work with land spear. The trait’s description has been updated to “underwater spear” to reflect that.

Which begs the question, why can’t they allow it? Or is this a technical issue? But they’ve shown to update traits’ functionality before, so this must be intentional.

[Curunen.8729]

I'm surprised any 20% weapon cooldown traits still exist when they were in the process of removing them. Would be nice if all weapon traits had this done and not only some. It's only sword, staff, uw spear, trident and focus to go and absorb whatever cooldowns seem appropriate to the weapon (or not as in the case of torch... :/).

[Solomons.9713]

3 hours ago, ZephidelGRS.9520 said:

Since no one posted about it yet, but it’s confirmed that Fencer’s Finesse will NOT work with land spear. The trait’s description has been updated to “underwater spear” to reflect that.

Which begs the question, why can’t they allow it? Or is this a technical issue? But they’ve shown to update traits’ functionality before, so this must be intentional.

Lol at anet, unbelievable they did this yesterday whilst buffing jaguar on ranger... What did I even expect lmao. Read my previous post so you will know what I mean as I specifically asked if the traits will work for spear. Very low of them to do this, now give us easy access to swiftness to compensate now that you confirmed you do read the forums, that is what melee builds actually need and mesmer needed a loooong time... 

[Levetty.1279]

9 hours ago, ZephidelGRS.9520 said:

Which begs the question, why can’t they allow it?

Because Mesmer can't have nice things.

[PureMage.7845]

Spear Mesmer: “Extremely boring weapon both visually and gameplay-wise. Lack of effort put into it extremely apparent.”  Mesmers always gets the short end of the stick with every update.  Spear skills lack excitement. Visual animation needs to be more better to represent Mesmer.! Stop using the same mesmer skill animation over and over and create something unique. Instead of unlocking spear, give us something more exciting. 

[Terrorhuz.4695]

First things first: the visual effects are nice and the AA is straight up gorgeous. 3 contrails, glitter and glass shards? YES PLEASE. Mechanically it's also very fun. It's a very "fair" weapon, which is new for mesmer standards; because of this fairness, it could use a slight damage bump in PvP (kind of like vindi gs, for example; every skill is a FAT bonk)

SKILL BY SKILL

• AA: simple. A bit too simple but I won't complain.
• Mind the Gap: decent damage, decent mechanic, it's AoE. A bit slow, but acceptable for a skill of this kind. Very hard to trigger clarity in 1v1, the outer circle radius isn't very generous. Works fine in teamfights tho, which I guess is the intended design and I can live with that.
• Imaginary Inversion: mechanically wise, it's blurred frenzy on steroids. Let's put aside the fact that blurred frenzy does deserve a buff, this one is a very decent skill with very decent mechanics.
  • Invert the cleanse and the healing; the skill should heal when empowered and cleanse if it evades anything, so that removing those 10 stacks of poisoncan be done reactively, which is more important than some healing
• Phantasmal Lancer: the coolest skill, but the one which probably requires the most work... which admittedly, is still not that much.
  • Phantasms should be summonable even if the opponent is blocking, like all other phantasms. This needs to be fixed.
  • Phantasms need better pathing. Very often one of them will be unable to find a path to the target and end up doing nothing; it's a skill that requires a setup, and having your setup being denied by rocks is never fun This needs to be fixed.
  • Range could be improved a bit (60 more range would probably do, doesn't need much).
  • Switch the effects from the phantasms and the mesmer; mesmer will cripple\immob, phantasms will boonrip, so that the mesmer thrust can act as a setup for the lancers.
• Mental Collapse: super fine skill. The blast finisher is also LOVELY.
  • Refund on Mind the Gap should happen only if it hits a target tho.
  • It's super weird to be ported in melee range and then be expected to use again Mind the Gap... which you don't want to use in melee range. Can be worked with, but it's weird.

The good: it covers a niche mesmers really struggled with; as in, teamfighting melee bonkers.
The bad: it relies A LOT on clarity, and getting clarity is trivial in teamfights... not as much in 1v1 tho.

Overall, it's a beta and obviously there's bugs, but the weapon itself is fun.

Spear itself doesn't provide great defensive and it struggles in teamfights because of the cast times; you need stab, and the weapon doesn't really provide it.
For this reason, it works very well with chaos (stab on shatter, to cover your casts) or mirage (straight up evading while attacking).
The cast times also would love quickness, and for this reason it works very well with chronomancer (quickness on shatter) and virtuoso (quickness on block); virtuoso also provides ranged options, which is something the weapon struggles with otherwise.

Long story short: mesmers clearly don't suffer the "RIFLE IS USELESS ON ANYTHING OTHER THAN DEADEYE" syndrome. For different reasons, everyelite spec has a convincing use case to actually improve the spear toolkit.

All in all 8/10 would play again.

Edited Friday at 07:36 AM by Terrorhuz.4695

[Lincolnbeard.1735]

Might be cool (still haven't tried) with the sigil of quickness on weapon swap.

2 5 change to GS and GS combo as a poor man's confounding suggestions/blink replacement.

Edited Friday at 07:27 AM by Lincolnbeard.1735

[Purple Effects.2503]

20 hours ago, PureMage.7845 said:

Visual animation needs to be more better to represent Mesmer

In all honesty, you could pepper spray me in the eyeballs and on a 10 pixel screen I could identify that spear is Mesmer lol. 

what do you honestly believe represents Mesmer, if those animations don’t…

[Surelia.2651]

Will preface my point of view here by saying my mesmer has been one of my "mains" in PvE since I first started playing the game, and that I have really only played Condi specs, most exclusively Mirage because it's just always amazing to play; even in spite of the many nerfs to Mirage, I still enjoy playing it.  Had never played a power Mirage ever, only Chrono.  So for the heck of it I tried playing a power Mirage build to test the spear and was really surprised by how fun it was to play and how much damage it did actually do. 

Because of the legendary armory, I did also ditch all the beta gear (i think they had it set to marauders).  I used berserkers on armour and weapons, and then berserkers and assassins on trinkets, dragonhunter runes and fireworks relic.  Went across lws3 maps, West Inner Nayos, and Skywatch, deliberately pulling as many mobs onto myself as I could, including some Champions, since I am not too fond of just beating on a golem with a ton of buffs on me.  It was quite easy to mow down everything in sight, so I would strongly disagree that the dmg is just way too low, though it is nowhere near as high as what I can pull on a Condi build.   It was fun to play, very fluid, and the animations were lovely. 

Looking forward to seeing the final version of this one; it seems to have some nice potential.

Edited yesterday at 12:23 AM by Surelia.2651