Janthir Wilds Spear Beta Event Feedback: Mesmer

[Rubi Bayer.8493]

The beta event for spears has begun and is open to all players with an account in good standing! The event runs from June 27 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time until June 30 at 10:00 p.m. Pacific Time and we'd love to hear your feedback. Let us know what you think of the new weapon for mesmers in this thread!

[maplemist.5897]

The "Sharp Edges" buff from Mirage Mantle lasts for 10 seconds (in PvE, and 4 seconds in WvW/PvP), and the buff tooltip itself says "Maximum duration: 20 seconds."

Tried a bit and the duration does not seem to stack if I do two ambushes in a row.

Not sure if I missed anything but kind of pointless to say maximum duration if it does not stack at all.

[Geronmy.3298]

Ok, after doing some tests i can 100% say the ambush for some reason will miss hits no matter the hitbox size. The minimum of hits seems to be 3 out of the 7. Distance doesn't seem to help. Tried inside the hitbox, at medium range and max range of the ambush and the chances seem the same.

 

I know Mirage is not the top prio on the list, that's chrono or virt, but this is plain embarrassing.

Have you given thought about making it hybrid/condi? Give mirage a real treat this time instead of the crumbs its siblings leave behind.

Edited Thursday at 05:48 PM by Geronmy.3298
nvm i was right,

[Thar.9465]

The biggest issue for me is the missing blade attribute. Virtuoso is already extremely limited by having only two effective weapons and if this doesn't get the attribute either, then it will just be another one that will never be used by them. Unless, of course, the numbers are just so hight, that it gets over that disadvantage with brute force, in which case the spear will still be much better in the hands of a chrono.

The spear is  a dagger on a stick, it's only logical it should count as a blade if dagger does.

[Novah.2510]

Mes spear is sooo fast!! It's nice to finally have a true aoe melee weapon on mes and not have to use the swords so much lol!  Love that none of the skills are rooted and recharge fast. The clarity mechanic is really easy and smooth to upkeep/use. Really like how layered the weapon is with offense, defense, mobility, cc, boons, boon strip, finishers, 2 phantasms and 3 clones, and every animation is beautiful. Best of all is how wide the aoe is. Easily my favorite melee weapon in GW 2 ever!✨💕

Edited Thursday at 05:46 PM by Novah.2510

[Mike.7983]

Spear does not affect blade procs if running power virt, need a few abilitys to be boosted.  As was already stated does not stack 20 seconds on mirage. Fun wep though way way better than garbage that is spear rev.

[Kimmi.3087]

My feedback so far, after an hour of playing:

• Mind the Gap's range should be 350 so a player can evade backwards -> spear 2 (Mind the Gap) -> spear 4 or 5. Currently, unless you're inside the target's hitbox a backwards evade will get you more than 300 range from your target (this is also true if you use spear 4 or 5 which will move you to the edge of the target's hitbox making a backwards evade move out of Mind the Gap's range). I think if this goes live it'll be really annoying to always need to take two steps forward, after evading backwards, to use Mind the Gap; it'll throw off the flow of combat. This shouldn't be a problem with raid bosses since you're generally really close to the boss... but for open world PvE I could see it being an inconvenience.

Edited Thursday at 05:52 PM by Kimmi.3087

[ascii.1369]

Let me start by saying that I don't play much PvE, so this is going to be from a WvW/PvP perspective. I was kind of excited for Spear, since it looked pretty decent in the live stream, and ever since Swords damage was gutted, Mesmer really lacked a power weapon that can complement GS with some actual damage. The one thing I was worried about was the positioning requirements for clarity on Spear 2. Unfortunately now that I played it, not only is it worse than I thought, I discovered additional issues that make Spear somewhat unfun to play in competitive.

1. The positioning for "Mind the Gap" feels a lot worse than I anticipated, and I was skeptical about it from the start. The GW2 combat system in PvP is very fast, to the point that abilities with a 3/4 second cast time feel slow. With spear you are most likely gonna engage with a movement skill to close the gap, and than you want to use "Mind the Gap" to get clarity and empower whatever ability comes third in the chain. Given the distance you need to walk for the outer ring to hit, Spear forces you to afk for 3/4 second to 1 second before you can continue your assault after the engage. Even if you play Mirage and are willing to use Jaunt just to reposition for clarity, wasting its cleanse and damage, it feels super unfun to close the gap to your target, just to then waste time disengaging again so you can hit "Mind the Gap". In my view this is not an issue of needing to "get the hang of it", it's a design issue. The abilities on Spear have anti-synergy and it's not fun to play around that.

2. If you want to engage with Spear you have two movement skills, which I was quite excited about. The issue is that "Mental Collapse" can't actually be used as an engage tool unless you are willing to waste the "Mind the Gap" reset and don't mind not getting the stun it has with clarity. In other words the longer range teleport has so much power loaded into its synergy with "Mind the Gap" that it feels terrible to forgo it. On the other hand, the short range dash "Phantasmal Lancer", which would be great to stick to a target once you're already in, but can't really function as an engage, has much more limited synergy with "Mind the Gap". Just doesn't feel well thought out. While a long range teleport feels better than a long range charge, for practical reasons I would swap the range of those two skills, giving the additionl benefit of more defensive mobility, since "Phantasmal Lancer" doesn't require a target.

3. Just in general, there is too much power hidden behind clarity for how unreliable and inconvenient it is to get. All Spear skills are pretty vanilla damaging skills with zero additional flavour or benefit, unless you have clarity. Compared to the utility Spear competes wit on other Mesmer weapons, especially the off hand weapons and Sword, that's just not gonna cut it. Given that you specifically mentioned in the preview stream, that many bosses have such a large hitbox that you will always get clarity, I feel like you alreay know what you should do. My personal recommendation would be to forget about this outer ring nonsense and just make "Mind the Gap" always give clarity on hit. I know that means removing a "cool" idea some game designer is really proud of, but it just doesn't work well.

 

I guess those are my main points. I still think the weapon is really cool and has great potential, but only if you fix the design issues now. Number tweaking once it's out won't save it for competitive if the utility and combat flow isn't built into the core design.

[Teknomancer.4895]

1 hour ago, Geronmy.3298 said:

I know Mirage is not the top prio on the list, that's chrono or virt, but this is plain embarrassing.

That's weird since at least on my beta toon the default spec was Mirage, in all build slots.

I tried it briefly and it seemed fine, nothing spectacular and nothing awful. The thing that stood out to me (so to speak) was the Clarity indicators being unclear (irony, your name is Mesmer). The little overhead floaty thing is barely visible, and the buff icon gets buried in with the rest of the boontangle down by the skill bar. That effect is going to be the devil to keep track of if that's all we have to work with.

[Geronmy.3298]

5 minutes ago, Teknomancer.4895 said:

That's weird since at least on my beta toon the default spec was Mirage, in all build slots.

I tried it briefly and it seemed fine, nothing spectacular and nothing awful. The thing that stood out to me (so to speak) was the Clarity indicators being unclear (irony, your name is Mesmer). The little overhead floaty thing is barely visible, and the buff icon gets buried in with the rest of the boontangle down by the skill bar. That effect is going to be the devil to keep track of if that's all we have to work with.

And even then the ambush wasn't tested enough to see that it randomly misses 4 out of the 7 hits or the buff doesn't stack like it's supposed to.

 

Edited Thursday at 06:32 PM by Geronmy.3298

[Noro.2879]

First thing: It feels REALLY good.

Mind the Gap's VFX is a little too vibrant when other players are using it and makes it difficult to see mechanics.

[Ellon.4316]

6 minutes ago, Geronmy.3298 said:

And even then the ambush wasn't tested enough to see that it randomly misses 4 out of the 7 hits.

Weird. I just tested this against a bunch of open world mobs and golem (average size) and keep getting 7 hits consistently. I'm not even trying to position myself correctly.

[Geronmy.3298]

13 minutes ago, Ellon.4316 said:

Weird. I just tested this against a bunch of open world mobs and golem (average size) and keep getting 7 hits consistently. I'm not even trying to position myself correctly.

Screenshots

Don't have any screen recording program to showcase, can only post these lame screenshots.

The damage was also reduced to the amount of hits you see on the vuln stacks.

For clarification. I didn't cancel any ambush, i let the full animation play before trying to dodge again. On my whole hour of just ambushing the different golems, for these screenshots was the first time i see it hit only twice. And is something constant, not rare to see at all. I'd say that around 30% off all my ambushes ever hit the full amount.

Edited Thursday at 06:55 PM by Geronmy.3298

[ascii.1369]

16 minutes ago, Ellon.4316 said:

Weird. I just tested this against a bunch of open world mobs and golem (average size) and keep getting 7 hits consistently. I'm not even trying to position myself correctly.

 

6 minutes ago, Geronmy.3298 said:

Screenshots

Don't have any screen recording program to showcase, can only post these lame screenshots.

The damage was also reduced to the amount of hits.

Just tested it too on the average golem, alway seven hits, could not make it miss no matter how hard I tried. Seems like an issue on your end.

[Teknomancer.4895]

A suggestion re the Clarity indicator: instead of burying it with the rest of the buffs/debuffs, put it next to the clones/blades counter instead.

Speaking for myself, I look at that far more often than I ever bother trying to decipher the constantly-changing boontangle.

Edited Thursday at 07:09 PM by Teknomancer.4895

[Skyroar.2974]

First things first, I want to congratulate Anet for both the weapon design and the animation/visual effect design. Mesmer's spear has a fun gameplay loop and cool-looking attacks.

There are, however, two things that it needs to feel truly polished.

• Hitting with Mind the Gap's outer radius to get clarity is a lot worse than I expected. The UI is not good enough to show us if we'll hit it or not before/while casting the skill, the visual effect isn't that clear either, and any little movement from the enemy will make us miss it. For such a fundamental, rotation-driven skill, it feels really clumsy to use against smaller enemies. My suggestion is to either make a much better UI for it (like League of Legend's Darius Q UI, which this skills seems to be based of), or just increase the radius.
• Why is Virtuoso's viability always excluded from the new weapons? Spear has an ambush skill for Mirage and a double-phantasm combo for Chronomancer, yet no blade skills for Virt. This is not a spear-exclusive problem. For some reason, Anet decided to only add the blade mechanic to Virt's weapon, dagger, and to greatsword. MH and OH swords have never gotten it, even though they should, thematically. Axe has never gotten it with Soto's weapon mastery. Underwater spear has never gotten it. And now land spear is being ignored too. This is something that never made sense to me since EoD, and something that Anet has consistently been ignoring for years. So tell me, Anet devs: is Virtuoso intended to be stuck with dagger (and greatsword) forever and till the end of times? Why? I want to use spear with Virt as well, and so do many other players.

Edited Thursday at 07:14 PM by Skyroar.2974

[Noro.2879]

Currently the weapon is performing just fine on power virtuoso, it does not need the blade tooltips to keep up. If it does get nerfed following the beta, it may however need those tooltips to stay relevant.

I don't know if anyone has benched it effectively, but in my testing it keeps up very well with current live game meta weapons.

[Mungo Zen.9364]

49 minutes ago, Noro.2879 said:

Currently the weapon is performing just fine on power virtuoso, it does not need the blade tooltips to keep up. If it does get nerfed following the beta, it may however need those tooltips to stay relevant.

I don't know if anyone has benched it effectively, but in my testing it keeps up very well with current live game meta weapons.

I have had similar experience trying Power Virt in PvE

However I am not a fan of the way Mind the Gap works.  If I use Mental Collapse to the target, and use Mind the Gap immediately, I do not gain Clarity as I am too close to the target for it to trigger.  This feels wrong/bad as I do not expect to portal to someone just to run away from them before attacking again.

Also, having the Clarity orb floating right by the Virt Daggers..... Chef's Kiss..... 

 

EDIT: I am trying out Power Chrono as well, this is less exciting.

Edited Thursday at 08:18 PM by Mungo Zen.9364

[ascii.1369]

6 minutes ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:

This feels wrong/bad as I do not expect to portal to someone just to run away from them before attacking again.

My thought exactly! While the idea is kind of cool it just feels really bad to play in practice. I really hope they have the balls/freedom to change a core mechanic like that based on player feedback. Feels like in the past the beta tests were mostly for tuning with the actual mechanics set in stone.

Edited Thursday at 08:04 PM by ascii.1369

[Lincolnbeard.1735]

+1 change Mind the gap.
Come on! You came up with actually good ideas to empower on other professions, scrap this one and come up something that doesn't feels a mess.

[Fueki.4753]

Out of the ones I tested so far, Mesmer's spear felt the best to use, but #2 is a bit too slow.

I think that clarity as a Mechanic should be scrapped and its "bonuses" should be on the abilities by default.

If having two phantasms as the default is too much, that effect could be added to Bountiful Blades.

 

[Batalix.2873]

28 minutes ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:

I have had similar experience trying Power Virt in PvE

However I am not a fan of the way Mind the Gap works.  If I use Mental Collapse to the target, and use Mind the Gap immediately, I do not gain Clarity as I am too close to the target for it to trigger.  This feels wrong/bad as I do not expect to portal to someone just to run away from them before attacking again.

Also, having the Clarity orb floating right by the Virt Daggers..... Chef's Kiss..... 

 

 

This does seem to be the crux of Mespear's usability. Mental Collapse should be recoded to port to 300 away from target, or at least some distance away from the target without needing too much adjustment for Mind the Gap to tip.

 

2 hours ago, Kimmi.3087 said:

My feedback so far, after an hour of playing:

• Mind the Gap's range should be 350 so a player can evade backwards -> spear 2 (Mind the Gap) -> spear 4 or 5. Currently, unless you're inside the target's hitbox a backwards evade will get you more than 300 range from your target (this is also true if you use spear 4 or 5 which will move you to the edge of the target's hitbox making a backwards evade move out of Mind the Gap's range). I think if this goes live it'll be really annoying to always need to take two steps forward, after evading backwards, to use Mind the Gap; it'll throw off the flow of combat. This shouldn't be a problem with raid bosses since you're generally really close to the boss... but for open world PvE I could see it being an inconvenience.

Combine with this for ease of dodging and tipping.

I am definitely against removing Mind the Gap's tipping bonus and making it always generate clarity. People advocating for that are anti-fun. Not all of these weapons need to be super user-friendly or PvP-viable.

[Xei Han.8736]

Note on skill descriptions: for clarity, try copying the style used for the guardian's illuminated.  I think that would make it much easier to parse out the changes that clarity brings.

[ShadowKatt.6740]

Does anyone have a spear build they want to share? I'll admit it, I'm being lazy, and I just want to play with the spear for a bit.

[Mike.7983]

Really like the 2,5,2,4 burst with spear, but the second skill 2 being shadowstepped into melee is a bummer, need to step back and sucks. Would suggest they remove the outer edge clarity and instead make entire skill grant it, with maybe 10% damage bonus to edge on tip instead.

Edited Thursday at 09:27 PM by Mike.7983
new stuff added