Janthir Wilds Spear Beta Event Feedback: Mesmer [Merged]

[Cameirus.8407]

sigh, another weapon useless on mirage.

the ambush attacks mostly miss....

[Mangoyami.2418]

lacks clone generation.. you have 1 on 4 with no clarity, 2 with clarity

where a clone generator would be, is clarity instead. feels okay with chrono.
feels okay using 'required' duelist trait on mirage.
is probably okay with dodge generation on virt.

all this from wvw perspect

7 minutes ago, Cameirus.8407 said:

sigh, another weapon useless on mirage.

the ambush attacks mostly miss....

seems to be hit or miss for most people. all my attacks hit

[ascii.1369]

3 minutes ago, Mangoyami.2418 said:

lacks clone generation.. you have 1 on 4 with no clarity, 2 with clarity

where a clone generator would be, is clarity instead. feels okay with chrono.
feels okay using 'required' duelist trait on mirage.
is probably okay with dodge generation on virt.

"Mind the Gap" generates a clone if you hit an enemy. So 2 clones with reset from "Mental Collapse".

[Gesbo.6420]

I works like to see more ways I'd getting clarity. That or more chain effects like mental collapse resetting the cd of mind the gap. 

Like auto attacks from you and all of your illusions shave cooldown from mental collapse, each phantasm hit removes cooldown from illusionary reversion or whatever is called. Chain them all together

Love the visuals tho 

[ckajlooc.8791]

You've made this "chronoknight" very happy! =D

My only critique is that the speear 2 dahlia flower animation is bright and fast. Decreasing one or both of those may make the mixed clipping and stretching between the 3D and 2D/ground magic animations less inundating.

[Noro.2879]

the fact that clarity lasts so long that it carries over across a whole weapon loop while you're on another weapon so you can start with an empowered skill the next time you're on spear is so cool, definitely makes the weapon extra interesting I think

[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. 

[Deth.4109]

oops

 

Edited Friday at 12:02 AM by Deth.4109

[Deth.4109]

35 minutes ago, Noro.2879 said:

the fact that clarity lasts so long that it carries over across a whole weapon loop while you're on another weapon so you can start with an empowered skill the next time you're on spear is so cool, definitely makes the weapon extra interesting I think

Yes this is SUPER useful. This has allowed me to plan ahead for MC burst combos. I actually wanna see this mechanic expanded a bit, in what way I can't articulate yet.

[Mangoyami.2418]

1 hour ago, ascii.1369 said:

"Mind the Gap" generates a clone if you hit an enemy. So 2 clones with reset from "Mental Collapse".

it does? I'm having trouble finding it in the description 😕
Still I have trouble landing clarity in an action fight against someone who's good at the game.

[HotDelirium.7984]

8 hours ago, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

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!

Can skill 2 include a ground aoe indicator because I'm just guessing the whole time. The petal effect is a little janky. Love skill 5.

[Teknomancer.4895]

After playing with it more, I have to agree with the Mind the Gap critiques - the positioning requirement makes this skill clumsy to use, and the mobility skills actively put you in the wrong place. If you're just a tiny bit off, you don't get the buff and the usefulness of the weapon falls off a cliff. Its damage is basically competitive with other stuff in the kit, but the extra hassle involved in getting it just right makes me wonder why I'd choose this over something else that doesn't need you to be precise with your positioning.

Don't get me wrong, the damage is good, the melee cleave is very nice and the effects are beautiful (if too opaque; I'd like to see the "danger-circles" on the ground tyvm). But once again, Mesmer skills have been saddled with some stupid prerequisite that makes us do extra stuff to get the same output that other classes can just do.

Kudos to the art department, they did an amazing job. The skill designers however... 💩

[China.5268]

Spear Melee? seriously??? another trash like rifle??

Ok then... 

[Batalix.2873]

3 hours ago, PureMage.7845 said:

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. 

Disagree. It's quite pretty without being too overbearing.

7 minutes ago, China.5268 said:

Spear Melee? seriously??? another trash like rifle??

Ok then... 

Don't listen to this person. Varying spear builds between ranged, midrange, and melee was a great idea, and Mesmer's melee implementation makes a LOT of sense for a class with fencer/performer sub themes.

[Jojo.6590]

Overall, the design team did well on this one. It just needs a handful of changes/touch-ups to make Spear compete with our other weapons for power.

Note my input and suggestions are based on my experiences in pvp/wvw. As someone who does raid weekly, I feel this will do fine eventually in pve given tweaks to numbers and that pvp/wvw have a higher priority in the weapon design/skill kit.

Critical:

·        Gaining clarity is tough in wvw/pvp (minus zerg play). This drastically puts the spear at a disadvantage as it is very noticeable that the weapon skills are lackluster without clarity.  Though skill 5 is the exception to this.

·        Better visual indication for when you have clarity is needed. Both for the Mesmer and those fighting them.

·        Skill 4; Phantasmal Lancer. The phantasms don’t always reach their target or bug out and disappear. This appears to be the same issue that disenchanter and phantasmal defender have. 450 range is low for what feels like is supposed to be an engage skill/gap closer.

·        Ambush buff for 4 seconds is not long enough in pvp/wvw and is not stacking/refreshing.

Suggestions:

·        Gaining clarity; A fix for this could be having skill 2 mind the gap give clarity when it lands as a critical hit thus emphasizing the power theme of the weapon. Another option can be making it so all skills (except the auto chain) give clarity when landing a crit. Or reduce the cooldown on skill 2 to allow more access to get clarity and increase the range of the aoe.

·        Darken the eye visual for clarity floating above the Mesmer.

·        Slight buff to damage on autos and skills 2 and 4.

·        Skill 2 mind the gap. Requiring clarity to gain the 4 might is odd, this requires us to double tap skill 2 then. Mesmer is starved for might outside of great sword. Having this skill remove boons if under clarity would be better. Then have this apply 3-5might when the skill crits.

·        skill 3 Imaginary inversion provides 2-3 stacks of stab on evade. Instead of having the Mesmer spin in place having them move back would be nice as this leaves us stuck when it comes to all the aoe in the game.

·        Skill 4 Phantasmal Lancer brings the range on this to 600-900 should be good.

·        Make spear skills count as blade skills for Virt, minus skill 5.

More aggressive suggestions/skill changes:

·        Make skill 3; Imaginary inversion a disengage instead of an evade/mini distortion. The skill that comes to mind is shadow strike (I know, I always request this). Have it remove/steal 2 boons. (Finally, another weapon to have some boon removal other than great sword and sword. It would be nice to have just a little more as to synergize with our boon removal traits.)

·        A lot of visual clutter in skills 2 mind the gap and 5 mental collapses. Make these a little more transparent.

·        Better visual indication for what counts as the outer ring for mind the gap (currently it appears to be the flower petals.)

 

Edited Friday at 03:18 AM by Jojo.6590
Added skill 3 suggestion.

[China.5268]

Make it ranged and be happy, mes need another strong OFFENSIVE ranged weapon coz rif = trash, we already have sword and axe and both are good. 

[keyokku.5412]

it isn't bad but I'll provide my criticisms

- the design doesn't seem to make much sense altogether

- because it all hinges on Spear 2 which requires you to be in melee range (but not stacked) which is an awkward thing to take note of in the middle of fast paced combat...

- gap closers or repositioning like spear 4 and 5 don't make sense since they also kind of depend on spear 2 to be most useful and they have higher cd, which means you don't want to waste it much for actually closing gap to get into melee range for spear 2, you have to wait for the cd to come back up to make use of the clarity effects

- spear 5 needs you to have already hit spear 2 to reset the cd, so what's the point of a shadowstep in? you would already be in melee range, so it isn't useful for gap closing

- spear 5 also seems to set you a little too close to make sure you've got the right range on spear 2

- spear 3 is nice ngl

- overall it hinges on spear 2 too much which is a melee skill, if you use spear 5 to gap close at all, you are stuck with some 5 second lull times, in any case after you've gone through your rotations you'll just often find yourself in 5 second lull times to really feel like you're able to get a good burst off for wvw or pvp or something

- I think it needs to find some synergy and clarity (haha) with the gap closing and melee range, it is a bit awkward and doesn't make much sense atm

- tbh even the stay in the outside circle of spear 2 doesn't make a lot of sense in fast paced combat or in pve group where you stack tightly, even removing that is helpful but the gap closers still are weirdly out of place 

 

minor suggestion:

- to do the least work on this, I might suggest changing one skill such as the spear 3 evade to include a dash, roll or dodge back, this way you can jump out of range and then dash back in with your gap closers or synergize with your other weapon sets which makes a bit more sense imo

 

note: I am commenting on it from the sole focus of the spear. ofc in application you can add other things in whether utility, shatters, and weapon swap yes, but the spear on its own needs to feel like it is a sensible logical package and atm it feels contradictory or awkward

Edited Friday at 04:34 AM by keyokku.5412

[Noro.2879]

High level PvE Power Virtuoso and Boon DPS Chronomancer POV (NOT Chronophantasma and NOT Power Mirage):

 

The more I play it the more I love it. I'm at 13 hours of boon chrono and power virtuoso using spear today and I think the weapon feels better than any weapon in the game right now. There's a lot of depth and interesting ways to use it, especially when combined with continuum split and signet of ether.

 

I have four complaints and that is it:

Imaginary Inversion will interrupt any skill other than the phantasm or signet of ether. This is a bit annoying because it limits how you can queue the skill. It's not the end of the world, after all we've learned to deal with GS3 doing the same and at this point it is endearing.

Mental Collapse goes on full cooldown if you interrupt it the moment before it hits, but it doesn't hit and its effects do not go off. This is particularly annoying in combination with the above, though it's also something that won't happen when the rotations are done in an efficient manner, it's more an issue when you make mistakes and get doubly punished for doing so. (apparently this is likely due to the shadow step happening, as in it goes on cooldown if the shadow step happens even if you cancel between the shadow step and the attack portion, which makes sense due to competitive modes if so)

Mental Collapse teleports you to the exact range from a small hitbox enemy to not get the Mind the Gap proc. I am not sure if this was intentional, but I can see this being an annoyance for a lot of players. Personally, I like it and I wiggle a ton while dpsing even at the golem and it gives purpose to that wiggle. But it is not going to kill me to lose that lol.

Mind the Gap is a little too powerful of a visual effect for allies. It covers mechanics and other VFX a little bit too much for the non-mesmer players. It's absolutely beautiful, but I think it should be more transparent for allies. See Virtuoso's Rain of Blades for comparison's sake, I don't know if it should be quite that muted, but it helps out a lot when there's a very large group of players especially. Fulgor on Elementalist's spear has the same problem. I haven't seen many more issues like that.

 

Regarding changing it:

Power-wise, it feels pretty good. Even on Power Virtuoso despite not having blade tooltips. I think it is possible that it's a little bit stronger than greatsword for the builds I played, and I think that's a good thing considering greatsword is a ranged weapon with two phantasms and will always have a place in the game due to that. I think it might suffer on Chronophantasma builds, but I don't really play that so can't comment really.

The spear exceeds my expectations and I love it. It combines all of my favorite things in this game's weapons into one weapon and puts it on my favorite class. Truly wonderful. Forced movement skills with minor animation locks, burst+cleave, Mesmer-themed Arc Divider and a reset to use that skill even more. It's just perfect. I'm going to keep playing it all beta and try to get some HTCM/Cerus kills with it and I don't agree at all with people saying it's bad or weak. Buffing spear to make power mirage better would be a major mistake, the weapon is in a great place. Power Mirage's traits might need some love, but I don't know if anyone has truly cooked an actual power mirage rotation using spear yet.

Edited Sunday at 12:22 PM by Noro.2879

[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, decent radius 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 poison can 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. THANKS FOR LETTING THIS BE CASTABLE WITHOUT A TARGET, THANKS FOR THE LEAP FINISHER.
  • Phantasms should be summonable even if the opponent is blocking\dodging, 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. THANKS FOR LETTING THIS BE CASTABLE WITHOUT A TARGET, THANKS FOR THE LEAP FINISHER, THANKS FOR FINALLY GIVING MESMER A TARGETED PORT WITHOUT A RANGE CHECK.
  • Refund on Mind the Gap should happen only if it hits a target.
  • 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\prot 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, every elite spec has a convincing use case to actually improve the spear toolkit.

All in all 8/10 would play again.

Edited Friday at 08:00 AM by Terrorhuz.4695

[Terrorhuz.4695]

13 hours 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.

It probably needs to alter the look on your skill bar, with some vfx like the one on revenant when they legend swap

[seraphain.1093]

2 hours ago, Noro.2879 said:

High level PvE Power Virtuoso and Boon DPS Chronomancer POV (NOT Chronophantasma and NOT Power Mirage):

 

The more I play it the more I love it. I'm at 13 hours of boon chrono and power virtuoso using spear today and I think the weapon feels better than any weapon in the game right now. There's a lot of depth and interesting ways to use it, especially when combined with continuum split and signet of ether.

 

I have four complaints and that is it:

Imaginary Inversion will interrupt any skill other than the phantasm or signet of ether. This is a bit annoying because it limits how you can queue the skill. It's not the end of the world, after all we've learned to deal with GS3 doing the same and at this point it is endearing.

Mental Collapse goes on full cooldown if you interrrupt it the moment before it hits, but it doesn't hit and its effects do not go off. This is particularly annoying in combination with the above, though it's also something that won't happen when the rotations are done in an efficient manner, it's more an issue when you make mistakes and get doubly punished for doing so. (apparently this is likely due to the shadow step happening, as in it goes on cooldown if the shadow step happens even if you cancel between the shadow step and the attack portion, which makes sense due to competitive modes if so)

Mental Collapse teleports you to the exact range from a small hitbox enemy to not get the Mind the Gap proc. I am not sure if this was intentional, but I can see this being an annoyance for a lot of players. Personally, I like it and I wiggle a ton while dpsing even at the golem and it gives purpose to that wiggle. But it is not going to kill me to lose that lol.

Mind the Gap is a little too powerful of a visual effect for allies. It covers mechanics and other VFX a little bit too much for the non-mesmer players. It's absolutely beautiful, but I think it should be more transparent for allies. See Virtuoso's Rain of Blades for comparison's sake, I don't know if it should be quite that muted, but it helps out a lot when there's a very large group of players especially. Fulgor on Elementalist's spear has the same problem. I haven't seen many more issues like that.

 

Regarding changing it:

Power-wise, it feels pretty good. Even on Power Virtuoso despite not having blade tooltips. I think it is possible that it's a little bit stronger than greatsword for the builds I played, and I think that's a good thing considering greatsword is a ranged weapon with two phantasms and will always have a place in the game due to that. I think it might suffer on Chronophantasma builds, but I don't really play that so can't comment really.

The spear exceeds my expectations and I love it. It combines all of my favorite things in this game's weapons into one weapon and puts it on my favorite class. Truly wonderful. Forced movement skills with minor animation locks, burst+cleave, Mesmer-themed Arc Divider and a reset to use that skill even more. It's just perfect. I'm going to keep playing it all beta and try to get some HTCM/Cerus kills with it and I don't agree at all with people saying it's bad or weak. Buffing spear to make power mirage better would be a major mistake, the weapon is in a great place. Power Mirage's traits might need some love, but I don't know if anyone has truly cooked an actual power mirage rotation using spear yet.

Same profile, same opinion.

Thanks anet for the spear, mesmer virtuoso feels at least how it should (fast ! 😄 ).

[Pengu.7481]

this is from a pvp/wvw perspective

overall spear feels fine, BUT mind the gap should grant clarity no matter what range u hit from. having to do mental gymnastics and rangefinding to get clarity while fighting ppl in a meta where everyone has leaps thrown at them wholesale does not feel good.

not to mention it doesnt flow well when you do get clarity then port 5 only to follow up with 2 again and not get any clarity since you are too close now, it feels clunky af.

otherwise its all good

edit: id still rather use greatsword tho, its a non contest

Edited Saturday at 02:16 PM by Pengu.7481

[Teknomancer.4895]

3 hours ago, Terrorhuz.4695 said:

It probably needs to alter the look on your skill bar, with some vfx like the one on revenant when they legend swap

The skills themselves don't change like the Rev's do though, so that seems like unnecessary overkill. Much simpler would be to just move the existing buff icon to a location where it won't be jumbled in with a mix of other ever-shifting icons.

Given Clarity's critical importance to the functionality of the spear (to the point that Mesmer spear is garbage without it), it should be right over there next to the shatter-ammo counter. Make it easily seen by putting it right next to something Mesmers are frequently looking at anyway; don't bury it in a shifting pile of randomly-changing icons.

Do you hit the shatter buttons without first checking how many clones you have out? Of course not, so why should we have to find and interpret the spear buff icon, which is basically the same mechanic: some tiny effect if used "raw," but intended to be used "fully loaded." Clarity kinda works like it's the spear's ammo, and if we can't quickly tell if we have that or not, it makes a huge difference to the spear's utility.

[keyokku.5412]

7 hours ago, keyokku.5412 said:

it isn't bad but I'll provide my criticisms

- the design doesn't seem to make much sense altogether

- because it all hinges on Spear 2 which requires you to be in melee range (but not stacked) which is an awkward thing to take note of in the middle of fast paced combat...

- gap closers or repositioning like spear 4 and 5 don't make sense since they also kind of depend on spear 2 to be most useful and they have higher cd, which means you don't want to waste it much for actually closing gap to get into melee range for spear 2, you have to wait for the cd to come back up to make use of the clarity effects

- spear 5 needs you to have already hit spear 2 to reset the cd, so what's the point of a shadowstep in? you would already be in melee range, so it isn't useful for gap closing

- spear 5 also seems to set you a little too close to make sure you've got the right range on spear 2

- spear 3 is nice ngl

- overall it hinges on spear 2 too much which is a melee skill, if you use spear 5 to gap close at all, you are stuck with some 5 second lull times, in any case after you've gone through your rotations you'll just often find yourself in 5 second lull times to really feel like you're able to get a good burst off for wvw or pvp or something

- I think it needs to find some synergy and clarity (haha) with the gap closing and melee range, it is a bit awkward and doesn't make much sense atm

- tbh even the stay in the outside circle of spear 2 doesn't make a lot of sense in fast paced combat or in pve group where you stack tightly, even removing that is helpful but the gap closers still are weirdly out of place 

 

minor suggestion:

- to do the least work on this, I might suggest changing one skill such as the spear 3 evade to include a dash, roll or dodge back, this way you can jump out of range and then dash back in with your gap closers or synergize with your other weapon sets which makes a bit more sense imo

 

note: I am commenting on it from the sole focus of the spear. ofc in application you can add other things in whether utility, shatters, and weapon swap yes, but the spear on its own needs to feel like it is a sensible logical package and atm it feels contradictory or awkward

I posted that earlier but thinking about it again, what would easily fix the awkwardness between using gap closers or using them in melee with mind the gap range:

make clarity stack.

this simple fix will allow most skills to actually activate with clarity (just takes one of the stacks) since you'll have a surplus stock of them to use (your mind the gap cd is much lower than your others) and you can use them as gap closers appropriately without worrying that you'd be doing it without clarity

 

[Akeera.7912]

Would be nice if they moved the evade from skill 3 to skill 5 (suicide dive) and made the spear 3 a parry like mechanic similar to scepter 2/sword 4 block the next attack, and counter with a punishing strike

Move the dash from skill 4 to instead be on skill 2, and grant clarity from all range (enable the mesmer to land it more reliably)

Overall decent, but for power virt I think it is still outdamaged by dagger, and greatsword, and you have to be high-risk close to land anything whereas you can just spam unblockables from range with other weapons. Need to give virtuoso a niche, chrono has double phantasm, mirage has ambush  virt feels lacking without blade traits to bump it up to performance of other weapons