List of Mesmer Fixes and Quality of Life Changes Needed in PvE

[Alquinon.2957]

After recently reading and posting on this mesmer forum, it seems like a good number of people here don't realise the real issues regarding this class. Yes staff mirage is very strong right now, but overall mesmer is getting more frustrated to play in PvE content such as fractals and raids. So here I will list out a few issues that mesmers are facing in PvE content. The videos I linked are from Luxroy so all credits to them!

 

1. Clone despawning bug/feature.

Below is a video demonstrating this bug. Basically in the May 11th patch, Anet added in a mechanic where if your clones are not able to attack anything within 4 seconds of being spawned, they will self destruct. In theory this was probably done to prevent people from prestacking clones on encounters such as Slothasaur, Mursaat Overseer, Conjured Amalgamate, and Qadim the Peerless. In my opinion, prestacking clones doesn't really give you that much of an advantage gameplay wise so I'm pretty ambivalent about them taking it away. However, this is affecting the gameplay of all varieties of mesmers. I'm noticing my clones self destructing on bosses such as Ai (fractals 100) and Twin Largos where the bosses can move out of the range of my clone attacks. It is very frustrating having your clones randomly disappear and having to burn more skills to summon them, especially since clones are a pretty big part of your dps as a mesmer. So I have stopped playing mesmer altogether on 100cm and instead playing other dps classes.

 

2. Phantasm mistargeting bug.

I have also linked another video below demonstrating the bug from Luxroy. This has been a bug for a while now. Not only does this bug decrease your personal dps but targeting trash mobs, it can also lead to raid wipes on bosses such as Slothasaur and Qadim.  On Slothasaur if your phantasm decides to go after the friendly slubling it can easily lead to a wipe, and on Qadim I have seen power chronos accidentally break the lamp prematurely more times than I can count.

 

3. Self-Deception targeting

So now we are getting into the quality of life changes that I would like to see for the mesmer elite specs. The first one is the Self-Deception trait for mirages.This trait is pretty much always taken by mirages in PvE. The idea is after you shatter your clones, this trait allows you to have 3 clones back up and running as long as you are able to get at least 1 of them from your weapon or phantasm skills. However, the issue comes from who the clones from your deception skills target. The tooltip and wiki doesn't offer any hints, but from my observation it's the closest enemy target to you when you cast the deception skills. This is very clunky when you are dealing with several mobs or when you are fighting a boss with adds. Your clone from your deception skill can target some random trash mob that dies almost instantly and you would be down a skill as well as a clone. Ideally, the clone spawned from deception skills should target the enemy you have selected similar to your staff 2 skill.

 

4. Quality of life issues for power chrono

Power chrono was supposed to be very strong in the last patch, we got to see all kind of raid records done with them. However, for the more casual players and raid groups, there were already a lot of reasons why I would hesitate on playing it in such settings. First of all, slow uptime can be hard to come by if you run Danger Time. Slow is a scarce condition that only a few classes have access to and you often need to get other people to change their builds just so you can get 15% crit chance. Danger Time doesn't even give the extra crit damage anymore, so why not make the trait easier to take advantage of. Currently on the benchmark, the difference between running Danger Time vs Improved Alacrity is about 3k dps.

 

Second of all, a good portion of chrono's damage comes from phantasms, and as seen from the previous video, phantasms can be very unreliable. For example, the sword and focus phantasms will root itself in place while doing the blurred frenzy attack. So often for bosses that move around I would opt to just play a different class.

[Ardenwolfe.8590]

Excellent post. Well thought out and explained. And thank you. I thought I was going crazy when some of these issues happened to me. 🙃

 

Hopefully, these issues will be addressed.

Edited June 1, 2021 by Ardenwolfe.8590

[Yoci.2481]

Number 3 affects all clones that spawn from non-targeted traits and abilities, such as Deceptive Evasion and Signet of  Illusions. I believe they will always target the next closest attackable entity.

[Alquinon.2957]

Oh right I forgot about that since they're not traits/abilities I use, but yeah it's very annoying when you can't summon your clones on the target that you want.

[Kondor.2904]

I legit don't understand that urge to remove the ability to precast clones. Every time they dumb down one aspect of the gameplay, they simultaneously break half of the game with it.

Just... why 

[Alquinon.2957]

1 hour ago, Kondor.2904 said:

I legit don't understand that urge to remove the ability to precast clones. Every time they dumb down one aspect of the gameplay, they simultaneously break half of the game with it.

Just... why 

 

Yeah precasting clones barely give you an advantage...

For power chrono the best case scenario you get a free 2-4 clones to shatter. For boon chrono you can pretty much fit everything you want into a one clone continuum split so precasting saves you the trouble of using a 0.5s skill to spawn that clone I guess.

[Zraurum.8493]

My opinion needs to be corrected by renewing oasis so that it works on poison, although it also does damage
It would also be nice to set up the work of printing illusions so that the clone does not appear when he pleases, but strictly according to the timer marked in the game, as it should be.

Edited June 3, 2021 by Zraurum.8493

[Iso.3425]

Another quality of life idea.

The remaining duration of Continuum Split should show up as a countdown or "cooldown" on Continuum Shift. 

 

I know it's a bit clunky and an abuse of how the cooldown counters are used, but I'd like this better than trying to keep track of the Time Anchored icon on the buff bar.

[Mik.3401]

1 hour ago, Iso.3425 said:

Another quality of life idea.

The remaining duration of Continuum Split should show up as a countdown or "cooldown" on Continuum Shift. 

 

I know it's a bit clunky and an abuse of how the cooldown counters are used, but I'd like this better than trying to keep track of the Time Anchored icon on the buff bar.

I think this is actually a nice idea to have some timer there. The rotation is already hard as it is so having bit more info on how much time you have left would be welcome in busy encounters

Also - continuum split is like the only unique profession skill in chrono so it would give it some more flavour (I know other shatters are altered a bit as well but they kind of mirror their core counterparts).

Edited June 17, 2021 by Mik.3401

[lockhart.6048]

#1 actually broke quickness stacking on siege for WvW. It uses to be that you could spawn clones against a wall and constantly shatter as a StM chrono to give an omega golem (for example) high quickness uptime. Maybe it was a bit "broken" but it now also affects legit targets - gates. Non omega need to hit the gate, so quickness stacking via #1 chain on scepter + StM is pretty important. After the update, I've seen my clone spawn into the gate, be unable to hit the gate and then vanish without giving me a chance to shatter.