Azure The Heartless.3261

Think about it. If they use a skill, they take a 'lotta damage.

If they move to avoid having to use skills until the confusion wears off, they take a 'lotta damage.

That way, the opponent gets punished for even thinking challenging you was a good idea.

It's a stroke of genius, I would go so far to say.

I don't see what the big deal is. If people are that obsessed about having a choice to fight back with, they could just go play another game.

(#)Nowthatsalottadamage

(#)Excitinggameplay

If you have a necro on your team heading to mid, it is your job to peel dps off of them so they can wipe opposing team when they acquire lf.

Being targeted as necro doesnt bother me. I either try to stick to a competent teammate or arrive a little bit late to the point when theres a contest and everyone's tunnel visioned.

Couple things. I'm on the fence about this, but I am leaning toward allowing it for the moment, mainly because of the prevalence of the mindset below.

> > @"Rufo.3716" said:

> > Thief in general as it is right now is bad for the game. The crazy amount of stealth combined with all those stupid ports and movement are just plain dumb.

Condi Mirage and Condi Thief have similar annoying condition applications, but one of those classes can also ignore shutdowns and the other has the lowest HP in the game.

I am fine with classes being annoying and cheesy as long as sneezing on them/stunning them kills them. If you're willing to increase the viability of thieves so they can be proper duelists if specced, then we can talk about increasing the skill requirement for landing dots or p/p reworks. Right now thieves are mobile and deadly, but also exceptionally fragile and easy to down.

Either give them bursty, deadly openers and keep them fragile, or tone them down and give them more raw sustain. Otherwise they will not be useful. It takes considerable skill and awareness just for a thief who has specced for damage to stay alive in the current pvp scene because of their low HP pool, their stealth and movement skills sharing their damage resource pool, and their lack of active blocks, and that often gets disregarded when evaluating thief damage. If you're going to nerf their damage or make it harder to set up, they will need more attrition tools to help them acquire the time to set up burst.

And I'm talking active, stealthless attrition so they can contest points.

Also, @"Crinn.7864" go play thief.

I'll go for it, but tentatively.

It's obviously mes but no forum poll would be complete without mandatory thief hate.

kitten you thieves.

you do everything too op, unless I kill you in which case gg you suck.

Stay bad run away cheese

> @"Vieux P.1238" said:

> > @"Xuazinegueri.3592" said:

> > They evaded it, like always.

>

> Does that mean that we can nerf perma evade thief & perma stealth thief as well?

whataboutism

> @"phokus.8934" said:

> The only problem with Mirage is Elusive Mind. It's the lies that people say about "all these evades, blocks, invulns, 100-0" nonsense that doesn't leave much for conversation. They put Chrono and Mirage into one bucket and let frustration type rather than sensibility.

This.

Mirage is by no means fair as it stands. Its playstyle is annoying and focuses on disorienting the player. That would be fine if they also were not able to ignore CC that DOES hit them by merely dodging.

The exhaustion tacked on to their trait is a token gesture and does nothing, because energy sigils and rune of Adventure refill endurance even if exhaustion is active.

It is fine for a class to be a high damage, target-diverting/stealthing/annoying duelist or a stun ignoring tank, but you cannot give both of these to any spec at the same time. If your class does high damage or high dots, it needs to be susceptible to lockdown. If it is not susceptible to lockdown, it needs to do low damage or have moves be heavily telegraphed.

There's no excuse for Mirages being able to inflict stuns on other players that are more visible and more targetable, then not be susceptible to those same stuns being applied to them, even on top of the fact that they can force you to retarget or detarget at their leisure. for all of that offensive pressure, mesmers need to be glass-fragile against interrupts and hard cc. Giving them a free pass to just dodge out of a setup that managed to snag them when they have blinks, distortion, portals, stealth, retargets, blinds on shatter and etc is disingenuous.

They turned it into Moa Nerfs.

Thanks for making this thread. It's good to have perspective and periodically remind myself as a primary PVP player that there's a hell of a lot of things Guild Wars 2 does right, and community involvement/incentive on the PVE side is certainly one of them.

Glad you're enjoying the game. See you during my brief excursions out of the mists.

Oh look, someone expecting not to get stacking dishonor for disconnecting.

Leaving it here for general comments, maybe it'll turn a gear somewhere.

> @"Vague Memory.2817" said:

> The OP conveniently doesn't mention the ton of nerfs done to Mes over the last few years that would make his paltry laundry list weep.

Please elaborate.

> @"Taltevus.3289" said:

> Fine if you want mesmers to have stupid levels of access to Quickness fine.

>Mesmer has this unique ability to queue up effects against foes...it's not like other classes. we are granted the ability of a sort of non-linear attack system where the mesmer can attack you many ways (Seemingly) at one time (after a short delay in setup). But sure...go a head and make those cast times even smaller so there is NO RISK at getting interrupted. Nah, Quickness don't mean ish, let em have it....I'm fine with that but don't cry about Phantasm Spam in the matter of seconds becasue you and others apparently want this? Lets not even get on with Chrono...becasue Alacrity is ONLY useful on Skills that have been used...have free access to quickness can help.

(Edited for brevity.)

Quickness isnt the problem here. I'm fine with setups being faster or having burst dropped on me faster. That's something I can learn to play around.

I'm not sure what your point is regarding mesmer being overpowered, but I don't think I agree with your general argument. Personally, I'm fine with mesmers being able to mess with boons or add quickness to themselves. It in no way approaches permanent uptime. Problems, however, occur when this weakness is covered.

> When a Mesmer gets interrupted they become VERY vulnerable and

> A good way to chop a mesmer is to just stop them from casting...

If it's in the PVP lobby, HoTM, I'm fine with it.

Add another island like the arena but only have people turn red if they accept a duel request. You can leverage how the "Invite to Dance" skill works for the dance book.

Caveats though:

Why is this any better than the 1v1 arenas?

AoE spam from onlookers.

I'm of the opinion that balance focuses on the overarching state of the game, where making choices for traits or weapons make you strong against one type of class, but weak against something else. That concept deteriorates when a class or gear by nature of design is very strong against most other things in the game, and only weak to a handful of entities.

I would go for it, tentatively; but only as a test. At face value, it doesn't solve the problem,

Shaving their HP makes their glass play more fragile, and would encourage them to spec tankier, but the main issue we have right now is not glass memsers but condi mirages that can snap out of stun at will.

You'd just force more people into the cheese. I'd rather see more glass shatter mesmers, so as I always say, priority should be balancing from the top before we reach into the innards of the core class.

Also, Weaver elementalists are already pseudobunkers. I'm not sure exacerbating that would be a step in the right direction.

> @"witcher.3197" said:

> > @"Malpractice.7850" said:

> > > @"witcher.3197" said:

> > > > @"Azure The Heartless.3261" said:

> > > > I've also seen Jalis/Shiro work, and I personally run Condi Mallyx/Glint.

> > >

> > > Both of those are beyond bad.

> > >

> >

> > Very informative and Helpful for new players. Thanks for the great input.

>

> Revenant is unplayable without the Glint heal, so Jalis/Shiro combo is out of the question to begin with. Jalis is easily the worst revenant legend in pvP (not counting the new elite spec), it just doesn't do anything useful, bad damage bad sustain bad everything.

>

> Mallyx/Glint damage is very easily avoidable and has worse sustain than Shiro/Glint.

I'd disagree on both accounts, but I'm not going to do build breakdowns on them both here. If you are interested I can try it on you in a duel room/the arena. I've had some reasonable matches vs builds using those legend combinations. They're weird, but they have some success.

> @"AngelLovesFredrik.6741" said:

> Power shiro herald

This. S/S Staff or S/Sh Staff.

I've also seen Jalis/Shiro work, and I personally run Condi Mallyx/Glint.

*Makes note to annoy Poe with pistol/pistol thief*

Yes, its stupid. pressing 3 should not be a viable strategy in an MMO. I wouldnt mind them reworking that specific skill to make it more engaging, if they can do so while still preserving the dps of the pistol/pistol set.

For the moment though, it's a stopgap against scourge. Once we have an answer to Sand Savant, then we can figure out how to make pistol thief not stupid.

At least the bullets don't bounce anymore.

> @"Vieux P.1238" said:

> Mesmer only looks overtuned cuz many of your classes got there defensive passives gutted. You really think that only mesmer is squashing your class in 2 shots? Think again. Pretty much every classes are doing it. Only problem with mesmers is that players playing it are getting good standing still making it that much hard to hit the right target. & everyone is getting frustrated cuz you can't tank as well as before. & by the time you do find the right target you already lost more life points then your use to. That's the real truth. Anyone saying other wise is in complete otter denial.

You pretty much put your foot in your mouth here. If mesmer is a problem now, because every other class had its tanking/sustain toned down, then it is doing too much damage or has too much defense.

And standing still is not a skill that should be rewarded with high damage in tandem with high defense. Your staff clone pretend is cute, but it doesn't warrant being able to freebail out of stuns by having 50 endurance.

Guess I don't believe in otters though.

> @"EpicTurtle.8571" said:

> Congratulations on making another Mesmer thread, the rest of them clearly weren't getting the job done.

I feel bad for you because you're rational, and I've seen thief and war (which I play the most) implode due to poor balancing several times over.

Sorry you have to read these so much lel.

> @"Blocki.4931" said:

> One problem at a time. I don't think most people were even aware that Mirage is strong

Many of us were, but compared to Chrono Mirage was not as aggressively obnoxious.

I'm all for _Another_ merged mes thread until it gets dealt with.

Just Elusive mind. Make them mindfully use their detargeting skills if they need to avoid cc. That Get out of Jail free card, even with exhaustion, makes a class that is already difficult to track if they are any good also impossible to lock down.

Exhaustion is a token nerf. All you have to do is slot adventure runes and woo, free extra dodge on heal.

> @"Vieux P.1238" said:

> WoW, i thought you where talking about thief now.. Both condi and power.

> I wonder why ppl din't make an issue of Mirage before last patch when making an issue of Chrono. I mean lots of ppl was playing the same mirage build before the Chrono nerf. So what happen? Din't see no one crying about it then. What's next after that? GS power shatter nerf?

1.) We did complain about it. I am pretty sure you were part of those discussions too.

2.) Chronomancer was just cheesier at the time so more people played it, and it was thus the larger issue.

3.) ~~Sure, Let's do power shatter next.~~ Power mesmer is fine. We just mostly think it's bs that Mesmers can stun someone from 1200 range with no telegraph but are also not susceptible to stun when it is clearly telegraphed, if they spec mirage.

Axe Shield/ GS Power Berserker..

sword/Sword / Mace Axe Condi Herald.

D/P SB SA Deadeye.

GS/Staff Zerker ChillReaper.

GS LB, Double Wyvern Core Ranger.

GS, Sword/Focus Meditation-oriented Dragonhunter.

(I dont know elewell enough yet to have a weird build for them, but itll probably be weaver.)

(Ditto Engie, itll probably be holomancer.)

(Ditto Mes, itll probably be either core or Chrono.)

You can't have my setups.

Chronomancer is tentatively fixed. Power Mesmer is fine.

The only thing they need to deal with is elusive mind. Being able to break stuns with a dodge that already allows you to ignore interrupts is too much for a class that relies on deception to be effective.

If they are annoying and deceptive, stuns should punish them.

Other than that, mesmer is annoying, but fine.

That being said, I'd take some of the complaints here with a grain of salt. Their underlying messages are true. I don't know how a team of people looked at a class board and decided that a dodge that allows the continuation of channels and breaks stun on top of a class that can force you to switch targets, stealth itself, and drop dot condis on you so fast it makes your head spin would be good for anyone except pve players.

Not to detract from their attempts to fix it as they did balance chrono; I am just confused as to why they crafted it like that, knowing full well that pvp player behavior overwhelmingly favors classes that have miniscule weaknesses. If it was an oversight they would have patched it immediately. If it was to sell x-packs, then why leave revenant underwhelming?

Balance devs, if you're reading these threads, consider a preview week where you can test balance changes on the community for a couple of days before pushing it live.

Let's not buff DH right now. It's fine.