apharma.3741

Honestly I feel like the OP shot at the target and somehow hit his foot. Condi is a problem in GW2 but imo not because X is OP or condition builds are stronger than power (they objectively aren't), the biggest problem I have with condi is how much is loaded onto skills for no reason. Many fights you suddenly get 5 to 6 conditions on you just for being in the fight. They're not damaging but when 1 of them is immobilise you're basically dead unless you're a class that can largely ignore or specifically cleans immb at will. Unless you have a super strong cleanse skill. But hey, who cares, at this point I think ANet is actively trying to sink this ship given the state of WvW.

Choo choo All aboard the karma train. Just use this build from metabattle and this macro to spam all skills and you're good to go! CHOO CHOOOOOOOOOOO!

I'd like to second this, let people who want rewards karma train around edge of the mists like they once did. Also let event rewards be earned there too otherwise you get the same queue problem during these half kittened events that only serve to draw in people who care about rewards over gameplay.

hmmm must be a different Alva.4590 recruiting for a guild. The point is that the weapon cannot be used for anything BUT a healing build, you look at other support weapons (mostly staff) on other classes and you see that while they are healing focused they also provide plenty of options and self defence. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Staff The only 2 classes where the "healing" weapon doesn't have any defence is scepter on thief and torch on necro, this is because the support and defence is put into the class mechanic, traits and or utility skills as part of a co-ordinated elite spec focused on support.

Personally I think you can break mobility down to the amount of distance travelled over time and has 2 components with the 2nd having 2 distinct categories. Movement speed, as defined here which is mostly passive: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Movement_Speed . This determines how fast you are at moving compared to others, this is where mesmer is slowest for investment. Movement skills, these are skills that travel X distance during their cast and have 2 distinct categories, those that travel on X/Y and those that travel on X/Y/Z, the latter is almost always a teleport (needs path except portal and shadow portal) and is much more valuable. This is also where over time against meta builds mesmer has been losing out, mirage thrust helps a lot but the other mesmer elite specs have seen an erosion of mobility through blink CD increase and other CD increases over the years while other classes had more skills added. We should also not ignore a classes ability to chill and cripple you or the opportunity cost of it, example being necro sword provided perma chill almost on auto and two 700 unit movement skills on a 10s CD, phase retreat eat your heart out.

You clearly do not play competitive game modes across enough classes. Mesmer isn't particularly fast when you compare it to Thief (all), Ranger (Slb, Drd, Unt), Guardian (DH,WB), Revenant (Shiro, Vindi), Warrior (all), Elementalist (air + x/d or s/x), Engineer (rocket boots, Scr, Holo) and even that notoriously "slow" class Necro (s/x, reaper, harbinger). To reach the same level of mobility you have to run mirage and sword with blink but even that's not enough against WB, Slb, Drd, DrD, Harb, warrior and they have the better sustain to fight you with. On Chrono, Virtuoso and core mesmer you are slow. We are talking about the same class, the difference is Lincolnbeard and I actually play it in said modes 90% of our time while you only dip your feet in to get dailies/achievements, going off your responses. "So we decided to restructure and focus it more on PvE content" - this is a quote from you. It's fine, it's a good PvE weapon and I agree with that but it's an awful PvP and WvW roaming weapon. It's better for zergs than staff, at least till it gets nerfed because ANet only thinks about zergs and removes chaos armour.

I was talking to a friend about it and I stand by what I said in the beta, they should have made it a rifle. This would have given them more skills to add AoE or ground targetted skills, they could have fleshed out the bullet mechanic to 2 generators and 2 consumers (or 3:1 with #5 being the consumer) and generally would be easier to adjust numbers.

Giving only 1 example in 1 specific area where it is good is niche. If you're trying to disprove what he said you're doing as good a job as ANet in regard to balancing. Not agreeing or disagreeing, just showing that you've only proven their point. At topic. One of the biggest issues I have with rifle is it doesn't fit in with mesmer's play style very well and it feels like a shoe horned approach to providing support, especially in the context of the changes they made a few months ago to inspiration and chaos trait lines. It has no mobility on it for the mesmer, no defence for the mesmer, and the self healing is focused on 2 skills which are not big enough to get allies too. Heal on auto while nice, the damage side isn't too good as mesmer doesn't have huge damage modifiers to stack like other classes. I'd like to see the damage on auto increase a little, about 10% should do it. I'd like to see you able to swap places with your singularity from singularity shot, it's not often I find the need to portal and ally out as opposed to teleport away from thieves. Journey needs a lower CD in WvW, play around with the healing/damage modifiers if needed but constant clone generation would be useful. I'd like to see boon removal added to the phantasm but we all know how much some people on the balance team seem to hate boon removal. This wouldn't do anything to the PvE performance but would help PvP and WvW. Evaluate after the changes.

Gotta make sure players don't get silly ideas like venturing off on their own or even "roaming". Get your titles guys!

This is what happens when you keep adding and adding and don't take away. The sheer amount of boons, the cool down on them and their durations is nuts, I'll link a core video below but also the amount of heals, cleanses and then the nerfing of corrupts and strips (entirely justified if you were reducing boon availability) has left us in the boon ball meta of HoT and that helped kill the game with desert borderlands. We also see skills that are already pretty overloaded getting buffed doing multiple more things on top of the multiple things they already did, take protectors strike, Aegis wass added in 2016 which it didn't need, then later the radius was increased for absolutely not reason, this was a great skill without these 2 buffs. Strong boons also have been given out like candy, quickness, alacrity, stability and protection at the same time condition application has had the same thing done to it where poison, immobilise, weakness and chill are mainstays on your bar for looking at someone. What I'd like to see is a scaling back in HOW much traits and skills do, it's OK for something to do 1 thing. Also ANet seems to have a really creepy bias for guardian atm in WvW, kinda nuts how strong this class is across the board.

STOP NERFING BOON REMOVAL ENTIRELY! Null Field: Reduced the field duration from 5 seconds to 2 seconds in WvW only. Reduced the number of pulses from 6 to 3 in WvW only. Then again this plays into someone's agenda of 2 big blobs smashing into each other like meat sacks as they dance around pretending to have skill.

Was very clear I was talking about WvW if you'd bothered to read and contextualise, thank you for the completely irrelevant reply.

It's still not competitive with other healers. My tempest has 1296 healing power and giving an aura heals for 1815 in game with two "healing to others" increases, with the mantras that will be about 1910 about 100 more healing.. You can cycle the mantras a little more but I can also transmute that frost aura to heal for another ~2.6K and I cleansed a condition on providing the aura and 2 on transmute and I can do this to the point I'm cycling an aura every couple of seconds. I also get other benefits to this like frost aura on allies (-10% damage and perma chill to enemies) overloading water for it's healing and cleansing that will dwarf any mantra. The heal mantra can be cycled a little faster (~20s) than wash away the pain for the same total effects and probably about the same healing depending on range. We are also not factoring in the general utility of shocking and magnetic aura that tempest does provide plenty of, despite mantras on paper healing a little more in reality a build with mantras and rifle will still heal less I believe, even with restorative illusions as you're not going to be doing full shatters as often as overload water comes off CD. For reference, you get frost auras on the following CDs and all are transmutable. 20s - weapon skill 24s - Overload water 30s - Flash Freeze shout (also cleanses an additional condi if running trooper) 40s - elemental bastion passive 60s - Soothing ice passive 75s - "Rebound" The reason people took mesmer support was the perma chaos aura and perma alacrity or quickness, both of the latter boons are getting nerfed to the point where it affects EVERY chrono build in WvW. Looking at the mantra change and saying it's better on paper, sure it is but it's not comparable to already good healers (putting aside how awful it feels to use mantras) and it's unique aspects that made it worth bringing along despite the poor heals are also getting nerfed. The mantra change doesn't exist in a vacuum. Edit: Btw healing to allies is multiplicative if you're wanting to math it out.

WvW changes are clearly designed only for GvG and Zerg v Zerg and the 2 guys doing it should really stop balancing exclusively for this. Mantras nerfing the healing power by 50% on top of splitting it to each mantra use is a bit excessive. All 50% nerfs are excessive. Nerfing alacrity is just dumb because they made it dumb in the first place. If you want to provide group alacrity DO NOT HAVE IT ALTER THE TRAIT GIVING PERSONAL ALACRITY. All it does is make the class outside of a minstrels boon ball have no alacrity even if investing the traits. That once again we see a DOUBLE nerf to it only shows how much the balance devs dislike mesmer. Can't wait to play a "support" mesmer which can't output anywhere near the healing a tempest does by rolling their face over the keyboard or cleanse anywhere near as much, or provide as the important boons. Hey, you heal on auto attack with rifle (🤭) and you got a personal portal! So stronk. Absolute bunch of biased double standard clowns.

I was there when balance wasn't only about GvG and Zerg v Zerg.