Curse

drkn · Dec 26, 2009, 03:29 PM // 15:29

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I'd argue VoR and E-Surge, actually. VoR was probably weaker than SS even before it started antisynergising with pretty much everything else on the Mesmer bar. And E-Surge is, what, a 100-damage nuke every 20 seconds? Yawn.

They're "best of a bad lot" skills, no more.

yeah, still, they're the only two elites i've ever seen used in mesmer-only builds. VoR sucked enough and was inferior to most necro elites, not only SS, while now it sucks even more.

i'd like to see pve version of Ineptitude - a spammable anti-melee nuke-hex:

Ineptitude, 5e, 1s, 7s
Elite Hex Spell. For 4 seconds, the next time target foe attacks, that foe takes 30...90...140 damage and becomes Blinded for 4 seconds.

i'd love to see Migraine pve-useful - the recharge time, the cost and the casting time, doubled with the surprisingly low health degen, make it a shitty skill, useless even if it wasn't an elite.

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4. Monsters generally having immunity to a lot of things Mesmers do.

this, somehow, can be used to our advantage - say hello to Wastrel's Worry, one of my favorite skills when i used to have CoP on my skill tab. 1/2 hex duration on bosses and wurms rocked then.
it would probably be possible to change immunities into resistances but it would need too much work. i wouldn't want to meddle too much and take the staff their precious time if there are other possible tweaks that just require changing some numbers or reworking several skills and a bit of testing.

there's one big sin commited against mesmers by ANet. throughout the game, as GW was developed, as new content was added, new professions came, new skills were introduced, the mesmers got the least love out there. they weren't buffed as much as other professions. it wouldn't be that bad if they didn't suck in the first place (talking about pve all the time). but hey, then came some builds using a /me secondary to rock the pve world - mo/me, a/me, e/me, rt/me, actually any/me can be ran efficiently in some places. secondary mesmers were used in farming, speedclears, running...
so, in order to nerf the overpowered and broken parts of the game, ANet nerfed mesmer skills. see CoP changes - done because CoP was overpowered in speedclears, mainly in DoA and mainly on elementalist primairies with a cheap and powerful aoe nuke they could run. see VoR changes - done because it was used as a long and powerful aoe hex ran by e/me to fuel up the CoP. see (later reverted but still) MoR nerf - done because mo/me and e/me used it for tanking and farming.
the mesmers were nerfed because of overpowered builds with mesmer secondary. still, it was the primairy mesmers that were hurt the most.
it wouldn't be that much a crime if other mesmer skills were buffed along with the nerfs. killed CoP? okay, buff Cry of Frustration. nerfed VoR? give us a strong buff in another elite skill so that we have anything handy out there in pve. nothing like that was done.

and, by the way, talking about CoP and CoF. i've already suggested it a long time ago but it was ignored then and we had no test krewe set here at guru yet. one of the ideas i came to with my guildies was to switch CoP and CoF. make Cry of Frustration a sunspear skill, while Cry of Pain would be a domination skill with a vital and needed breakpoint at 13+ domination magic. it's not the perfect fix and not even half as good as giving us back CoP, just linked with fc, but it looks like a quick tweak not needing too much of work and time.

just a general though at the end, to ANet and the test krewe. if any of you even reads it, that is.
don't hesitate to bring changes. if you change something and notice it's broken - either you made it overpowered or useless - just change it back or tone down/up a little. and you will be able to see it clearly really soon after complains - or a lot of new builds - seen here, at the wiki, at pvx. reverting a skill can be done in less than a day, as you've already proven with MoR. do not be afraid of giving us something broken - everything's fine as long as you try to balance out the game and we can see that something changes and you care, we don't need 'the one great update that will make us all happy'.

@down:
degen is generally much inferior to direct damage, armor ignoring or not. at least in pve, on mobs. thus, CoP was nerfed.

lishi · Dec 26, 2009, 05:08 PM // 17:08

Why people keep saying CoP was nerfed? it's very true for CryWay and maybe for a mesmer who double echoed it, but for all other uses the damage it does is very similar to before.

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and, by the way, talking about CoP and CoF. i've already suggested it a long time ago but it was ignored then and we had no test krewe set here at guru yet. one of the ideas i came to with my guildies was to switch CoP and CoF. make Cry of Frustration a sunspear skill, while Cry of Pain would be a domination skill with a vital and needed breakpoint at 13+ domination magic. it's not the perfect fix and not even half as good as giving us back CoP, just linked with fc, but it looks like a quick tweak not needing too much of work and time.

This change will just make the speed clear use mesmer primary (or a grail) instead of ele/mes , good i guess for the mesmer who are looking to get themself into a speedclear, but it cause the same problem of why they would have nerfed in first place.

Tenebrae · Dec 26, 2009, 09:40 PM // 21:40

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Originally Posted by lishi

Why people keep saying CoP was nerfed? it's very true for CryWay and maybe for a mesmer who double echoed it, but for all other uses the damage it does is very similar to before.

Well because it was nerfed. Now have almost half of the direct damage and like we all know , direct damage > degeneration. It was used to SPIKE , not to give a medium spike and leave mobs with some degen that can be healed and while still alive they do damage bla bla bla.

This , like TNTF , should be scaled along with FC.

ForgottenAccount · Dec 27, 2009, 12:42 AM // 00:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by lishi

Why people keep saying CoP was nerfed? it's very true for CryWay and maybe for a mesmer who double echoed it, but for all other uses the damage it does is very similar to before.

Of course it was a nerf. It wasn't as bad as what they did to MoR during the pirate event, sure, but doing X damage instantly is almost always better than doing X cumulative damage over 10 seconds.

As you also point out, the change makes the skill syngergize less well with existing Mesmer skills (and typically other party members too).

draxynnic · Dec 27, 2009, 04:18 AM // 04:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by drkn

i'd like to see pve version of Ineptitude - a spammable anti-melee nuke-hex:

Ineptitude, 5e, 1s, 7s
Elite Hex Spell. For 4 seconds, the next time target foe attacks, that foe takes 30...90...140 damage and becomes Blinded for 4 seconds.

I'd even be inclined to leave the blind at 10 seconds with this change. Elementalists get Blinding Surge, after all, which can keep an entire mob continuously blinded. We shouldn't be afraid to demand that as the profession that supposedly specialises in shutdown, we should be able to achieve this against at least a single foe.

Heck, I'd be tempted to go further and do the following:
Ineptitude, 10e, 2s, 8s
Elite Hex Spell. (4 seconds.) Also hexes adjacent foes. Interrupts next attack. Interruption effect: deals 10...76...92 damage and target is blinded for 10 seconds

Yes, I did copy-paste the Clumsiness text - largely because I thought doing the full Ineptitude damage in an area might be a little too much. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn't - after all, the Blind condition from this version of Ineptitude still remains more vulnerable to removal than from Blinding Surge.

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i'd love to see Migraine pve-useful - the recharge time, the cost and the casting time, doubled with the surprisingly low health degen, make it a shitty skill, useless even if it wasn't an elite.

Migraine could possibly be fixed by making it area-of-effect - then it'd be an Arcane Conundrum with a lower recharge, and the token degen would just be gravy.

More ambitiously, replace the degen with the Frustration damage-on-interruption mechanic - that'd make it synergise with Clumsiness and the like as well as the spell interrupts it's designed to work with.

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this, somehow, can be used to our advantage - say hello to Wastrel's Worry, one of my favorite skills when i used to have CoP on my skill tab. 1/2 hex duration on bosses and wurms rocked then.
it would probably be possible to change immunities into resistances but it would need too much work. i wouldn't want to meddle too much and take the staff their precious time if there are other possible tweaks that just require changing some numbers or reworking several skills and a bit of testing.

Oh, yes, WW is good for fooling the system - but does that really make up for having so many energy draining skills that are at best used for their other effects, and are in some cases completely useless? Does it really make up for pretty much any enemy that might last long enough for skill disabling to be useful proving to be immune to it?

And yes, I'd agree that Mesmers have got the short end of the stick when it comes to power creep. They've had new toys as new chapters and expansions came along, yes, but unless you count PvE skills that really move away from Mesmer behaviour, nothing that really changes the Mesmer paradigm as the paradigms of other professions have been changed by things like DS-spamming and Nightfall fire magic elites. And anything that came up that even threatened to do so has been nerfed into oblivion.

(Idly, regarding VoR - I don't think that was nerfed due to secondary abuse. The nerf actually, to my eye, would encourage secondary abuse if the prime candidates for such abuse didn't have better options for elites, since it makes it most powerful on a bar that isn't throwing Mesmer hexes or interrupts. By my understanding, it was nerfed because it was proving overly powerful in PvP, and it seems that they figured that since it was used in CoP builds as well, they might as well not split it because that would weaken CoP also.)

bhavv · Dec 28, 2009, 12:54 AM // 00:54

Lyssas Aura with Wandering Eye / Clumsiness spam is also good for PVE.

Other than that and VoR, I dont use much else on my PVE mes.

A few ideas (PVE only)-

Energy surge + energy burn reduced to 10s recharge.

Shatter Ench - reduced to 5e and 10 recharge.

Shatter Hex - reduce to 10e

Bring back the old ench conundrum / shatter delusion spike for PVE (114ish damage when ench conundrum ends).

Wastrels Worry - hex spell deals 75 damage when it ends (remove premature ending, make it last and rechage in 5s).

Wastrels Demise - 33 damage and -3 degen on target foe, 5s recharge, AoE if foe was casting a spell.

Overload - bonus damage to work on any skill.

Sig of clumsiness - 5s recharge.

Accumulated pain - increase damage to 50ish, reduce recharge to 10s.

Psychic Instabilty - make the interupt and KD AoE.

draxynnic · Dec 28, 2009, 06:02 AM // 06:02

Hrrmn. Your proposed changes to the Wastrel's skills seem to be missing the "wastrel" part.

WW I think I'm happy to leave as is, or just increase the damage further. It's supposed to be a gamble.

Wastrel's Demise shouldn't be getting a bonus when used when the target is doing something. A better conditional would be to make it have the area of effect if the target isn't using a skill - or just make it area of effect in general, but only have the (full) effect on targets who aren't using skills.

reaper with no name · Dec 29, 2009, 09:49 PM // 21:49

Honestly, the only thing I can think of that Mesmers currently do better than anyone else is sin summon spam.

Unfortunately, the game is currently just not set up for mesmers to be worthwhile.

Either:

A) Monsters need to start reacting to mesmer hexes

or

B) Mesmer hexes in PvE need to start flat-out preventing enemies from doing certain things, instead of discouraging them (empathy preventing one from attacking instead of dealing damage on attack, etc).

The problem with A is that it would take far too much work. We might as well ask Anet to randomize all the mobs. It would be nice, but it's just not going to happen.

The problems with B are that monsters use those skills too (could you imagine if Backfire prevented spells from being cast, and a monster cast it on your monk?). Ironically enough, this would also be sort of a good thing in a way, because it would encourage more balanced groups (since more people would have to pack hex removal) as well as more coordination (since the monk wouldn't be able to remove the backfire himself, but would have to rely on other players to do it). Still, this is an unrealistic scenario. The playerbase would never go for it, most players would never be able to adapt to it, and as a result Anet simply won't do it.

Of course, all this dances around the additional problem of mesmer hexes generally being single-target. The ability to shut down a single opponent is just not that desirable in PvE.

tl;dr: Mesmers might as well just try to be happy with AE+AP+EVAS, because the changes that would be necessary to make them viable in PvE just aren't likely to happen. It sucks, but it doesn't really look like there's much that can be done.

bhavv · Dec 30, 2009, 01:13 AM // 01:13

I didnt really know what wastrel meant tbh, so on Wastrels demise, make it aoe if the foe is not using any skills.

For wastrels worry, maybe just reduce the trigger duration to 2s then.

Just small buffs to improve the skills for PVE.

I found another decent build to currently use in PVE, that being tease / cof / cop / confusing images / wandering eye / clumsiness. Same as what I currenty use with lyssas, but I just dont have tease and VoR capped yet. I like synergising with Lo Sha in EOTN very much, though on my Elly I would use Lo Sha + Zho for the same effect.

Also, maybe make confusing images last 5 seconds longer, or recharge in 15s too, it is really handy in HM as it reduces AI skill activation times back to normal. Oh, and a 10s recharge on mistrust too would be great.

Shadowspawn X · Dec 30, 2009, 02:54 AM // 02:54

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Originally Posted by lishi

Why people keep saying CoP was nerfed?

Because of Natural Resistance all hexes only are half as potent if its DoT.

drkn · Dec 30, 2009, 05:05 PM // 17:05

idea brutally stolen from draxynnic: make Cry of Frustration a shout. same with Tease.

Giga_Gaia · Dec 30, 2009, 07:30 PM // 19:30

I would have thought that the obvious first step to making Mesmers more desirable in PvE would be to reduce the recharge on most of their spells like E-Surge and E-Burn. That way they can actually use the skills from their own profession instead of relying on secondaries/PvE skills for gimmicks that aren't even all that effective.

Desert Rose · Dec 30, 2009, 10:57 PM // 22:57

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Originally Posted by Shadowspawn X

Because of Natural Resistance all hexes only are half as potent if its DoT.

Afaik the degen from CoP does not count as a hex and therefor the duration isn't reduced by Natural Resistance.

Turbo Ginsu · Dec 30, 2009, 11:57 PM // 23:57

Cry of Pain is a spell, not a hex. Therefore it still works rather well with VoR. I have a beautiful PvE VoR build that is based on using vor+cop with a couple fallback hexes/spells etc.
It's still quite easy IMO, to have a quite viable PvE VoR build that will contribute to the party.

drkn · Dec 30, 2009, 11:59 PM // 23:59

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It's still quite easy IMO, to have a quite viable PvE VoR build that will contribute to the party.

...requiring a lot more ingame knowledge and paying off in a 1/3 of the effect of monk, imbagon, splinter barrager, tank or anyone else's usefulness.

Turbo Ginsu · Dec 31, 2009, 12:12 AM // 00:12

Yes, most of the time yes. I was merely saying that with a little adjustment it still pretty-much works.. :P

TBH though, one of the things that I always liked about the mesmer, kinda like playing a wiz or sorc in Neverwinter Nights, was that they do require more in-game knowledge to use.
I suppose with GW's pick up and play game style, this can be counter-productive, and yes, I'm all for seeing my beloved class get a decent buff to bring them more into line with the sort of dps I used to see before they removed the ability to stack VoR with other useful hexes.

Anyone remember VoR+Empathy+Backfire+Wastrels with a touch of CoP? The numbers! The beautiful, constant stream of numbers as the foes fell away in droves..That one spell combo demonstrates exactly what my idea of the Mesmer is and always should be. A class that can hurt you for merely existing at them. Not to forget the class that provides the laughs.

"Stop hitting yourself!" "Stop hitting yourself!!"

Lawl.

What have they given us, since they took the majority of our power away in that dual-hit smash?(CoP+VoR nerf)As far as I can see, nothing. Just a bigger dunces hat, and the ability to warm the benches even better than we already were, being, as I said, a class that does take a little extra work and knowledge.

All-in-all, roll it on in. If aNet could approach this like a mesmer, perhaps they might understand their own class more, and fix it in a manner pleasing to all, most especially lovers of the class.

ForgottenAccount · Dec 31, 2009, 01:28 AM // 01:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by bhavv

I didnt really know what wastrel meant tbh, so on Wastrels demise, make it aoe if the foe is not using any skills.

For wastrels worry, maybe just reduce the trigger duration to 2s then.

I think that comment was directed at the change you suggested for Wastrel's Demise, which made it an AoE effect if the target was using a skill. That's kind of out of the "theme" of the Wastrel's skills, which is to punish the target more if they aren't using a skill.

On Wastrel's Worry, I wouldn't mind seeing it drop to 2s, but I would rather see:

(a) Partial damage based on how long the hex was active on the target.
(b) Only able to cancel the hex using spells and not any 0 second shout or chant or attack skill. Sure, this might be marginally unfair to monsters that don't carry spells at all - But seriously, ~100dmg every 3 seconds is not exactly screaming out nerf to me.

bhavv · Dec 31, 2009, 04:56 PM // 16:56

How about making Wastrels worry a direct opposite to overload?

Target foe takes 40 damage. If not using a skill, that foe takes an additional 50 damage (15 Dom numbers I think).

Overload - Target foe takes 40 damage. Deals 50 more damage to foes activating a skill.

The current expiration timer hinders its usefulness.

And for Wastrels Demise - Target foe takes 11...44 damage and suffers from -1...-4 health degeneration for 8 seconds. Also affects nearby enemies if that foe was not activating a skill.
The idea here is to create a powerful line of 5e spells, then just reduce the lot of the 20s recharge damage spells between domination and illusion to 10 seconds. The 20s+ recharge on spells like Energy Burn, Energy Surge, Mistrust, Shatter Ench and Accumulated Pain are the main limiting factor to mesmers, when instead they can just go /E or /Mo and run arcane echo SH + Breath of Fire, or RoJ with Snowstorm, which is kind of like what I started doing :x. But Ive finished grinding my elite armor set on my mesmer now, so dont think I'll be playing her ever again.

Karate Jesus · Dec 31, 2009, 05:11 PM // 17:11

This whole premise is loltastic.

Mesmers were built from the ground up to be amazing at PvP. If you buff them in PvE (w/o a skill split), then they'll become unbalanced. Anyone remember VoR? You should because it still rapes.

Leave mesmers alone. They can still use Assassin's Promise and PvE skills just like every other caster, which combined with FC makes them OP enough.

drkn · Dec 31, 2009, 05:41 PM // 17:41

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If you buff them in PvE (w/o a skill split)

if you read the whole topic, you'd notice i pointed that pvp/pve split is necessary.