Curse

Lonk · Sep 13, 2005, 04:03 PM // 16:03

To begin with, I don't think mesmers are weak in any way, that being said this is just a fun idea to toss out there and see what happens.

I was playing my warlock on World of Warcraft (yes shame on me =p) and started thinking "why not give mesmers a pet and make an even half of the professions able to have a pet?"

Now hear me out here, and note this is a basic concept, not fully fleshed out for balance issues, which im hoping for som positive responses and ideas on. Anyways, the basic idea is actually two skills, a normal skill and an Elite version.

First off the normal skill, called something like Phantom Ally. This would summon an ally, possibly some glowy purple color to signify its link to mesmer, using Illusion magic (it is an illusion after all). As far as how this skill works, well I was thinking it would have a small to medium energy requirement for casting, decent cast recharge time, limited to 1 but able to stack with the elite version possibly based on balancing. What would it summon exactly? Who knows, perhaps some ghostly version of a ranger pet, or a henchman, or cooler still, it could select from a random list of "monsters."

Example being it could randomly summon a melee charr warrior, or a fire imp or something, the ally would have its own skills, but to balance this out they would be considerably weak compared to a real player and the summon would probably have armor comparable to a necro minion if not worse.

Now I know what you're thinking by this point, "whats to stop people from making a mes/ran then and have a party of 8 players, 8 ranger pets, and 8 summons?" Well naturally there must be a balance to this, best balance i can think of is to put a limit on how many can be out at once in a party, reguardless of how many mesmers there are, perhaps 4 (I'll get to that shortly)

Now the Elite version of this skill would be Phantom Army (yeah new names for the skills could help too) and would of course take your elite slot, but also cost more energy, take longer to cast, longer recharge time, but you'd summon 3 at once to fight for you.

Now to balance this particular skill, these could be even weaker then the single ally skill, or perhaps be time-based, a bit like necro minions. Naturally as a PvE oriented player, I do mostly have these in mind for PvE, which is wh these skills are just concepts and do need balancing ideas added on.

I know some people will go "wow this guy is just an idiot for posting this" but this represents our freedom to post ideas knowing ANet will read these if the community gets involved, and this could lead to some great improvements to the game for all we know =)

A final note, as mesmer skills it would be assumed if these were ever implimented in any way, they'd replace 1-2 other mesmer skills, but that I leave to the community to discuss which skills you believe a mesmer could do without.