timmyf

timmyf, on 18 October 2012 - 03:44 PM, said:

Now thats what im talking about. Do you have the recipe?

Yep, it was also on this site:
https://sites.google...update-tracking

I figured someone would post it eventually. Big dragons means we're gonna need big weapons. Really, big weapons.

"Yo, I heard you wanted to fight dragons, so I placed dragons inside your dragon so you can fight dragons while fighting a dragon."

Sorry, had to do it XD

First off, I haven't played a Mesmer at any of the beta events or stress tests; I am, however, interested in rolling one for launch ... probably not as my main (lovely, lovely Necrokitty) but as a favoured alt. Secondly I have read this thread in its entirety, I did this because I don't really understand Mesmers and want to learn more about them.

SPvP players tend to be saying the class is fine. I'm glad for them but I really don't enjoy PvP so that's a bit like saying Druids in WoW aren't broken ... nothing to do with me, different game. Obviously it's the same class but I'm sure that anyone would concede that there is a world of difference between PvP and PvE skills and the challenges presented by those respective parts of the game.

PvE players, on the other hand, seem to be saying that the class needs some love ... quite a lot of love actually ... and I am starting to see why. For starters, I really can't imagine that a Mesmer of any build (hell, any profession at all) has fundamental problems dealing with regular landscape mobs. If people are having trouble with landscape mobs then really they should consider trying a different profession that might be more comfortable to play. It's not a question of "hard" or "easy" value judgements, just preferred play style (eg. I love playing Necromancer but just cannot get my head around Elementalist ... so I play a Necromancer ). The challenge with PvE comes in Dynamic Events, specifically in the "boss" encounters. There are two things here that I see making certain Mesmer builds redundant; first off there is generally a lot of AE damage going on, a player knows to dodge out of the way, clones and phantasms? Not so much. As a consequence of this you are unlikely to be able to consistently apply shatters in boss encounters, by the same token your phantasms will probably be taken down fairly quickly because of AEs that they won't move out of. The second issue is one of threat. In large encounters threat is very rarely an issue partially because it's likely to be melee classes that hold the most interest and secondly because it's trivially easy to drop threat if you get it; this means that clones are largely redundant in PvE except as shatter fodder (see AE damage above). This would seem to limit PvE Mesmers to boon/condition builds if they are to be as useful as they can be in PvE environments such as dungeons or end-of-chain DEs. This is not to say that other builds won't work in PvE, just that they won't work as well as a support build, which is a bit of a shame because the TL;DR description of the profession (experts in manipulation of raw magic and illusion) seems to suggest that they would have a lot more flexibility than they in fact appear to have.

TL;DR
Pretty much working as intended in PvP. Need a fair bit of love in PvE.