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[Tyris Requiem]

From what I have seen on obs everyone and their mother is running dual esurge. I believe I would be correct in pointing out A-Net once again failed at skillbalance. Oh well on the plus side at least games are not being decided by whoever has more SW sins (lol).

T_T wtb skill balances which are actually good... and happen on time...

[raspberry jam]

Anyone could see from the update notes that mesmers would be gods (well, even more than before). Supposedly this is good for PvE PUGs or something.

[Simply Kedde]

Well, any idiot could see mindwrack would be ****ing insane.
But overall, I believe most people are overreacting quite a bit.
Sure it's really difficult to play backline against, and ele's are pretty much out of question, but I attribute that a lot to the fact that people haven't had to deal with any sort of energy denial for years now.

It does pump insane damage, but it's hardly worse than dual VoR and triple WE frontlines pumping ym, or the ridiculous hexbuilds we had not long ago with 5-6 hexers with partywide 10 degen+ 100 damage per cast.

Also, anguish is pretty stupid for RA purposes.

[kokabel]

The thing is, I don't think anyone's running it primarily because it's edenial, but because it's spammable LOLDAMAGE. The edenial is just an added bonus. Everyone's too busy bashing their faces into the keyboards to care about the finer points of edenial meta.

[Simply Kedde]

That's somewhat to the point, but in reality, the edenial alone would suck. The damage alone is enough for it to be potent, the energy only becomes an issue because the damage potential is so high you need to spend a ton of energy on infusing and healing up the loss again.

Energy denial will either be too powerful today or it won't work, it's really that simple. Unless they completely overhaul defense and specifically the way monks work, energy denial won't cut it.

[kokabel]

Still. Mesmers were said to be a harder class to play because they required a really good field awareness so they could take advantage of everything the other team might do, as well as being able to make stuff gtfo with good shutdown. (okay, so VoR kinda killed that too, but still...)

Now they are just armor ignoring nukers that spam crap until stuff either runs out of energy or dies of boredom.

[Tyris Requiem]

Well, any idiot could see mindwrack would be ****ing insane.
But overall, I believe most people are overreacting quite a bit.
Sure it's really difficult to play backline against, and ele's are pretty much out of question, but I attribute that a lot to the fact that people haven't had to deal with any sort of energy denial for years now.

It does pump insane damage, but it's hardly worse than dual VoR and triple WE frontlines pumping ym, or the ridiculous hexbuilds we had not long ago with 5-6 hexers with partywide 10 degen+ 100 damage per cast.

Also, anguish is pretty stupid for RA purposes.

Yea you are probably right it probably won't be such a problem when people get more used to countering it. Even still... the stuff you are comparing it too was pretty ****ing retarded and although this is certainly not as bad as that I don't think its much better. Imo it almost boils down to luck. For example: say I am hiding my energy in shield set and switching to 40/40 or prot staff to get my casts off. If you get hit by esurge out of shield set you have no blue bar unless you go to high set which has the same risks etc.

Everyone's too busy bashing their faces into the keyboards to care about the finer points of edenial meta.

/agree this is the main issue. This is literally just mash buttons and make blue bars and red bars go down. Not really any significant amount of thought or effort required.

[Simply Kedde]

It isn't like they haven't been like this before though. Eurospike you spammed diversions on recharges, shames on spikes and pain on spikes. That was just as brainless.

You watch for weapon swaps, but you also did that 5 years ago when you spammed sig of weariness and when pleak took away like 35 energy.

It's hardly utopia, but in no way as bad as people make it out to be.
Hell, I'm playing against this every match tonight and I've yet to take a death in 5 matches as the only monk.

To me the difference isn't how this update suddenly turned the meta to one with a much higher skill/reward ratio, but because it's just much more offensively oriented.
2-3 mostly offensive midliners is more entertaining to play, and besides, it's less *** to die to straigth out damage than to sit and degen out with full energy because you'd kill yourself casting.

It'll possibly force changes to staple backlines, positive. Especially to move somewhat away from every monk and their mother being invincible for minutes to offense due to stances.

I really don't think it's that bad. They could just bump the recharge on mindwrack and I'd be happy. It's too spammable right now.

[shawn]

Now they are just armor ignoring nukers that spam crap until stuff either runs out of energy or dies of boredom.

Welcome to what gw's been like since post-NF. Enjoy your stay. (lol)

[Akirai Annuvil]

Essentially, this update seems intend to reroll all the mesmers past nerfs. Mantra of Recovery is back, Ineptitude, Clumsiness, Crippling Anguish, Migraine, Mantra of Persistence, Shatter Enchantment, Spiritual Pain and Enchanter's Conundrum. To make the row of incredible spike skills complete, Energy Surge is at a new all time high. Furthermore, random skills had their damage buffed, and attempts are made to bring back e-denial, resulting in just bringing back 123BOOMSPIKE. Which is now AoE across the board.

Really, these Mesmer buffs are almost all PvE only. None of the above buffs were called for - most can be returned and the game would be better off for it. AoE seems almost omnipresent, and the much coveted KD is freely handed around.
There's a few interesting tests, Panic, Instability, Aneurysm, Tease, Arcane Conundrum and Calculated Risk all add some cool new toys and with some tweaks some other things could stay too (remove the dmg clause from wrack, lower complicate's disablement numbers, disruption sig's recharge redux is good).

Anyway, these two points in the dev commentary had me laughing:

To use Illusionary Weaponry properly, a Mesmer must wade into melee combat, but the high damage output from Hard Mode creatures makes this impractical. We've added an armor bonus to this skill in PvE to address that. To keep things balanced in casual PvP formats where enchantment stripping is limited, we've split this skill and kept its original behavior in PvP.

Wait, the most +AL a mes could get out of this is +40, putting their total at 100AL, the same as a Warrior with Sentinel's insignia. In that case the mesmer can't use an IAS and has a dreaded DPS of... 28. Clearly, such an all powerful buff as this would unnerve every dedicated Gladiator and thankfully, this horrendous buff has been kept out of RA.

We added a Weakness component to Signet of Weariness in order to give it more use in PvE, where Energy denial is less effective.

So you added Weakness, an anti melee condition, to a signet, which has an anticaster effect, an effect which is useless in PvE, on a skill which has too long a recharge and activation time? That sounds like the best. Idea. Ever.

Anything worthwhile to add?