Whats wrong with spirit of Failure?

Because its 30 seconds of missing 25% of your attacks for no attribute investment that stacks with other melee debuffs. If that was the problem, making the duration scale based on the associated attribute would have been a more reasonable change. I spec high inspiration for some builds, but changes like these make it harder and harder to justify the investment.

10 energy, 3 cast time, 20 recharge, and you have 25% chance to get 2 energy if the enemy attacks u.u Blind him, make that a 90% miss chance, thus 90% on that energy gain instead of 25%. Though that's only what I did in PvE. Don't know about PvP.

Because it's a well known fact that Mesmer's aren't allowed good skills. QFMFT

enough said

Because it's a well known fact that Mesmer's aren't allowed good skills. Agree. They hate mesmers.

The thing that was wrong with spirit of failure was the same thing that was wrong with price of failure and soulreaping. The favorite child (pvp) cried and it was nerfed for them. PvP is not the favorite child of Anet. Consider each expansion. PvE players get boatloads of new content in the form of a new story, a new continent to explore, new skills, new items, new elite mission areas. PvE players get loads of weekend events. PvP players simply have to live with imbalancing skills and some new halls. PvE players get the bulk of the updates (over time most add more PvE related content than PvP related content). The most recent PCgamer article is an in depth discussion about the game which mentioned PvP for all of...2 sentences maybe? The PvP arenas have been long neglected and needing significant changes and adjustments for the sake of playability. When Anet _finally_ gets around to doing something about it many PvE players start moaning because they don't get their way in one area of the game (skill balance) which has a far less devestating impact on PvE than PvP. Its not everyone, I know lots of players who are either PvEers or hybrid players (like myself) who are content with skill changes for the most part and happy to see that work is being done to fix PvP environments and in general that Anet is taking into account PvP issues. Anyway, give it up.

Are Mesmers hated?

Mesmers have loads of good skills and always have, and always will be, an integeral part of the GvG metagame. HA is a different story, but that is related to the current setup of its maps/objectives and not the class itself. In PvE I will admit that they have historically been underused. IMO this is part of the design concept of the class itself which in many ways focuses on shutting single characters while PvE has typically been focused on dealing mass amounts of damage via AoE (see minion swarms and nuking - searing eles in DoA etc). In pretty much every case in PvE its more time efficient to simply bomb the hell out of monsters till they are all dead than to try and shutdown a monk, or tp help relieve pressure by disrupting their midline characters, or blacking out a melee toon etc. Monster A.I. simply can't keep up with it and is easily duped into bunching up for meteor showers (see searing eles in DoA).

Why the change?

As for spirt of failure, the problem is part of an issue with hexes in general as compared to conditions. As pointed out by stueyman2099 the skill resources of the game given to a team to deal with hexes are much less efficient and cost effective than skills able to deal with conditions. Monks have a boatload of extremely efficient skills to deal with conditons, Mend, Draw, RC, Dismiss, extinguish, etc. Warriors themselves have become pretty much unconcerned about conditions with the introduction of skills which are commonly on their bars like mend touch. Of course there are also Melendrus Dervishes...gg conditions. Hexes on the other hand, while individually less potent, could be easily combined with other hexes in certain team builds to essentially neuter an offense (Price and Spirit with Reckless which is AoE, or shadow of fear etc) etc. The problem is that resources to deal with hexes have been, and still are, underpowered relative to the ability of a team to stack hexes across your team. Divert for example is a slower cast, doesn't necessarily dig deep enough, slower recharge than RC. Its also generally much less useful. So being forced to run a Divert monk to have a prayer against the prominent hex teams means you put yourself at a big disadvantage in any other match. There are no, mends, draws, and extinguishes for hexes. The comparable skills are all either more costly, and much slower on recharge. Now of course there is a balance to be had here. Since a hex like spirit of failure is less effective on its own than a blind in a way, we don't necessarily want something _exactly_ equivalent to a mend condition for hexes. But, there needed to be something done in order to bring the ability for a team to effectively deal with hexes without completely handicapping themselves in every other matchup more in line with a teams ability to deal with conditions. What the skill adjustments gave us was the toning down of certain hexes (spirit for example) while also improving the quality of hex removal. We will see in time if this was enough.