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Originally Posted by Nuclfus
Much as I don't use it much, I consider IW an excellent skill and one of my favorite Mesmer elites. I'll explain my thinking.
I'm sure you realize Illusionary Weaponry is a very energy-efficient way to deal fixed-amount, armor-ignoring damage to your target at a constant rate. Its residence in the Illusion attribute means you'll never have trouble adding degen and/or snares on your bar for increased pressure. Or if you're worried about being on the front lines, bring Distortion (the energy loss from blocking attacks will be alleviated by the energy you aren't using while swinging your blade sans attack skills). The key to IW's worthiness of an elite slot is not its damage quantity, but its damage reliability: your enemy's AL could be 300, he could have a 95% block chance, or he could keep you blinded indefinitely--but as long as you're swinging your fists with IW applied you'll do XX dmg per sec. Consider that not even a skill like shadow form will keep you safe from damage dealt by IW--can you imagine what would happen to perma-sins if mobs started packing this in UW? For the sake of balance, power like that must come at a price. IW's is this: you need to be highly dependent on using it or it won't be worthwhile, yet being dependent will also make its being countered (enchant stripping) more detrimental to your effectiveness. I think given the perks I've mentioned that's a perfectly fair weakness--players truly skilled enough to benefit from IW will either use cover enchantments or plan the rest of their bar accordingly for situations where it is stripped. |
The reason being is it's only purpose is to do frontline damage and that IS NOT what a mesmer is designed to do. You can argue well then, why did they give them this skill and the answer is probably because they were running out of ideas. If we actually look at a mesmer as a frontliner we can see why this is such a terrible skill. Mesmers are soft targets, they only have 60AL, they have very very little defensive capabilities, with the exclusion of Distortion. A mesmer in the frontline will simply get slaughtered. As for covering the IW with another enchantment, deep enchantment strips are common place now with Rend still being so imbalanced and with the introduction of Pain of Disenchantment, a long with most other "proper" mesmers carrying a shatter as well. So yeah, any half competent team is never gonna let you keep it up.
Then we can go into the general concept of a mesmer actually playing frontline. It just basically boils down to a wannabe Warrior and guess what. Warriors do a lot more damage, have higher armour, have more mobility and have more utility, as well as not being vulnerable to enchantment removal. So guess what, no one is ever going to choose to play an IW Mesmer instead of a Warrior.
Also please don't comment back saying something a long the lines of "Yeah but warriors can't hit through targets blocking 75% etc etc" only retarded Warriors will sit and train a target who is blocking 75% of the time.
using Daggers in sentence messed me up but my statement stands about being rude with cursing and IW being balanced.
