PvE Mesmer nerfs should end.

So make PvE better. To do that, buff the useless skills that monster run around with. That makes monsters tougher, and players happier at the same time.


If the status quo is bad, which you seem to agree it is, then a change is necessary. Pure nerfing is not the answer, because even if you nerf the top ten builds out there, top builds 11-20 will replace them, and still steamroll. To make the game tougher, we need to make the opponents tougher. And that means wide-range buffing for professions that aren't pulling their weight as monsters or as PCs.

Im definitly not advocating nerfing mesmers, as i dont see mesmers as having any overpowered skills after the IoP nerf. The problem is that if you buff skills to make PvE monsters better, you are also buffing the players, which counteracts the efforts to make PvE harder. What I think needs to be done is that normal PvE monsters need to be similar to current bosses in terms of their health and damage, and bosses need to be similar to boss-like foes in terms of their health and damage... but that is all for another thread. What i am trying to say is that the PvE environment needs to be harder but buffing skills will just further powercreep and will not make PvE any harder.

when you buff even two skills, loads of monsters will benefit from it, making pve harder. seriously. you are one, maybe two-three running those skills; sometimes you'll encounter eight mobs, clustered, spiking your whole party to wipe or keeping you severely hexed.

i believe that serious buffs would work much better with general mobs rebalancing - changes in their spawn locations, amounts, types - but that's a lot of work. even without it, the general outcome would be at least slightly harder game than overpowered new player skills. and then, imagine mesmer bosses after some nice buffs...
as now they're mob-like, not boss-like ;p

PvE will never be difficult because mobs are not balanced, static, and the AI is easily abused. Numbers can be pushed up, but, as we've seen, that is only annoying. In order for something to actually be difficult due to big numbers, the numbers have to be pushed to an insane level that it is almost impossible, like DoA at the release of NF.

While it is a decent thought, one needs to remember that just giving higher numbers to monsters doesn't make them better most of the time. Domain of Anguish proved this, no matter how high the numbers go, skills beat numbers any day.

The blanket buffs work better because monster bars across the continents get a little better. Meanwhile, most of these skills aren't buffed to the level of the current meta, and if things get too bad, they can easily be pruned back with a targeted nerf.

Ideally, AI would be the best improvement for monsters. If they had a "How's My Fighting" loop that checked the progress (or lack thereof, for certain tanking skills) of attacking the target they were going after, 600/smite wouldn't be a problem. If they had a disruption/removal priority list, Shadowforming might not be as bad. Etc.

But since that is unlikely, the next best thing on Ye Olde Tiers of Improvement is skills. Because the smarter and the more efficiently the enemy fights, the better, more than any numeric increase can accomplish. If all the worthless skills in the game were buffed up a few notches, even if they don't get near the most overpowered stuff, it will still do wonders for making monsters tougher opponents, which is better for PvE.

No, it's the other way around.
If you buff a skill to a very powerful level the change is high that nearly every player that is in the position to utilize it uses it, making them even stronger, but only a few monster that have this skill from the beginning will be buffed because monster can't change their skill bars.

If you buff the damage capabilities of a mesmer two things can happen:
1. The buff was not enought to replace other damage dealers in PvE (or other damage dealers benefit from the buff as well), therefor mesmers are still "useless".
2. The buff makes the mesmer more powerful than other damage dealers, forcing other professions into the position the mesmer currently is.
Imo, both outcomes are not desirable.

i'm not saying to buff mesmers to be top damagers. make them at least viable. not to very powerful level, but to contributing one, comparable to other non-primairily-damaging classes, as monk or something. no one said anything about overbuffing skills here.

Ideally the buffs need to be ones that dont break mobs bars, dont over stack to broken levels, ala cryway, dont give players some stupid broken imba bar, ala shadowform and dont make other classes obselete..Swapping one gimped class for another is not the way to go either ^^

Power creep is as bad if not worse than been underpowered in general...

Some of the things that would be effective would be Esurge style nuking, that cant over stack due to the needs energy to burn to do the damage, and need a real spec of attributes of points so cant be abused like cop was. AND more importantly is still in the vein of been mesmery by nature.

Cutting the recharges and Cross linking some of the more problematic skills for 2ndy mesmers to fc would also be a nice way to improve the mes own skills without allowing them to be abused by others to power even more op bars.

Oh and adding a 'real' interupt function to guilt and shame would be nice, making the skill actually need to recharge before it can be reused..instead of it been ready to go right away!

Thats just a start to some pretty sensible buffs that wouldnt be broken for players or mobs without op'ing the mes and keeping it in line with how people feel it should be played and giving them some much needed help in pve land.

OT:The actual nerf to iop wasnt a big deal for pve....but needed hitting in pvp...win/.

There's a number of specific buff focuses that could help the mesmer, and amusingly, they come straight from the description.

Mesmers are masters of illusion and control, subverting the enemy’s Energy for their own use, and that of their allies. Combined with any other profession, their skills provide excellent support, turning enemies’ powers against them and changing the very fabric of reality to hinder foes and help allies. Mesmers have the ability to cast spells quickly, which can make all the difference in the heat of battle. Their powers of domination allow them to take control of enemy skills and Energy. Their unique illusionary talents can slow or even halt enemy movement and skill casting, or cause imaginary illnesses that drain Health and Energy from foes while healing and energizing allies. While Mesmers are not known for brute strength, their ability to confuse, distract, and drain the enemy’s resources more than compensates.

Emphasis Mine.


There are Three Things that mesmers should be able to do, and do well. That's where fixes should concentrate.

Dominate, decimate, and debilitate enemy skills.
-Decrease recharge times on most skills, especially enchantment removal. Single target removal should recharge at around 10 to 15 seconds to compete with Rip Enchantment.

-Energy loss is made of fail against hard mode monsters. All skills that use it should change functionality. For example, Chaos Storm could increase skill recharge times, like a wide area/less potent diversion. Price of Pride could cause major damage on elite skill use. Signet of Weariness could reduce attributes. Power Leak could cause easy interruption.

Apply Debuffs
-Give most illusions spells area effect. Crippling Anguish, Ethereal Burden, Imaginary Burden, Ineptitude, Calculated Risk, and Confusing Images should all hit adjacent. Recurring Insecurity should hit all adjacent, and every time it reapplies itself, spread to each enemy adjacent to those; a recurring spread of doom.

-All skill thievery skills should be targetable (for Arcane X), like Simple Thievery, and use their own attribute as the base. Applies to Arcane Larceny/Thievery, Revealed/Inspired Hex/Enchantment.

-Expand range of skills like Blackout and Signet of Midnight.

Energize and Inspire the Party

This is a big one.

-All hex removal should have better targeting, less recharge, more effect. Expel Hexes should remove all hexes from the target. Hex Eater Vortex should be a massive area hex removal. Shatter Hex should have reduced energy cost, Hex Eater Signet should have less recharge and not require touch range, etc. Just like rits can own conditions but have no hex removal, proper mesmer bars should obliterate hexes but have no control over healing and conditions.

-All skills that steal energy should transfer energy to yourself AND to nearby party members. This will allow the mesmer to truly use foe's resources to aid his friends. Skills like Ether Signet should be able to target allies, and Signet of Recall should give energy to everyone nearby. Just as a necro can transform health into energy for the party, the mesmer should be able to move energy around to help them.

-Finally, Mantras should influence the party at a range based on Fast Casting. At 0 FC, a Mantra should only effect the mesmer. At 1 point, it buffs the mesmer and all adjacent allies, at 4 FC, all nearby, at 8, all in the area, at 12, all in earshot. 16 Fast Casting could also expand this to spirit radius. This would allow the mesmer, the Primary Mesmer, to have an unrivaled place in the party dynamic, able to make everyone just a little bit better.

For example, Mantra of Recovery could become "your skills recharge 33% faster and all skills of allies within range of your mantras recharge 15% faster." Primary mesmer is credit to team.

Mantra of Recall could become "You gain +1 energy regen, and all allies with range of your mantra gain half your Fast Casting attribute." Everyone loves cuddling up to their fastercaster.

Mantra of Flame/Frost/Lightning/Earth/Physical Res/Elemental Res/Inscriptions would all apply to an area. Distortion and Resolve would apply to an area, but only the mesmer using it would lose energy. Concentration would affect a number of interrupts, dependent on Inspiration.

The buff would be less potent than the normal mantra (for example, when using Mantra of Flame, you would be the only one gaining energy when hit by fire, everyone else would just have damage reduction), but it would still apply a potent, passive buff. And since they are stances, thus you can only have one, it doesn't infringe on paragon territory, and the fast casting effect keeps them in primary mesmer turf.

the ideas are nice, but i'm concerned about two suggestions.

blackout had once a longer range and was nerfed to a touchie because of other/me abuses (mainly r/me back then).
expel hexes, if not linked to any attribute, shouldn't be changed, as buffing it would buff the use of secondary mesmers, what is one of the problems here; mesmers are potent, desired and widely used as a universal secondary, but suck as a primairy.
the best and easiest would be to buff/change useless skills and link them to the FC attribute somehow, be it recharge time, duration, damage, additional bonus. hard thing with no attribute skills though.

So i dont want to get into an arguement again... i just want to give my opinions.

I feel as though lowering the recharge time of shatter enchantment would make it way overpowered. It already does a lot of ar ignoring damage that i dont think it really needs a lower recharge, especially considering that all rip does is apply a measly bleading condition.

I also think that rather than changing the functionality of all e-denial skills, the monsters in PvE should just be made more susceptile to e-denial. Sense you insist on buffing mesmers, i think it is far more effective to nerf the environment's ability to resist e-denial than it is to removal the mesmer's ability to drain energy. If you are concerned about e-denial still being "useless" because it doesnt cause damage, then skills like mind wrack should be made more spammable with + damage. Basically, i am saying that if you insist on changing e-denial, you can make it easier to manipulate into damage rather than removing it all together. Once again, i dont think any buffs really should be implemented but iv given up trying to argue my point, so i might as well suggest what kind's of buffs i would prefer.

Even though i already think mesmer's hex removal is strong enough considering it isnt a proactive removal oriented class, i do not mind the suggestions you made to hex removal. At least they wouldnt advance power creep as much as your other suggestions.

If there is one buff here that i will continue to argue is completely unnecessary, it is the suggested buff to MoR. I see MoR as being perfectly balanced as it is right now. If it absolutely must be buffed, then i would suggest making it maintainable at 10-12 fast casting. I think that the suggested buff would make it rather overpowered, and would definitely advance powercreep.

Oh, and if the suggested buff were made to distortion, that skill would be incredibly Overpowered. If you must buff distortion, i would just make it maintainable on the caster at 10-12 illusion w/o the use of dwarven stability.

Finally, i wouldnt mind at all moving some skills from other attributes to fast casting. Its not like it would make mesmers any more powerful and it would calm down some of those people who complain about mesmer primaries as being useless.

U know, before the VoR/Cry nerfs, I loved my mesmer above all. It had great damage, and was rather well synergized. That being said, it was no better than a good SoI, but at least it was a Mesmer, using nearly all Mesmer skills, and was generally quite welcome and helpful in a party.

Oh no!! Say anet, people are out there in PvE enjoying playing their Mesmers!!? *Gasp* Can't have that, no we can't have that!! *Nerfbat!!* Damn Mesmer liking scum!! You're just as lame as your Mesmers are, and really, we at anet hate you. This VoR and CoP nerf should put you back in your place, as mules and PvP toons.

Yeah... Noway. Here's a big fku for anet and the constant hammering of my fave class until I can barely bare to use it any more, and certainly aren't welcome anywhere save perhaps Urgoz.

Now there's a bad idea. Warriors haven't been nerfed much because of all the classes, they are the ones that are actually balanced for the most part. Tactics took a brunt of the nerfs that did happen, but that was mostly because non-warrior classes could exploit it.



Anyways depending on the skill and the reason, mesmer nerfs might be the right thing to do. In PvE their biggest problem is they lack damage from their class skills and they don't have the support skills to make up for it. So if you are nerfing a mes because he's doing too much damage in the current state, that would be a problem. IoP getting nerfed is hardly the PvE mesmer's biggest problem.

Which is their main problem. PvE and the AI involved with it is too different from PvP, as such the things that mesmers tend to do well in PvE are often worthless there.


If you want to make mesmers more useful in pve you'd also need to do things like this:

-Make skills like empathy cause AI to pause for a second or two before attacking again. That'll give it a use that it has in PvP that it doesn't in PvE. Have empathy cause casters to either stop casting or to change their habits while it's up. Have VoR deter enemies from using skills.

-For e-denial, if mobs have larger pools and quicker recovery, then the slow and weak ED that mesmers can do is worthless. That means a PvE buff to e-denial should negate some of these advantages that mobs have somehow. Also have mobs change how they cast when they have low energy to mimic what players do.

-For interrupts, they aren't great in NM and a lot of them are pointless in HM due to the mobs buffed abilities. What's the point of power spike in HM against a foe that has half cast, half recovery, and double HP?

QFT. This is also something that needs to be considered. I mean if HM mobs have energy surge that can cast in a second, recharges in 5 seconds, and strips away 15e and 300 health... you might be in trouble if you run into a group of those.

Also considering that some hexes like empathy will cause players to pause as it is, buffing those so they are more useful in PvE would have a greater impact against players in PvE instead of against the monsters.


IMO an AI rebalance might be one of the most important things to make mesmers more viable in PvE.

Precisely why a Mesmer often gets overlooked.



When the rest of a team is plowing through enemies with immense DPS and the best a Mesmer can do is interupt a few spells here, shutdown a foe there than you aren't carrying much weight. I'm sorry but standing around wanding and waiting for a foe to cast a key spell for you to interupt is inefficient. In that same time frame you could've provided much more had you played another class or provided some form of damage which a Mesmer lacks.

we've continuely pointed out that pve, in the current state, is fairly easy to be played with anything and lots of classes/builds/teams can steamroll through vq, hm, dungeons. if monsters get buffed by mesmer buffs, giving us, the players, more useful skills, efficiently raising the pve difficulty at the same time, it's two birds with one rock.
it is possible - but i haven't thought that through or something, just a possibility - that by buffing mesmers in pve lots of overpowered builds get indirectly nerfed by raising the general monster abilities. and i think that it's better to power up the monsters than nerf any skills, as nerfing limits the players AND weakens the monsters.

we're thinking (ha...) players, not dumb ai. if you're going into a location with newly buffed mesmer mobs/bosses, take additional prot spirit. organise yourself a low energy set. start thinking, using some tactics and changing your builds accordingly to the location instead of steamrolling the whole game with three gimmicks.

The way people talk makes it sound like there is no situation that a mesmer could possibly be useful and get the job done. People who say classes are useless use fallacious or just false arguments like "There's no reason to be a rit other than spirit spammer and paragons only have imbagon". Really? That's the only thing those classes have that can possibly achieve success in a timely and efficient manner? There's a huge difference between steamrolling and being viable.


Rip enchantment causes bleeding, a weak easily applied condition that the target could likely already have. So rip's only real function is to just remove the enchantment. Most of the mesmer removals have much better secondary effects. If you want a fast recharging enchantment removal use discharge enchantment.

I like the idea of stolen skills being useful but then it kind of invalidates signet of illusion. Maybe if it used half your attribute it would be more balanced.

The hex removal buffs would be too strong compared to monks.

Spreading energy would either be useless or very overpowered. First of all there aren't that many skills that steal energy but the ones that are around would just be ridiculous if they helped the whole party. One mesmer with energy drain would basically cover energy skills for the whole party.

Mantras last too long and reduce too much damage to be aoe. On top of that stance removal is rare in pve. This mantra buff would invalidate paragon damage reduction which is the main reason they get into groups.

Buffs like those go to the other extreme, making mesmers too good. There would be nothing wrong with some small conservative buffs but some of those ideas are complete overhauls.

Iv been thinking and I figured that buffs would actually be okay so long as they remained small. Buffing skills to the overpowered point of AP and MoP would be bad and would only make power creep worse than it already is but buffing underpowered skills to a "balanced level" would not really make power creep any worse, so long as these buffs didnt go over the balanced level. I think that any skills should stay in their context (ie: crippling anguish should stay as a snare/degen skill). Really, this thread is just a complaint about the IoP nerf, however, so if we are going to discuss mesmer skill buffs any further, a new thread should probably be made.

I'd love to see mesmer skills get a good buffing to compete. Problem I see is if they become AOE etc then what's to stop secondary mesmers using and exploiting them?

I'd like skills moved to fast casting, or the AOE effect of skills tied to FC. Or maybe the AOE effects of skills only above req 13. Eg mantras become AOE at a levels of fast casting, or at req 13 inspiration or over. Channeling AOE at req 13 insp etc...

Would be nice for the mesmer to fill more roles as either a disabler, interupter, hex causer or spreader, or remover. I think it could become overpowered if it could fill all roles at once or have the skills exploited by secondaries.

One other idea is put sig of illusions into fast casting and have it apply to the next 3-7 skills (depending on attrib). This would lead to fun builds and mean that mesmer could fill a role that the party needs.

just a thought, out of the discussion we had here.

i lack an interrupt-over-time in mesmer skills. i mean - something like maelstrom, that might deal no damage, but interrupt every 1/2s for 10s or every second for 15s (that knowing mesmer recharges - a shorter duration with a short and usable recharge time would be much better, though). probably chaos storm could do it instead of draining energy in pve, but then it would be an omgcheap version of maelstrom... maybe if it got linked to fc or inspiration... or maybe if it was at least halfly spammable one-target hex on 13+ domination...

Some classes can make good use of their secondary because of their primary attribute, which gives them good build alternatives to adapt their character to the circumstances.

As someone already mentioned, buffing Fast Casting to also reduce recharge time, which would not only shorten the recharge on Mesmer skills, but also those of your secondary, could open interesting possibilities.