Physical damage should not be 5x stronger than elemental/caster - balance needed

What do you mean? What do you mean by "physicals have very little support"?

You speak of "more difficult areas" when judging from your posts you have not tried to H/H more difficult areas. You claim that Mesmers can shut down more than one target when H/H'ing and is more reliable than straight out damage, yet I would be impressed if you had half the H/H experience as I.

If you believe Mesmers to be an effective choice in so-called "more difficult areas", by all means go ahead and try to do Shards of Orr HM or Forgewight HM with a Panic Mesmer. The most dangerous foes in both areas use nukes that Mesmers ostensibly counter. Try it. You'll quickly see how effective the Panic Mesmer is at defending the party. Without good aggro techniques you will be annihilated. With good aggro techniques it is still difficult.

Interrupts work at defending the party to some extent, but it's a fragile choice. Mesmer heroes are generally weak. Unfortunate maybe, but true.

Or that Mesmers are bad. What's the difference?

No, it isn't. Defensive warding is in general terrible. Consider the wards:

Ebon Battle Standard of Courage - you shouldn't be bringing a defensive ward as a player.
Ebon Battle Standard of Honor - is an offensive ward.
Ward Against Elements / Ward Against Harm - would you rather have 8 players protected by the Ward taking damage from Savannah Heat, or 2 players unprotected by the Ward taking damage from Savannah Heat?
Ward Against Melee - Aegis >>>>>>> this spell.

No, wards are not good. Utility in general is not good. Kill speed is what matters in PvE, and almost the only thing other than damage that matters is staying alive.

It's not just physicals, casters clear areas faster than Mesmers (that's why I use mainly Necro / Rit heroes). Shutdown may be "helpful" in inverted commas, but it's not efficient.

As for the second, well, the purported niche of Mesmers - shutdown - simply has no role in PvE. Unless Mesmers can deal damage then, they will remain useless. Mesmers received a major buff not so long ago, but it did not change their position because they're still bad. A bit less bad than before, but still bad.

If Mesmers are to be useful, they need to be able to deal damage. How they find a damage build that deals comparable DPS to other classes, while still being one they can call their own, I don't really care.

@Jeydra and The Josip:
Are you arguing that casters should deal an equivalent amount of damage to physicals or that the gap between caster and physical damage is too high.

Afaik the manuscripts were written at some time during the beta or even the alpha of Guild Wars. During the beta a lot of balance changes were made, one were a heavy decrease in the damage capabilites of eles.
Also, handbooks often overpricing the ablilites of the every class/unit in the game, Ugh has provided another example for this.

Ugh, no. This would be awful. Please no one support turning mesmers into yet another nuking class. I would be really pissed . The reason why i play mesmer is because of their playstyle being centered around interruption and disruption.

Edit: didn't mean to double post.

He thinks Keystone is bad, he's baiting people for quoting people in future threads. Don't do it.

If utility is bad, then Aegis is bad.

Physicals have SY, bodyblocking, and knockdowns. That's it. While that may seem like a lot, it's only good if they can provide plenty of damage with it. If the physical and caster damage was made equal, the new meta would probably be something like imbagon + 7 casters. But, if physical damage was made slightly weaker, that'd probably be fine.

With a melee, you're stuck jogging up to mob while they rape your party. Even if you preprot and flag or whatever, your party will draw aggro eventually. Then, once that happens, you better kill like the fking wind; no long-term, relaible shutdown makes you very fragile.

Also, you're easily countered as a physical.
The "kill everything before it kills you" strategy is the definition of fragile. There's nothing unreliable about mesmers' shutdown (maybe PI, if you have bad ping); mobs will always stand next to each other and spam skills, so Panic will always work.

Thinking mesmers are bad because necro and rit heros are overpowered is ridiculous. Necro and rit heros are good because necros and rits have powerful skills that can still be used well by the stupid AI.

Also, why do you care if your mesmer heros are bad? Do you have a soft spot for Norgu? I'm sorry if you miss him or whatever, but you can at least rest easy knowing that you, a mesmer player, are not bad.

K.

It's efficient in hard areas.

Once again, shutdown does have a place in PvE. I'm sorry if you can't vanquish some areas as fast as a physical, but your purpose is still useful in pretty much every non-beginner area and extremely useful in higher-end areas.

Also, stop playing mesmer. Seriously.

I've never been the one to say something like that and I usually find it stupid when people do say that, but I'll have to make an exception. Not every class is designed for damage. Mesmers are shutdown, not damage. Shutdown is useful, but you don't like it. You don't like doing what mesmers were designed for. You don't like mesmers. Roll a different character.

I'm sick of all this "why can't this class do another classes' job?" nonsense. If Anet can find a way for mesmers to deal damage while still staying true to their role, fine. But, if they wanted to do that, I'm sure they would've done it in the last update.

This logic is born out of power creeping, plain and simple. Yes, with gimmicks like Discordway, Physway, Glaiveway, Critical Scythe Sins and generally OP skills, damage is on the cheap. This is a lazy attitude and frankly I am now glad secondaries get the axe in GW2.

Mesmers and elementalists are not useless in PvE, power creep has simply allowed people to ignore this thing called strategy and just steamroll. That's a tragedy, not something to embrace.

Absolutely I do, Gwen is very handy with the recent buff, and two of my guild mates play mesmers. Stolen Speed and Panic are great skills that my guild has come to love (though you'll probably hear a dozen other skill names if you talk to them). Do you know what heroes I don't take? Physicals. I think they are incompetent and inefficient. Minions work better as damage soaks and end up healing my party and becoming bombs when they die.

Sure, when you have overpowered builds out there, you don't need to rely on support. But it doesn't make it useless when a party doesn't rely on said power creeper builds. But that's too difficult for most people, why use strategy when you can ignore it altogether?

And those builds would rely heavily on OP PvE skills, which power creeped the game. These skills give preference to physical damage. They allow anyone to melee and turns the entire game into a damage pissing contest.

What exists, exists because they went too far in giving us PvE buffs. What's the point of arguing who can do more damage when it's all overpowered and should be nerfed? Everyone yawns and says PvE is too easy, yet I'm sure they'd throw a fit if their precious "uber" damage build got rightfully wacked. I say nuke it all, it would make a lot of things relevant again.

This is a retardedly amusing thread.

Btw, I've H/H'd every dungeon in HM in the game as a mesmer, sin, and rit. Mesmers are, have been and will continue to be extremely viable in HM pve.

I do.
In fact in most cases I don't take 1 mesmer hero I take 2.
Have you ever tried 2 PI heroes against....well just about anything that can be knockdown?

thanks for posting the link seeing the OP never really said anything. it did confirm my theory, PvE skill abuse while building the 3 heros to support the build some. all this goes right back to problems that have been around since nightfall and pve only skills. had hard mode been better designed and implemented, PvE only skills, consumables, and the current power creep way of skill balancing would of never been needed at this point in the game. the only true way to fix this is removal of cons and EoTN PvE only skills while linking the rest of the factions and nightfall PvE only skills to the primary attribue of the profession they belong to as they did with seed of life, critical agility and theres nothing to fear.

although in the case of the OP's build and team makeup, after doing a little reading, i think a A/D could out damage the Me/D while at the same time being able to change a few skills of the heros to improve their builds. only reason i can see the enemy mobs dropping fast is the abuse they take due to the 4 seconds at a time they are on the ground from Psychic Instability.

This thread is possibly the most TL;DR thread I've ever read on guru.

Whether Physicals are assrape on wheels or just as they should be doesn't matter because anets not going to completely change the way the classes relate to each other at the end of the games lifetime. That would just be ridiculous. We should be happy they care enough to try and make the underpowered classes competitive with the other ones.

So why argue tooth and nail over it?

This.

That said, I sympathize with the OP; it's much easier to roll PvE on my sin (with all the hero buffs) than it is on my monk...

Dude, the Warrior was the only physical in that entire team. He needed an entire group of casters to help him. Now if you showed me a group of 8 Warriors doing the same, you would have a point. And I would like a screen shot of that E/W, I wonder why its not meta by now?

@Jossip
All I proved was that w/o caster support, you do roughly the same damage in melee as a caster. Delete your Mesmer and make an Assassin. Why should every profession do the same amount and type of damage? What fun would different professions be, if they didnt have thier own flavor? So what a Mesmer does less dps on a single target than an Assassin? Look at all the other things a Mesmer can do better.

@TheDrunkard
Thank you for the link, I did try the build. Im not that impressed with it. I must have missed the point about PvE skills being OP. I think there is some confusion around here about physical damage and Holy/PvE damage. In the Me/D scenerio we have a Scythe, Aura of Holy Might, and Asura Scan, a deadly combination. AoHM does Holy damage not physical damage. Thats why the combination is so deadly. This could easily be fixed by AoHM being tied to Mysticism. That simple fix, would drastically reduce the exploitation of Scythes by other professions. Asuran Scan could be reduced, but that would really suck for my Ranger and Warrior. But if you take out AoHM, Asura Scan wouldnt be as big a deal. So I agree that some PvE skills need tweaking, but not a total nerf. But I dont agree physicals alone, are overpowered. Right now, vanilla physicals and caster damage is fairly balanced. When you get into PvE buffs and HM, the balance shifts depending on profession.

That's not the point, point is that Me/D as a scythe, frontline attacker is in some way the most efective build for support, caster class scuh as mesmer for general pve.

Now i agree with Josip on one thing, all this talking about how great mesmer skills are like PI or Panic are, that's just theorycrafting, because when asked for a full skill bar, there goes those lousy builds or most often nothing.

So what ? It's pve, since when you play it "vanilla" ? Heros, pve skills are what pve enviroment is for now.

Well, I don't think the thing is 'physical vs elemental'.

It's armor ignoring vs not armor ignoring.

Many, if not most, physical attack skills deal armor ignoring bonus damage.
Barely a few elemental spells deal armor ignoring damage. And some have armor penetration.

I would go with a change to Energy Blast, turning into an Enchantment spell that decreases the elemental damage of your spells, in exchange of some armor-ignoring damage. Other caster professions have their armor ignoring or almost armor ignoring stuff already.

That should fix that.

Josip if casters are so underpowered, then when you were in my alliance why did you run 3 discord necromancers?

So, get a group of support-chars to support you primary caster and do the same thing as that warrior.

Because HM PvE is about damage, healing and nothing else. You can't play mesmery mind tricks with AI and until recently it was nearly impossible to interrupt anything worthwhile with mobs on halved casting time.

Flavor may be fun but it does mean you're more likely to be playing your fun flavors with H&H

Those other things are not as efficient as just hitting things hard.

Which is the root of the problem.

1) Those builds are good for what a Mesmer should be. Obviously you dont like playing a Mesmer either. I wouldnt recommend you play one.

2)That was my point. Physicals are ok until you add Holy/Armor ignoring damage and PvE skills. Let me repeat what you quoted.

Edit: I dont know about everyone else, but my caster characters roll through PvE with H/H(all casters). Just as easily as my melee ones with melee support. Matter of fact my Rt and Necro are easier to take through than my melee. Thats because I dont have to deal with all the melee hate. Yes, my Mesmer still takes a little more tact to get through HM than the others. So I wouldnt recommend Mesmers to beginners. Wait until you learn how to pull, kite, and target.

Have to +1. It's painful to go with my monk. There's nothing for me to do but either be a weak Smiter or run UA and watch the AI fight it out, which takes forever.

Nah, healing/protting in pve is fun

And common sense told you that something is suspicious here, because if some build is stronger than the other one should always play the same build for the rest of his life? Common nonsense.

I played often with Discordway (modified, not pvxwiki one) because I ran it with AP EVAS spam, which was the strongest mesmer build of all those I've tested back then. Recent mesmer buff update nerfed AP EVAS spammer build, while it introduced some new skills such as Psychic Instability, which I decided to try. I also decided to try melee mesmer which was supposed to be just a fun build out of boredom and nothing else. But lo and behold, contrary to theorycrafting it turned out to be totally awesome build for those who know how to play, use proper equipment etc.

The "8 warriors" argument is something that might sound valid only to WMo player (by that I mean capability of understanding and not actual game build, although it can be related).

Every team is roughly divided between offense and defense. Entire team being offense or defense doesn't sound like optimal solution now does it?

There is also something called synergy. Adding caster to the team will usually add damage in a linear way. Adding that warrior will increase team damage not linearly, but exponentially.

As Amy said, why dont you make a team of casters or a team of melee support yourself as caster? How much will team add to your damage as a caster, and how much a team can add to that melee? Sure, 1 on 1, melee might deal equal damage. But general PvE does not consist of 1 on 1. It consists of your entire team vs whatever you aggro.

I know you don't get it, but you only proved you're theorycrafting.

"1 on 1 you do same damage as caster"

This is pure theorycrafting. Because you don't do one on one, you do 8vs8 or something like that.

When you say "caster support" you really mean "team support". One melee could be supported by 4 paragons and 1 ranger. Would you also speak of "caster support" then? It's not about caster support, it's about whoever gives stronger support.

You went to test the build on Isle of Nameless like a total noob. Good for you that over 90% of people in the forum won't notice anything wrong with it, and how it revealed you as a noobish player. But hey, everyone can pick their champion right? And if someone thinks you're typing credible posts, who am I to interfere.



Translated: if you employ a tactic that will slow vanquish speed, you are useful.

Please. Define useful. If useful is "ability to VQ a zone", then empty skillbar and 7 heroes can do the trick.

You can only define "useful" here in relation to other options. As amount of more efficient alternatives increases, usefulness of X decreases. If you say something is useful, that says absolutely nothing. Useful how much? Compared to what?

I'm tired of listening to "you hate mesmers so play something else". Let's get this done once and for all. Here's official description of mesmers: "While Mesmers are not known for brute strength, their ability to confuse, distract, and drain the enemy’s resources more than compensates."


PvP: True. Overall, mesmers have been valuable in PvP because their disruption and shutdown abilities have proven more useful than adding another generic damage dealer to the team. Optimal (not useful, but optimal) solutions to team building often included mesmer(s).

PvE: False. Adding another generic melee damage dealer to the team will be more useful than adding a mesmer. (Talking about general PvE not a single gimmick area like dungeon x speedclear.)


It's not about liking or not liking a mesmer. It's about how playing mesmer the way it was intended is not as good as taking a scythe and slashing monsters, or casting "assassins" and using shouts as a Paragon or Warrior. But as I said before, I don't think that mesmer needs a general buff, but that some clearly overpowered options need to go to make it better not just for mesmer but for many. This is because I like balance, and because elimination of "peak" skills makes more skills viable, which makes game more fun for me. Not for everyone.

But why are you not sick of not reading other peoples posts with comprehension? Does that not bother you?

No one here requested that profession X should do what profession Y does.

No, not in this case. It's more about millions of skills and buffs for melee chars and... almost nothing for casters. Say, you are a hexer and want to increase damage that Conjure Phantasm does. What can you do, take Mantra? And even then, it increases duration not degen. You have nothing. Take a blood skill. What can you do to increase damage? Nothing. Take Energy Burn. It's armor ignoring. What can you use to increase damage? BUH? Let's now compare this Energy Burn to melee. Burn is also armor ignoring. But so what? It's 10e, long casting time, long recharge, mediocre damage. Mesmer melee can strike for 50-350 damage and use either no energy or 5 energy (attack skill). And he can repeat it several times by the time Burn recharges. You can take elemental damage and use Weaken Armor. But melee can also use Weaken Armor and million of other things.

I've vanquished plenty of areas with H/H, with practically empty skillbar (C+space).

Empty skillbars are extremely viable.

And fun is subjective.

...You can't be serious when you say this.

1) Melee that supports casters goes against all mechanics built into GW1. It doesnt work and shouldnt, thats an opinion. Best they can do is bodyblocking and meat shield. Which works extremely well. One day in GW2, Warriors will have a banner that increases magical attacks. But Anet had to start over from scratch in order to implement this idea. So you basically want Anet to rework all melee characters in GW1. Good Luck with that.

2) Theorycrafting, you keep saying that word. I dont think it means, what you think it means.

3) Here again you stepped on your own words. I dont see anything about being damage dealers in the official description. In fact it states quite the opposite. The way its supposed to work is you do your mesmer thing, then your team takes them out easier.

You forgot, taking things out easier is bad. No matter how hard you try, you suck as a mesmer. Jeydra says so, it is the truth.

@Desert Rose - the latter. Also regardless of what the manuscripts are / are not, it's better evidence than nothing.

@Cuilan - Aegis is flat out defense, not utility.

Good.

I'm not going to say anything more about how good Mesmer heroes are until you show evidence that you've tried them in a difficult area. A screenshot will do.

If you say shutdown is useful, show me a time record of any kind (from H/H to full player parties) where one hero / human is a shutdown Mesmer. Henchmen don't count; you can't change their bars.

@Xiaquin -

You could say it's a tragedy, but it doesn't change the fact that currently there are better options than Mesmers and Elementalists in general PvE (not true in SCs). The fact that there are better options makes them useless, however heartless you think saying so is. If you think it's a tragedy, then something ought be done to redress the imbalance. In other words, you support the OP (read the topic title).

You are right that physical heroes see no play. That's because the AI doesn't know how to use them, nothing more and nothing less. Go ahead and use Mesmer heroes if you so desire; it's just not efficient. You're not going to set any time records using Mesmer heroes (H/H at least - with 2-man you'll probably use Mesmer heroes because you can't use more than 2 Rits), except in select areas where you can't use the MM for whatever reason.

If you prefer to rely on inferior builds, then tacitly you support buffing casters, because if Lightning Orb goes from dealing 106 damage to 1060 damage, there's nothing stopping you from using the completely inferior Lightning Hammer.

@Mesmers Are Bad - I've H/H'ed every HM dungeon as an Elementalist using a damage build, I suppose Elementalists don't need damage buffs in PvE either, hm? Heck I can probably H/H every HM dungeon with an empty skill bar (especially if I use consumables), I suppose empty skill bars must be balanced too?

@Charr -

Yes. It doesn't work very well. The AI doesn't use PI as often as it should, and even if you KD them you still need to kill them. The Rits and MM absorb and deal so much more damage than Mesmers that they're too powerful to give up.

If you don't think so, by all means post the bars. I'll take them for a run against the Stone Summit in Duncan HM.

@NerfHarder - the reason there's only one Warrior is because the AI doesn't play Warrior (or Derv, or Sin) very well. In fact they play them absolutely terribly. The E/W Sword build is here:

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...&postcount=142

It's not become meta because it's hard to use. For one, if you bring that build into PvE you'll need to maintain Prot Spirit on yourself. With no cancel stance, one misstep and you will be dead.

Nice to see that you think physical damage is overpowered now too.

PS:

The easiest way to take something out is to KD it and hit it with a billion damage before it gets up. Can Mesmers do that?

Same thing.
No profession can do that.

There wouldn't be a problem if people had less mania of protagonism. That's about it, Role Playing Games don't work anymore when every players feels the urge to play the pivotal role in any situation.

The idea coming out from this thread is that of a flattened game where every class does the same, every class plays the same main role, every class is given the ability to simply dish out three digit damage and mindlessly blow things up. And that's all in the name of "balance". Other roles and functionalities are rendered pointless because they're less efficient in the current broken state of the game. Sorry, "balance" means you're given equal faculties and possibilities to go with your role, not just the same degree of a certain ability.

Ten professions are way too much in a game like this. There's no place for ten interchangeable damage dealers (because that's what you call "balance", interchangeability of classes...), so some classes must be better than others at it, while lacking other capabilities.

"While Mesmers are not known for brute strength, their ability to confuse, distract, and drain the enemy’s resources more than compensates."

So, distract and drain the enemy's resources. That's your role as a Mesmer, not doing insane damage. Leave brute strenght to melee professions, support them playing your role while they play theirs and learn what teamwork means.

Up to then, I'll be with everyone else's opinion: stick to the official description itself and you'll realize you've picked the wrong profession. You just insist misusing a class and expect the game to revolve around this misuse.

EDIT:

All I see there is:

- A pretty common DS bar used by a profession not supposed to play melee
- A bar filled with buffs

It's not hard to use at all. It's not become meta because:

- It likely sucks when played on a caster class
- It's actually an everage DS build for Warriors

I'm not impressed by the results: a bar entirely devoted to buffs off course produces insane damage. So? You're compressing the role of the casters - to support damage and buff damage dealers - in your own skillbar.

What's being said in this thread is that there's no usefulness in that because the insane damage.

Seven heroes, huh? Here I've been playing and have been limited to three, what's your secret? Do you use consumables? Care to post up these builds? I mean, since everyone here is so stupid, they don't know what you obviously do. Please, enlighten us all.

Fixed for you.

That depends on the team. If you have a team of casters that can support the melee, yes. If a team lacks any meat shield, yes. But all cases? You couldn't be more wrong.

"Good" to you means damage. "Good" to other people means "effective". "Effective" to you again means damage. Arguments just bounce off of you if they don't revolve around that one thing. Tip: not everyone cares about big, shiny damage numbers. Some of us want fun, interesting game play. It's why I deleted my sin, and barely play my dervish and warrior (who uses a spear now anyway). It's monotonous.

Stop acting like damage is the only thing that matters in the game; it's the only thing that matters to you.

Good point.

You started this thread because physical damage is largely more effective than elemental damage, and therefore your concern is with the damage output. In fact, you've spent the better part of 8 pages of guru arguing about damage output and the effectiveness of certain roles compared to others. So stop shouting bullshit about "i just wanted to play a different build". You are raising a god damn flame thread because you are unhappy about what builds are most effective.

Stop insulting everyone who doesn't agree with you. I get it, you make fun of someone and attack someone not based on the merits of what they bring to the conversation but instead upon something semantic and as a result it belittles the actual relevant points they brought to the table. It's effective, but all it does is cause everyone to be really RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing pissed at you to the point where even if you are making valid suggestions as to how the game should be, no one is going to give you a damn second because you've pissed them off. Look at this thread. Most of it is flames.

And yes I agree with you wholeheartedly; physical damage outclasses elemental damage in many, many respects and in most, but not all areas, can be so much more effective.

Er, no. If something can get the job done, it's not useless. I never agreed that physical damage needed a balance; PvE skills do.

I'm supposed to care about speed? Yes, if I don't conform to the absurdly over-powered metagame flavor of the month that says the best way to do X is to run Y or a Z-way team, I won't be "efficient". It doesn't mean anything.

Fallacy. I just don't switch over my whole strategy to the current trends and then preach to others about experience. More nerfs need to happen than buffs, that much is obvious.

That's subjective. You can make anything irrelevant with the right mesmer build, it doesn't need to KD anything.

FC - 11+1
Dom. - 12+1+1
Insp. - 6+7
PI, CoF, Power Spike, Empathy, Drain Enchantment, Mistrust, GoLE, Rez. Signet
Never used it in Slavers' Exile because I don't play it but used it in regularly in missions, dungeons and WiK bountys.

That build isn't just hard to use it's almost impossible to use.
Any form of block or miss renders the entire build useless.

It isn't so much that Melee damage is too strong...its the fact that monsters are completely retarded and does not have good build, and the only difficulty comes from stats pump.

I actually want Anet to massively improve their kiting AI and make the mobs kite CONSTANTLY and give melee hate skills to more mobs. And make the mobs target the melee more, getting rid of this "beeline to the casters even when they're all protected" BS.

There is only ONE class where I would agree with the OP, the elementalist. The difference in damage is way over the top, and eles have their own huge lists of weaknesses that justifies them having more damage capability than the rest of the casters. (High Energy, Slow Cast, Long recharge, Exhaustion)

As others have pointed out, physical damage has to be stronger than caster damage in order to be useful at all, because physical damage requires one to get close to the enemy and take damage in order to deal damage. Furthermore, they have to worry about anti-melee.

Another thing to consider is that spellcasters by their very nature have more options at their disposal. Therefore, again, they have to do less damage in order to be balanced.

And, yet again, the most overpowered melee is actually caster-based, with melee serving only as a vessel.

So, you want to reduce DPS of all melee clasess to 0 in HM unless they bring a maintainable snare (because you are not going to catch a HM kiting moster without one) and IMS, and give more melee hate to mobs (as if they don't have enough of it now).
At the same time you want AI to targret backline less so they would not have any reason to bring any self defense, and could focus only on offence.
From what I'm reading you basically want to turn the game into pure tank'n'spank with all melee being tanks and all casters being nukers.

+1 to all replies which basically say Learn 2 Play and QQ moar

Won the thread on page 1

And somehow monster standing there getting hit by massive melee DPS is supposed to be a good thing? And I thought people on this forum likes "skillfull" play and "balance". If monsters actually kite more efficiently then snares wouldn't be so utterly useless, and caster would do REAL support rather than just stacking massive damage buff onto melee + whatever the monk does. And its not like I'm suggesting some radical thing, look at PvP.

As for the backline targeting, way to completely misread my post. Why the heck does the monsters lock on to the monk/casters when they have Prot Spirit + Guardian + Shielding Hand + Bonds on them, leaving the melee with absolutely nothing to worry about as they mash their keyboard. RANDOMIZE the damn targeting system so that the melee actually has a chance to get spiked to death, like how people in GvG occasionally lock on to overextended melee to "surprise" kill them. Just make the targeting 70%:30%, casters:melee. The funny thing is the current system can be EASILY abused just by having a low armor low HP guy tank, and having high armor, high HP melee mash buttons to "nuke".

Exactly what i was talking about, that's the problem w PI, it would be awsome if we have 3 skill slot on the bar, with 8 slots, it goes like this: prety random memser skills that don't synergize with themselves nor with the team.
If only PI wasn't a mesmer only skill, it would be popular similiar to AP. Anyway this hero build is bad, heros will be casting empathy or draining enchantment, even if there is balled up mob ready to be interupted and KD.